Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 6

I have long found it appalling the way the mental health system seems to bank on the low self-esteem of peer support workers. Many peer support workers are still chronically hobbled by internalized stigma, but this also appears to serve the agenda of our employers. I have also noticed that in one of my worksites, there appears to be a tendency towards hiring peer support workers who still don't present as fully recovered, or at least seem largely affected by internalized stigma. I even noticed this several years ago, while participating on an interviewing panel screening new candidates for the peer support training program. I was one of three, the other two being one of my supervisors and the then clinical supervisor of one of the sites where I work. We saw three candidates. I liked the first one, but the other two didn't want to consider her. They liked the next person, but I didn't think he would be suitable. We were unanimous about the unsuitability of the third applicant. The first applicant was a young woman, casually dressed, very pretty and athletic looking, friendly, warm, outgoing. I also thought she appeared confident and self-possessed. Even though as a candidate for peer support training she would have had to have lived experience of living with a mental health challenge, she appeared as though there had never been anything wrong with her. She also looked like just the sort of worker I would have wanted to have, as I thought she had really good energy and she did seem to radiate health and wellness. The others on the panel didn't like her, but didn't seem able to really articulate why. They seemed to take offense at her self-confidence. The second candidate, a man, seemed a bit slovenly, but also broken and very submissive looking. Full of internalized stigma, I thought, and this appeared to be exactly why both supervisors I was working with wanted to pick him. Their excuse was that a client would be able to relate to him, but to me, he had this crushed worm aspect that I don't think would have been very inspiring towards wellness and recovery. The third candidate I`ll say nothing about, except that we all found her deplorable. Let me give you a bit of a history. In terms of my own recovery, I never pulled off or occupied the role of mental health consumer and for the simple reason that I am not, never was and never will be a mental health consumer. I have never been a client of a mental health care team. I have never been a member of any of the organizations or societies that help and support mental health consumers. Only a couple of my many personal friends have ever been mental health consumers. I have never in my life been on any form of psychiatric medication, nor have I ever been hospitalized because of mental health issues. My recovery consisted of one appointment of fifty minutes every other week with a private psychiatrist for four years. Nothing, and no one else. When I asked my psychiatrist if I should think of myself as mentally ill he cautioned me to not be so hasty about this self-assessment. He at one point pronounced me recovered. Shortly after, he retired. We had been working together for four years minus two months. I was also advised that, even though I could ask that arrangements be made for seeing another therapist, that this would not likely be necessary. I had already been a peer support worker for two years when my therapist retired. He gave me some excellent coaching and training during that time, often exploring with me many of my scenarios with clients and benefiting me with his many years of invaluable experience and training. As I eased into my job I also came into an unexpected dilemma: being surrounded by coworkers still suffering from various degrees of self-pathologizing stigma, by osmosis I felt pressured to also view myself in this way. I found myself seeking in such simple difficulties and misfortunes as insomnia and worry, symptoms of lingering mental illness. I was like the proverbial frog in boiling water, when it is being gradually heated to beyond its lethal temperature. Our superiors, bosses, supervisors and colleagues all seem to expect us to be ill. In meetings I have sat through one meltdown after another by coworkers who didn't seem able or willing to accept that maybe they were just having a hard day, but instead of being adults about it, wanted to use their mental health diagnosis as bargaining chips for whatever extra concession or indulgence they wanted to gain. And this was condoned. It was when I began to travel and take other measures to develop a life that was not at all related to the mental health system that I eventually came to one startling conclusion: I was never mentally ill to begin with. Like many PTSD diagnoses, my diagnosis was bogus. I wasn't exactly well during that time and had some very messy emotions to work through. But only when I felt encouraged, even obligated to label those same emotional difficulties with the baggage of mental illness did I begin to feel trapped in this. I would say that in these last three or four years I have never felt so free from this nonsense of stigma. I think that by indulging and encouraging others to remain in this toxic but very comfortable miasma, the mental health system is doing a great disservice and rather than encouraging healing, wellness and self-empowerment, that persons who would otherwise be much stronger and much more independent now as fully functioning adults are still being kept in a semi-infantilized state of imagined illness, bowed down by the weight of stigma. This has to change.