Living With Trauma: The Healers, 4

Working in a climate of stigma can either make you or break you. For a while I was letting it suck the life out of me. Then I learned to use it as fuel for personal empowerment. In my thirteen plus year career as a mental health peer support worker I've seen 'em all, and I'm not talking about clients. I am referring here to the mental health union staff, the case managers, the rehab therapists and nurses, etc. When I first entered this profession, it was with the naïve expectation that I would be treated by colleagues as a colleague, with respect, an equal among equals. With incremental pay raises. Boy, was I ever surprised! They do everything they can to put us in our place, keep us in our place and remind us that, in the words of the late Doris Lessing, British author extraordinaire, we are "nothing buts", which is to say that we are "nothing but" our diagnosis, we are "nothing but" our mental health symptoms, we are "nothing but" poster children for mental health recovery, except that their version of recovery often has nothing at all to do with personal growth, development and empowerment, and everything to do with becoming productive members of society, compliant little workers and good little consumers, though it is an absolute cruel and ironic joke that we are expected to shop well and contribute to our local economy on twelve whopping bucks an hour! My first red flag was waved in my face when I had been just less than a year working in one of my early sites. While interviewing a new client the case manager said, in front of me, to the client, that I had also suffered from a mental illness. Later, I corrected her, telling her that it was my job to self-disclose if I so chose. She didn't get it and accused me of feeling ashamed of having a mental health condition. I countered that it is my mental health situation, therefore it is going to be my disclosure and no one else's. She didn't get it and I walked away in disgusted frustration. At that same mental health team, by the way, they closed all staff washrooms to peer support workers, assuming that like some of their most dysfunctional clients, that we all lacked basic toilet training. Once again, talking to anyone about it was like reading Shakespeare to a cat. I have been insulted by union staff left, right and centre. Fortunately this rarely happens any more, I think because my coworkers are a little bit more afraid of me than before, and for good reason. I don't take shit. From anyone. And they know it. Still, some of the idiots I have had to field: one arrogant occupational therapist, for instance, who had the nerve to ask me what kind of medications I was on. Ah, but the look on his face when I told him that I didn't take medication, and that my psychiatrist treated me not with meds, but with talk therapy. And he isn't the only one. Now if that question should come up, and I am glad to say that it never does, my answer would likely be, "And you need to know this, because...?" There was another OT who had the nerve to not only on one occasion tell a client in front of me that I had a mental illness. Even after I confronted her later about it, she still didn't get it. A couple of months later, while interviewing another client, she did it again, adding, in front of the client, that I still have a mental illness. I barked out, "HAD a mental illness. I'm recovered now." Later, I really let her have it. It was like a shark fight and she still refused to get it. Then there was the other OT who kept insisting that I should get support, like another psychiatrist or whatever, because I appeared to be irritable, though it really took a long time and a long learning curve for him to figure out that it was really his poor style of supervision that was making me irritable. I did see a counsellor for a couple of years, but basically didn't need to, and she didn't think that I needed the help either, and now I am happily professional support free. I have since learned that when union staff make those concerned sympathetic noises, it has very little to do with what I really need, and everything to do with their perception of what I need because, in my professional position I am already outed as being sick, because they don't really seem to believe in mental health recovery, even though that is all they seem to talk about. But I really think this has more to do with power and with keeping subordinates, well, subordinate, since the empowerment that comes with real recovery can be very frightening to those who think they are above us and it can turn us into quite a terrifying force. I have also the experience of knowing other union staff who are very progressive and enlightened and they don't talk to us like we're inferior sick people. They seem to have the humility, professional as well as personal, of recognizing that, really, we're all screwed, mental health diagnoses are often labels, and are frequently useless categories for helping us give people who are struggling towards recovery the support to which they are entitled. Fortunately, there are many like us in the mental health system, but I am rather sceptical about our voices being really heard by those who control our scheduling, policy and ultimately, the purse strings.