Living With Trauma: The Healers, 49

Fighting for our rights is never going to be easy. Especially when you belong to a population that has been already traumatized and marked by stigma. A population that was once deemed beyond hope or redemption. Persons who were chained and locked up in sanatoriums where they were tortured, brutalized, put on public display for entertainment, and generally lived very short and horrendous lives. Then they discovered psychotropic medications that put us in medical straight jackets. Then we were released, without adequate supports into the community, where many became homeless, wandering the streets unmedicated screaming and yelling for all to hear our psychotic horrors. We have come a long way since those days forty years ago. There was for a while a movement towards self-empowerment for mental health survivors. We have now community mental health teams (the industry where I work) and recovery sometimes brings to the fore peer support work. We have been somewhat integrated into the profession of mental health care delivery and it would seem at first blush that we have come a long way already. And really, I think we have. Which isn't to say that we haven't a lot further to go. I think we have two major obstacles to surmount. One is the intransigence of a mental health system that is obsessed with fiscal austerity and moves at a glacial pace towards change and reform. The other is the internalized stigma of many mental health consumer-survivors. I think that we are seen as fragile and unstable for the simple reason that we have come to see ourselves through that lens. We are encouraged, if passively encouraged, to use mental illness as a bargaining chip. I have seen a lot of this with other peer support workers, as well as clients. I bought into this kind of thinking myself for a while. Every time things went wrong I would blame it on PTSD. This isn't to say that I don't get triggered and that things can at times get out of hand. Rather, it is to say that this doesn't entitle us to use a mental health diagnosis as a get out of jail free card when things begin to go south. I went through my last major trigger almost a year ago. It started with a foiled dog attack, and then things really went sideways from there. Instead of soldiering on and just getting things done, I wallowed and even had my own little drama about it. This reinforced the trauma, and led to the next thing that went wrong, and yes, I was up against some unusual challenges that month. I have since come to believe that had I not pathologized the incident, had I simply accepted that I was really frightened and upset but would quickly get over it then likely I would have felt better sooner. But in contemporary therapy-speak there is this huge trend towards encouraging self-pity and self-indulgence and escaping personal responsibility for the way we respond in times of crisis. I think that mental health consumer-survivors really need to get this back if we are to truly gain resiliency and the kind of emotional toughness it is going to take to successfully advocate for ourselves. This doesn't mean it's going to be easier, but we have to learn to hit the ground running, accept that we are going to fall down at times, then get right back up again and continue the race. We have to stop using our diagnosis as an excuse for not moving forward. We have to ditch internalized stigma, because if we don't, then we are not even going to believe in ourselves, much less expect others to.