“What Is Mental Health?” — An Update

Last month, I told you about an international online conversation started by the Social Therapy Group called What Is Mental Health? Since this was our first experience with a dialogue like this, we had no idea if anyone would sign on. Well they did!! A diverse group of people in the US and abroad participated, and as we’d hoped they went outside the parameters of only mental health professionals talking to each other. We had 130 posts from people all over the world — patients, community members, colleagues, mothers, fathers, teachers, psychiatrists and teens weighed in what was important to them about mental health. Our moderators were from New York, Atlanta and Philadelphia, a few of the cities where there are social therapy centers.

Here are some highlights:

From George: I am bipolar and have recently been labeled “schizo affective.” To me that’s all diagnoses are, just labels that put me in a box for others to pass quick, biased judgment on based on what they have heard or read of others with the same diagnosis.

I have fought extremely hard to battle against the symptoms of both diagnoses to stay well. It’s been a long battle with a lot of learning curves. Unfortunately, those suffering the illness have to go through the full blown range of sufferings — be it the medicated suffering or the suffering of the illness itself while on medication or off medication.

From Ethel: For those struggling with a mental illness, it’s bad enough to deal with normal everyday living. I believe the worst part of “normal everyday living” is having to deal with people who judge you, think your illness is just “something in your head,” something you just “have to deal with” — or worse, force you to fit into a pattern of behaviors. If someone says, “I’m dealing with a mental illness,” it somehow seems less important than “I’m dealing with cancer,” “I’m dealing with diabetes” or “I’m dealing with high cholesterol.” As a society, we seem to forgive or sympathize with those who have cancer, but we don’t seem to do the same for someone with a mental illness. Why do you think that’s the case? 

From the moderator, Hugh Polk, MD: Dear George and Ethel:

Thank you for your honest comments. I’m a psychiatrist practicing a non-diagnostic group therapy called social therapy. We work hard in our groups to explore and challenge how we are all socialized in our culture to label things, including people. I work with a man who calls himself depressed and has always believed that he has “Major Depressive Illness.” I asked him how he knows he has that illness? How did he learn to talk that way about himself?” The group has joined me in exploring how he was told this story early in his life — in his family, in school, etc. The group says to him, “We don’t see you that way — we experience you here as being very open, courageous in sharing how you think, and very giving to other people in pushing them to not label themselves. You stay away from us when you insist that you’re mentally ill. Yes, you have problems, as we all do — but stop labeling yourself. How come it’s so hard for you to hear what we’re saying?” We’ve discovered that he and all of us come to believe those psychiatric labels and stories. They have the weight of science behind them, even if that science is deeply flawed. Thank you for joining us in changing this culture of labeling by participating in this conversation. It’s great to meet you both.

A full version of the conversation will be posted on the website DxSummit.org, an ongoing initiative to promote a global forum for professional dialogue about human approaches to the issue of diagnostics, by the end of March. Please visit the site this spring to read and share the conversation with others.

Christine LaCerva