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| Behind The Wall |
Please forgive my rant and what may seem an unreasonable expectation. Stop characterizing people as bipolar, or assigning other psychobabble labels to human beings. While we know labeling is not diagnosis, it is a deadly sin. It inflicts enduring harm to the self-esteem of the victim, and is the tool of character assassination. With a complementary tip of the hat to people who are exhausted with political correctness, there is a movement afoot to change the language we use in reference to mental health issues, including professional terminology. In any event it is time to scuttle amateur psychiatric diagnoses. Whether in the heat of anger, or in everyday conversation, pasting a label on another person is a 'below the belt tactic," one of those hurts neither easily, nor soon forgotten.
What prompts me to post this is the experience of a good friend, who is surviving a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder. (He prefers the term Manic Depression) We agree that most lay people have no idea, when they use the term bipolar, what they are saying! Some folks actually believe it is a minor imbalance, inconvenient, not devastating. Used improperly psychological terms mischaracterize people who do not have the disorder. Perhaps worse is diminishing suffering, as well as the struggle to be well. Don't misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with expanding your knowledge of Psychology. Nevertheless, while no lay person would diagnose another with lung cancer, it seems few hesitate to offer serious mental health diagnoses.
https://behindthewallstories.wordpress.com/“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unique Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
If someone shares the experience of his or her professional diagnosis, experience or survival with you, stifle the tendency to offer your expert opinion. Even mental health professionals and social workers, who are credentialed in their own fields, should stop short of judgments and recommendations beyond their pay grades. It is nonsense, damaging nonsense. Other terms have also become so popular as to be trite. Is there a junior high bully on the Internet, who doesn't know how to throw the occasional Mental Health Bomb? "You are a sociopath," texts the bully. "What would you know, you freaking Narcissist," replies her target. And so it goes.
The worst labelling applies to the most complicated of diagnoses (and perhaps the least understood,) Schizophrenia. I have lived in close contact with people who have experienced and survived various mental health diagnoses, many, struggling with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia. Karis Community in Denver, Colorado, provides housing and services to people who have dealt with mental illness,long term. I'd rather say they are in the process of becoming survivors. It is a wonderful place, an accepting environment and, for many clients of its program an opportunity to step into new lives. We lived across the street from Karis, in the Congress Park neighborhood. We visited, took our dogs for "Dog Day" celebrations, got to know the residents and staff. Some of us became donors. All of us benefited from the privilege of being part of the Karis Community.
I was and am so grateful not to have lived in my parents' era. Psychotherapy was off the table for them. Seeking, even, professional advice for anything that could be construed as weakness of character, spinelessness, was to be avoided at all costs. Of course nearly anything and everything did reflect on one's character, so shame was a given. Perceived excess, along with sadness and anger, was pure self-indulgence. Certainly gossip was rampant, so we kids were taught never to discuss family business, above all, not with family. Divorce was not a subject to entertain, not among Catholics. The local priest and confessional were the only acceptable recipients of private information. Even then it was selective. Adults seldom confessed to addiction and abuse. Bruised inside and out, our mothers and grandmothers went to mass, and shut their mouths. If anyone asked about a battered woman's face, a door had most certainly come off its hinges and leapt into her face.
The link below provides alternative descriptives for amateurs and mental health professionals, alike:
Language and the way we use it has immense power. It also carries with it enormous responsibility ... changing language is a defacto way to change perceptions for and of people living with mental health diagnoses.
