mental health

A Whole New Life

I started this blog as a kind of exploring place and a thinking space, to examine some of my unpopular feelings about hospitals, medicine, and mental health. I intended to be here in anonymity and to not risk my job.

If I knew more about the workings of WordPress, I would insert a slew of photos of people laughing hysterically.

I left my job of eleven years. It was stunning and shocking and, for a brief minute, shattering, if I am being honest.

Who shall I be, now?

The main reason I haven’t added any thoughts here over the past few YEARS is because I went to grad school, 25 years after earning my undergraduate degree. It would be accurate to say that I was unprepared for that level of time suck. But I was also so, so ready to add to my knowledge base. I had a lot to learn.

I have a new life, and it is beautiful. I am able to help people more than ever. I am able to know people when they are well, and when they are less well. I am able to put all the “heart” that I want into my work, with co-workers who feel like family.

I felt like was seeing a perpetuation of mental illness happening in the hospital, and it made me feel angry and helpless. Was it real? I don’t know. Was it that the responsibilities of my job changed and skewed my perspective? Maybe. I felt less trusted than ever before. I felt less competent than I felt on my very first day. But I also felt like my eyes were opened to a bigger picture – that yes, we could medicate the symptoms of mental illness out of our patients, but what could we do beyond that?

We could not provide stable housing, we did not embrace harm reduction, we had no ability to know patients long enough to offer strength-based treatment, we were in an environment that could not possibly offer trauma-informed care.

All of the above is what I do now. I listen and validate and problem solve with people who ask for assistance. I am the keeper of all the secrets.

I found my people and I found my place.

Highly Sensitive People (HSP)

One of the things I’m going to push on this site is to know yourself. Do the research. Find others that have traits like yours. Investigate how they cope and function. Look for trade secrets.

It’s not that I think it’s necessary to label ourselves, or diagnose ourselves with disorders, or swallow whole the concepts presented by medical psychiatry – not that at all – but it can be useful to know some common terminology of personality traits in order to figure out how other people cope (so maybe we can steal their ideas -grin). And, yanno, it’s nice not to be all alone. Even loners like company, sometimes.

So this is a link to some stuff about Highly Sensitive People: http://hsperson.com/

And here’s a simple quiz:  http://hsperson.com/test/highly-sensitive-test/

HSP’s might also be known as empaths. http://liveboldandbloom.com/08/self-improvement/empath-traits-of-highly-sensitive-person

Hello world!

Welcome to this new place, Wounded Not Sick. This is a special place where secrets and fears can be shared, and where being anonymous is encouraged, although certainly not required.

I’ll tell my secret first.

I’ve worked in medical mental health for a lot of years, and I believed that a lot of good happened there. But lately I’m starting to see a lot of less good is happening there, and I am frightened and disillusioned. What I see is that change for the better is not happening from within this broken system, and probably will never happen from within, because the system itself is self-perpetuating, and the honest truth is [insert drumroll] there is no money in curing mental illness. There is, sadly, money to be made diagnosing young people with chronic and persistent mental “illnesses” –  schizoaffective disorders, mood disorders, and personality disorders.

Schizophrenia, bi-polar, borderline personality. Social anxiety. Antisocial tendencies.

Terms and labels that make us think of school shooters and crazy people pushing shopping carts and living under bridges and not functioning.

Let me tell you a secret.

Sometimes medical psychiatry causes people not to function. Sometimes miracle drugs look more like behavior control than good medicine.

Sometimes helping looks more like hurting.

And I lie awake in my bed at night wondering how I can continue to be a part of this.