I think that in order to really move towards wellness, it is going to be a difficult dance, two-stepping between accepting your diagnosis and rejecting stigma. This isn't to say that you have to agree with your diagnosis. Psychiatrists are often wrong, and any decent shrink who is worth his pills is going to admit it.
My mistake was accepting my diagnosis as fact. It wasn't fact. There is no scientific basis to diagnosing mental illness, especially if it's PTSD. It is all guesswork based on certain "symptoms", patterns of behaviour and baselines, and very little else. This isn't to say that they are never right, rather that there is always going to be a substantial margin of error.
When I was diagnosed and went through four years of rather intense psychotherapy, I actually came to inhabit the illness. I colluded and collaborated with my shrink and with the mental health system itself by accepting as sacred writ my diagnosis. Big mistake and for me a real obstacle to full recovery. Being told that I had anxiety made me not simply anxious, but I was persuaded to do my utmost to fill all the categories I could that would help define me as an anxious person. Even while working against anxiety, I still fell into the diagnosis trap and actually incarnated my possibly bogus diagnosis.
The same thing happened when a housing advocate nearly persuaded me that I had depression, not because I had depression, but as a way of getting me on pills in order to shut me up, since she was also in collusion with a very political priest whose church I was attending and was getting tired of my outspokenness about some of her many pet issues. But I thought I had the illness, since I trusted her, and was sure that I was feeling and manifesting symptoms. I would describe to her the symptoms and my housing provider would simply cheer me on. It turned out that neither my family doctor nor the psychiatrist to which I was referred, agreed with her and when I told her she dropped me like the proverbial hot potato.
I never was mentally ill.
I took on bogus traits and symptoms. There was never anything wrong with me. Ever since refusing to go on using PTSD as a get out of jail free card, I have felt well, been well and lived and acted well. I still have a bad temper and tend to get impatient and anxious about things I cannot control. But these are normal personality traits and I still have the responsibility to challenge, steward and control my weaknesses and deficiencies instead of swallowing pills.
To this day I thank Ed Chodirker, my psychiatrist of four years, for not giving me pills,
No comments:
Post a Comment