The Day of My Diagnosis

This is the text of a speech I delivered on September 22, 2016

Twenty two years ago, when I was almost thirty six, I woke up one morning and said “Lynn, I’m sick.”. I had been in bed for weeks. I’d lost my appetite. We made an appointment with the psychiatric department at Kaiser Redwood City and by the end of the following week I was on Prozac.

Prozac was amazing stuff: I was cured the next day. My psychiatrist was surprised but because i had never told him about my other symptoms — the irritability, the paranoia, the rapid speech, that time in college when i had gone up to San Francisco with my girlfriend and come back with my girlfriend and they were two different people — he let things be. In time, our insurance changed, so I came under the care of a nice gentleman in Menlo Park who also had no clue about my other symptoms so he made no changes. Then we moved down here and I found a new psychiatrist who also made no changes because I never told her about my other symptoms either.

Then one day the Prozac stopped working, so she changed me over to Effexor. I found myself in a burning darkness. Two things happened. First, an editor was taking forever to get back to me on a story. Second, I overheard Lynn saying something about me to her sister. My irritability merged with my despair. I went for a walk in Whiting Ranch, called a friend — who found my anxiety funny for some reason. So I texted my last will and testament to Lynn, making special note to leave some possessions of my father to my nephew and asking her to be sure to be sure to get my poetry published after my death. Then I sat down on a sycamore log, studied my veins, and prepared to bread my glasses.

My cell phone rang. It was my psychiatrist. “Are you all right?”.

“No,” I whimpered. She told me to go down to South Coast Medical Center. Lynn picked me up and drove me to Laguna Beach

After spending several hours in the emergency room getting my chest x-rayed because I was wheezing, they took me down to the behavioral unit where I left Lynn at the door. They took away my shoelaces and my glasses, then showed me my room.

I came out after an hour. “I am diabetic,” I yelled. “I need my blood sugar medicine!” I can only imagine what was going through their minds — “this guy was brought here because he was preparing to commit suicide and now he wants the medicine her takes to keep himself alive” — but I am sure they took careful notes.

The next day when i went to group i was the happiest person there. Everyone was miserable except for me who was laughing at the fact that he had attempted suicide and lived to tell about it.

After group, I waited around until I was called into a consulting room. A psychiatrist joined me there. He took a few minutes to read over the notes the ER doctor and the nurses had made. Then he looked at me and asked in a very gentle voice “Had anyone ever told you that you were bipolar?”

And that is when my recovery began.

What Does it Take to Make a Diagnosis?

There are a couple of people who sometimes respond to my threads who don’t like it when I say we shouldn’t be calling people mentally ill just because we don’t like them or act in ways that we don’t like. I think it is time for me to outline what is required to make a diagnosis:

  • You have to be trained as a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist. (Most “experts” or the “peanut crunching crowd” are not.)
  • You have to have actually examined the person. This goes beyond watching them on television or reading about them in magazines or newspapers.
  • You have to use proper diagnostic criteria.
  • You must be neutral. Most of the pseudo-diagnoses that I have seen fail magnificently on this score. In my experience, progressives are the worst, but this does not exonerate others including conservatives.
  • You must have the patient’s welfare in mind, not an opportunity to insult.
  • You must avoid stigmatizing people with mental illness who are not anything like the person you are diagnosing. E.g. By saying that terrorists are mentally ill, you are implying that people who are mentally ill are like terrorists. (Research shows that people with mental illness are less likely to be violent than the normal population.

Caretaker Dominance in Mental Health Discussions

A few days ago, at the Orange County Mental Health Associations “Meeting of the Minds”, I attended a workshop on caretaker-patient-provider partnerships sponsored by our local NAMI. The material was very interesting and I sympathized with the panelists. Caretakers, they pointed out, can be a helpful part of the team that brings the patient to a place of recovery. They deserve to know what they can do to help the patient and this doesn’t mean that they have to know all the patient’s “dirty little secrets” as they characterized them.

But a few things struck me: First, at least a third of the panelists promulgated a “no fault” model of mental illness. This belief has been spread without challenge or acknowledgement of the studies that link the onset of mental illness to emotional abuse and bullying by NAMI. Though one speaker did allude to this, most of them adopted the model as applying in all circumstances, including their own. I can’t say for sure if they were telling the truth — I give them the benefit of the doubt — but I also know of plenty of abusive parents who use the shibboleth to hide their own history of family violence.
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