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.

Is Free Thinking A Mental Illness?

There’s got to be a better way to insert links. I’ll figure it out, but for now, I’m sorry my links aren’t very pretty. The title of this blog post is actually the title to the article I’m going to link to, and the comments attached to that article are important. They run the gamut from “you people are paranoid freaks and have no idea what you’re talking about” to “right on, I’ve been there and seen this” – and I believe all the people commenting are speaking some measure of truth.

People who have lived with persons diagnosed probably correctly with ODD have an understanding of the disorder as it was meant to be diagnosed, that the DSM-WhateverVolumeWe’reCurrentlyOn is intended to be noting these behaviors in extreme severity.

It doesn’t mean that all clinicians are diagnosing all patients correctly. It doesn’t mean people are not being misdiagnosed every day. It doesn’t mean these diagnosis aren’t being used to control behaviors and thinking patterns that are disliked by the mainstream. It doesn’t mean diagnosis cannot be manipulated and medications used in an attempt to make “weird kids” become “normal.”

And my saying that doesn’t mean the above will ever, ever work, by the way.

And it doesn’t mean that clinicians aren’t encouraged to make diagnosis in order to prescribe drugs, and that drug companies don’t benefit financially from the prescribing of said drugs. Or that clinics and hospitals and doctors and providers don’t benefit from follow-up visits to manage the prescribing of said drugs.

So arguments in comments notwithstanding, I still ask…. is it paranoid or fear-mongering to question the breaking down of “depression” or “anxiety” or “schizophrenia” into lesser diagnosis in order to prescribe essentially the same drugs?

Here’s the link. What do you think?

http://www.offthegridnews.com/how-to-2/is-free-thinking-a-mental-illness/

Psychopharmacology

Psych meds.

Not all bad, but not all good, either. As with so many things in our world, holding onto black and white thinking is a mistake because there are so many shades of gray. The key is, and always will be, knowing what you want and arming yourself with education.

Based on my own experience with anti-depressants, I’ve often told people that the correct psych medication should make you recognize yourself again. I have never believed that an anti-depressant will or should change a person’s personality, such as turning a typically melancholy personality into a sunny one…

But. I look back on my time taking anti-depressants and note, rather sadly, the creative wasteland that was that time of my life. I wrote nothing. No poetry. No stories. Nothing. I went to work in cube-land and was content to stare at the television until bedtime. Sleep. Repeat.

No real happiness. No real sadness. So even though I felt like myself, I was NOT myself, and 2.5 years later, when I dared to stop taking the anti-depressant, I kind of felt like I’d been duped into a false sense of happiness, because it had been pretty easy to pop a pill and feel like my usual, happy self again. But when I woke up, I had created nothing from the grand depths of my grief.

Anyway. Here’s an interesting article that questions if there is any such thing as a chemical imbalance of the brain that causes various mental illnesses. Food for thought. Click below.

Click to access Blaming_The_Brain_The_Chemical_Imbalance_Fraud.pdf

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.