Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?

[nolabear]

49. As a mental health professional I both disagree and agree.

I hang with people who have various issues. Some of them certainly appear to be of biological origin and medication helps to create the ability to live in a world that doesn't otherwise have a way to help them. I can't imagine not medicating a self destructive schizophrenic person, someone with a delusional disorder that tells them to kill themselves or others, a bipolar person who struggles to control feelings and thoughts that seem totally uninfluenced by what is going on in their lives.

But, what I know most of all, is that, medication or not, a person is a person, not a diagnosis. One of the saddest aspects of this work is the guilt so many (not all) people feel, as though they had done something wrong, or the terror that if people really know them they will not be loved and cared for. Sadly, the desire to medicate some things (such as grief and tantrums) rather than to give these people the deep care and permission to suffer and to help them reconnect to themselves and life itself is being shelved by a world that is itself a little pathologically disconnected and unwilling. It does no one, the sufferer or those who would benefit from helping them and reaping the benefits of their existence, any good.

You are not a simple thing. You are complex, and wonderful, and sometimes incomprehensible, and you deserve to live in a world that will do everything it can to make your life good and productive. And it is sometimes very, very hard. And I don't know where it's going. But some of us believe in people, and try to help as much as we can.