I am at peace now with my own so-called mental illness

[Guest guest]

I've kept a bit of a secret here on this list. I guess I was afraid of stigma,

so I don't think I have talked much about my own so-called mental illness. Funny

thing is, down deep I never really believed I had one, though there was no doubt

in my mind about what I had experienced and that I was powerless over it. As a

person who has had her own transient psychoses, I am grateful to find out that I

did the right thing for myself and insisting I taper off my medications. It was

hard being alone in room with a psychiatric doctor who I had to convince I did

not have manic-depression. He thought he was doing me a favor by changing my

diagnosis to schizophrenia. Thank God my husband stuck by me while I followed

my fear and anger to find out the truth for myself. Today it is HE that insists

I have no illness, he calls it a vulnerability. I am very very blessed.

I was going to devote myself to writing a book about my experience and share

how to recover and come off medications....(Such hubris?) Now I wonder if it

is necessary to do this work. I feel strangely liberated now.

For you see, for schizophrenia ...the most cunning, baffling and powerful

illness the psychiatric profession has encountered.... the officials finally are

admitting that fifty years of a pharmaceutical treatment has not bee proven

effectual. I knew the first time I was given a medication that something was

wrong. You feel so weird that if you are a strong person you fight like an

animal because it perturbs brain chemistry even more than a brief psychosis

could ever do by itself. But of course, they blamed the victims for years, for

objecting to medications... and forced people to consent to experimental

treatments....

Here is the announcement on a blog at the National Institute of Mental Health.

I fought the good fight and I am free. And now, others will hopefully be advised

by their doctors that it is time, high time, to reconsider their medicine

regimins. I say Hallelujah! I do so want to sing!

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2010/from-cognition-to-genomics-progress-\

in-schizophrenia-research.shtml

I thought this would be of interest to others here. If I read it correctly,

one of the key breakthroughs is that we might be able to prevent our heal mental

health problems by doing the painstaking work of changing our thinking.

Cognitive thinking, not medicines may be the way we actually work with our

genetic predispositions for " malfunction " . I am in danger of speaking too

generally, moving from schizophrenia to " all other mental illnesses. " But

because borderline can have just the same kind of transient psychoses I

experience, and my brother for a long time thought our mom was schizophrenic, I

think I can make this more personal.

So let me finish by saying that I have nearly given hope for my nada, because

of her advanced condition......For me the article validates my humble experience

in walking away from the fleas of the BPD environment I was raised in. Those

fleas, along with the brain altering effects of perimenopause, nearly took my

sanity when my son was 4. It took me 2 years to believe in myself enough to

question my own diagnosis... and assert myself with the " shrink " . I was

terrified of authority figures, but actually I suspected that psychiatry was a

sham just like the wizard of oz. I thought I was going to have to do battle

with psychiatry if my son also had a vulnerable brain, like I did. Now, maybe

I can just trust that I have already made a difference for my son. I am a

person who did the hard work of looking at my demons, insisting on doing so,

when the medical model told me that the best hope was to prevent my psychosis

with drugs that the establishment will finally admit were damaging the brain.

They denied it for years, telling us that the drugs were like insulin for

diabetes. One time when I questioned, my doctor suggested I had control issues.

I feel so redeemed. I am glad I did my fight. Finally, I realize I was enough

..... all along.... I am enough and I am becoming freer and freer but I did not

do it alone. No. I think I have a lot of people to thank ... all the

coincidences and my trusting in the hope that held those coincidences together

.... led me to this place.

And then there was the day that I finally read Stop Walking on Eggshells. When I

was finally ready to read it, I was medication free, trusting myself more and

more. I'd earned the trust of my husband, my brother, and my son, and so when I

read the book, I was a lot less likely to undermine my own recovery. When I

read the book, I saw how much work I had done.

There is a lot of work ahead, and the medication model won't be abandoned right

away. One can hope and pray that it is a gentle metamorphosis. My heart also

hurts for those for whom it will be a huge challenge to come away from a broken

mental health system...