Living With Trauma: The Healers, 12

Balance and perspective, both contemporary and historical, are among the biggest challenges towards real mental health recovery. It is increasingly more difficult to integrate into a materialist, consumerist society that celebrates banality, greed, escapism and addiction, especially if you yourself tend to be a little bit unusual. This is also one of the huge problems in delivering effective mental health treatment: where does personality end, and where does pathology begin? Or vice-a-versa. How much is the personality so affected and shaped by illness, that the symptoms of illness become the personality and the personality becomes the illness? But is this illness, or is it simply stigma? And by the same token, is it really stigma that becomes the mental illness, and it becomes it's own grey, grotty little gift that goes on giving? What causes mental illness? Is there such a thing as mental illness? We have agreed upon symptoms that indicate schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, mood and personality disorders, PTSD, anxiety, depression, paranoia, or fill in the blank. What is seldom discussed are the conditions that lead to illness: child abuse, bullying, loneliness, social isolation, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, any kind of harmless unusual behaviour that would mark as merely eccentric a socially adjusted individual, but would land anyone else in a locked ward? This isn't to downgrade the legitimate symptoms of illness that necessitate treatment: suicidal ideation, self-harm, visual and aural hallucinations, paranoiac ideation, violent acting out, loneliness and prolonged depression, sleeplessness and social isolation from heightened anxiety, to name but a few. Not everyone who lands in the mental health system started out as a socially maladroit misfit. But that does often enough tend to give mental health consumers a running start into a career of chronic stigma and illness. Neither am I doubting the necessity, or the efficacy of medications for controlling symptoms and helping people to stabilize so that they can actually begin to get on with the process of recovery. There is a lot of value in medications, but I also wonder if we have become over-reliant on medications, where significant changes of lifestyle, decent housing, self care and, especially a loving, supportive network of friends, a sense of spiritual and ontological purpose in life, resources for creative and self-exploration, and sufficient money for people to live on with dignity (at least double what people are currently expected to subsist on for their disability pensions, and yes, we can afford to do this!), could also do much to help alleviate symptoms. This isn't to assume that it has to be either-or, but I think that by introducing alternatives, should they be accepted and acted on, could also, in some cases, help reduce or even entirely eliminate the need for medications. Those who are most vulnerable are most likely to end up in the system: if you are without adequate family supports, if you have been traumatized by violence and ill-treatment, if you are in any way considered unusual: artistic, spiritual, literary, political, activist, and unable or unwilling to shut-up about your convictions. Anyone who is considered a threat to the social order is only a diagnosis away from extended leave. Let's not kid ourselves. But in order to have a health care system that really adequately addresses and treats mental health disorders, we would need to live in a vastly different and perfect world. We would have to live in a country with a society and culture that are not consumed by greed, competitiveness and addictive behaviours; we would have to be a people already recovered from, or well on our way to recovering from the kind of collective trauma that has marked our human species for millennia. Those things are nowhere near happening for us, and part of the fallout that is going to be confronting us will be the needs and symptoms of, not so much the mentally ill, but persons who are publicly and internally (or self) stigmatized by mental health diagnoses and treatment. The real kicker? In this population we will also find the healers.