Living With Trauma: The Healers, 50

The important thing when you've been living with a mental health diagnosis is to get to a place where you can begin to find your voice and start using it. This is the really hard part. Every one of us who has been through a mental health diagnosis and the mental health system has been through their own private hell. It has taken different combinations of different supports and therapies to help us move forward. I am one of the few, if not the only ones I know, who has never been on medication nor hospitalized, but medication and hospitalization very much constitute the norm or the common experience for people living with a mental health diagnosis. Notice that I don't use the word "illness". This is intentional. There is so much negative and destructive baggage associated with that word that I will not even think it. I have always refused to define myself as ill or sick. Exhausted, tired, upset, traumatized, yes. But those are part of the natural spectrum of human experience, as are almost every single facet of a mental health diagnosis. The only thing that makes us different from the rest of you is that we have been labeled, branded as it were, and it is for us to cast off this label and heal the scars left on our souls from the branding. And of course, the primary goal of the mental health system isn't to help us to heal, but to make us socially acceptable, or at least to help us to conform well. In the meantime, getting to a place of relative wellness is no cakewalk. Many never get there, and often for very good reasons. I think the ones who are worst off are the older consumer-survivors who have long lived as "professional mental patients." These, usually men for some reason, were diagnosed, generally with schizophrenia, while teenagers or young twenty-somethings. The medical model was very strong in those days and they have lived most of their adult lives in some form of institutional care. Some have lived experience of homelessness, from being inappropriately released into the community and without sufficient supports to help them maintain themselves. I cannot judge any of those people. From the very start they have been at a huge disadvantage, and often opted to cave, to give in and accept that they are sick, in need of care, and will never lead normal or enjoyable lives, that they will never feel even slightly in control of their own lives. This is a very sad and particularly tragic form of soul destruction that usually has never been caught early enough. I am not suggesting that it is too late now for any of those long-term sufferers, but the window of opportunity is very narrow, very highly placed and usually sealed shut to them. Everything has always gone wrong for a lot of these guys: lack of caring, supportive family and friends has often been an issue, though not always, but in many cases, even with family involvement, loved ones have often felt so alone, frightened, uninformed and frustrated that there is little real support they have been able to offer. Friends are almost always nonexistent. Likewise adequate housing. And because of the scant government support for people on disability pensions, they have lived always in grinding poverty. They have usually been too hobbled by their condition and the lack of support and proper care to care properly for themselves: unable to budget or handle money responsibly, unable to procure groceries for a balanced and healthy diet, or prepare food for meals, often neglecting their personal care and hygiene, making them particularly unattractive to the general public. They go through their lives like zombies, imprisoned by the same medicated fog that makes them seem less of a threat to the public and less frightening to themselves. They are almost all heavy, chronic smokers, even though they can least afford this expensive habit, and spend much of their time procuring cigarettes, scavenging butts off the pavement or bumming smokes from each other or strangers, or buying cheap illegal cigarettes if they have the money available. Some make friends with other consumers they meet in the drop-in centres or scheduled activities and meals. My guess is that, had each of those people had one, ideally two friends at the very beginning, persons dedicated and loyal to them with access to help and support and a certain skill set for providing ongoing support and care, had their been people present in their lives who truly loved them, unconditionally, and had adequate supports and structures been already in place to help facilitate and nurture such friendships, my guess is that most of those people would be recovered, or on their way to recovery, but leading now very different and quite fulfilling lives. Yes, medications and at times hospitalizations will always be necessary, for some people anyway. But for everyone with a diagnosis? I don't think so. But popular thinking is always so slow and changes at a most staggeringly glacial pace.