Friday, March 16, 2012

Sabotage

Hello dear blog - it's been too long. To be honest, I've had moments when I've wanted to write, and incidents that I've wanted to discuss, but somehow the two haven't come together appropriately. This week, I couldn't stop thinking about two communications.



Sometime told me earlier this week that my illness was sabotaging me, with respect to some interpersonal relationships. My first reaction was denial, to urge her to leave me alone because she doesn't understand a thing about me or my illness. My second reaction was to laugh out loud at the clarity of it all: of course my illness has been sabotaging me. What else would you expect an illness to do? Does diabetes or strep throat come by, grab you enthusiastically by the hand, and help you achieve your personal and professional goals?

It is not particularly interesting for me to hear others discuss the impact that my illness has on my life, because frankly, no one knows it better than me. No one knows how many relationships I feel I've lost or threatened because of my inability to control my moods at times and no one knows what professional sacrifices I have made: but if there is someone who does know, that person is me. If I could, I'd reclaim her statement, I'd take it back from her and dare her to repeat it, simply because by expressing such a truism she lay bare her own misconceptions, ignorance, and paradoxically, presumption. It is no more insightful to tell a mentally ill person that their illness is limiting their potentially than it is to tell an amputee that he might be able to run a bit faster if he had that other leg back.

I also engaged in a conversation this week with someone who takes a slightly different view on mental illness, who believes that, to a finite and limited extent, it is a fabrication of society, that we are unwilling to accept the full range of human emotion and behavior and therefore choose to label and "diagnose" the "mentally ill". This point of view resonates with me and deeply insults me. It resonates with me because I think our societal view of the spectrum of mental disorders is deeply flawed; we are too quick to diagnose, too quick to judge, too quick to condemn, and yes, too quick to explain away differences in our temperaments. This tendency is particularly harmful when there are psychiatric drugs involved. On the other hand, I'm sort of over the idealization or "prettyfication" of mental illness as a burden of the brilliant, the artistic, and the tragically misunderstood. Shadowing a psychiatrist has taught me that plenty of mentally ill people have average intelligence, average artistic ability, and average charisma. Plenty are below average on these spectra and others and plenty are above. Mental illness is not reserved for the brave, the beautiful, the talented, the misunderstood any more than it is reserved for the lazy, the complacent, or the confused. Mental illnesses are simply that, illnesses that affect people based upon their biology, their social upbringing, and the grace of whoever it is that bestows such grace (or lack thereof). To argue that my illness is simply society's understanding of myself is to fundamentally misunderstand myself, because I am not my illness. I am better than my illness and I am more than my illness and romanticizing that in my which hurts, confuses, and betrays me feels unfair to the rest of my psyche.

Anyway, the point of this post is about communication and understanding. These are different and complex topics: what is the role of a supportive friend or acquantaince in pointing out our limitations? What parts of our diagnoses are medical and which are societal? How to we create constructive dialogues around these questions to come to understandings about these conditions at a personal and societal level? I don't have the answers to any of these questions; I only have my answers. I'll keep sharing them, keep discussing, and try not to make anyone too angry. I hope you'll do the same.

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