"Mentally Ill?"

[bloom]

from http://amananta.wordpress.com/2006/05/05/mentally-ill/ "Screaming into the Void"


Mentally Ill?
May 5th, 2006
Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Welbutrin, Valium, Xanax, Ativan. PTSD, depression, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, BPD, Social Anxiety Disorder, Anxiety Disorder. What do all of these things have in common besides the obvious, that they are psychiatric conditions and psychiatric medications meant to treat these conditions?

Answer - all of these affect women more often than men by a significant ratio. Now, to anyone with a feminist consciousness, this should not be surprising in the slightest - cross culturally and world wide, women are oppressed. Oppression is scary and depressing, oppression saps your energy and kills your dreams. Endemic oppression such as woman hating leaves you no place to escape from it. There is nowhere a woman can go without being reminded that she is considered less important, not one single place on earth. Not in her daily work, where she is almost invariably paid less or not paid at all; not in marriage, where she inevitably loses legal rights; not in deliberate spinsterhood, where she receives unwanted pity and social disapproval; not in motherhood, where as a married woman, she is considered to be the default caretaker of children who belong to her husband, or as a single mother, where she is made the scapegoat for society's ills; not even if she is a lesbian separatist on a farm in the middle of nowhere, for the mere fact of knowing that right outside the gate lies a world of people who would gladly burn her home around her ears for her temerity in carving out a space for herself.

<big snip>

The patriarchy benefits by labelling sad and angry women as "sick" rather than admitting that they have every reason to be sad and angry and that the system needs to change. Admitting that women have a reason to be sad and angry would mean patriarchy supporters would have to admit that rape is a crime for which men should be punished, instead of nominally naming rape a crime yet convicting only 2% of REPORTED rapists and discouraging over half of girls and women who are raped from reporting it at all. Admitting that women have reasons to be sad and angry would mean they would have to admit that a system which ensures women will usually be paid less than men, consist of most of the impoverished people on the planet, and are discouraged or outright barred from higher payer and more socially prestigious professions, would have to change so that men have an equal chance of landing the shit jobs they've been foisting on women for substandard pay or no pay for thousands of years. Admitting that women have reasons to feel the way they do would mean they would have to LISTEN to our complaints instead of writing them off as the rantings of a crazy woman. And admitting that women have good reasons to be angry and sad would mean the psychiatric/psychological professions would lose big bucks from inappropriately drugging women or sending them into years of psychotherapy to try to understand what strange and buried reason they have for being so "irrationally" angry.

I used to take SSRIs, I used to go to therapy. I will be honest and say yes, I do sometimes still take anti-anxiety drugs. Sometimes it is the only way for me to cope wih this world which is so cruel and insane and is filled with people who think I should be a doormat who smiles all the time while eating like a bird so I can remain at a socially acceptable weight, spend most of my free time cleaning my house until it looks like a picture out of "Women's Day" magazine, always put my own needs and wants after those of my husband and child, remove all body hair that does not grow on my scalp no matter how painful and time-consuming and expensive and utterly pointless it is, and be happy to spend the rest of my life in this pink collar ghetto while being gushingly happy that I have "a good job". So as I said above, I don't blame any woman for being on drugs to help her cope with life in a milleniums-old patriarchy, memories of past abuse and the vast indifference of the world to her pain, or the constant struggle to keep what little legal rights to her own bodily integrity there still are.

But one thing I do ask of those of you like me, who have been on the psychiatric bandwagon, is to stop blaming yourself. Stop blaming your brains for having "bad chemistry", stop blaming your bodies, stop blaming your hormones. Stop blaming yourself for feeling sad and miserable and enraged. I don't believe you are sick for having these feelings - I believe you are reacting in a completely understandable way to a world that hates you. And I want to extend my cyber support to you in whatever you feel you need to do to ease your pain.

--------------

[noamnety]

1. This is much the same as PTS(D) in veterans

"I read a book on post-traumatic stress once. Rape is the most common cause, then combat. It said that trauma disrupts one's sense that the word is a safe place, that trauma destabilizes our sense of meaning. Let me explain something, as a veteran myself of eight conflict areas, and something that Doug discovered in Balad. The sense that the world is not a safe place is not a "disorder." It is an accurate perception. And the sense of meaning many of us enjoy is an illusion, a cruel construction that normalizes the orderly activity of the suburb and nurses our children on simple-minded, Disney-fied optimism pumped through television sets in a relentless data stream.

Post-traumatic stress is not a disorder. Calling it that earns it a place in the DSM IV, professionalizes and medicalizes this very accurate perception that the world is not safe, and that life is not a comforting film convention. Calling it an individual "disorder" cloaks the social systems responsible for experiences like Vietnam and Iraq."

(Stan Goff - http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/48/17106)

[bloom]

5. It probably makes more sense to call it a "reaction"

Like a "Post Traumatic Stress Reaction".

That is a similar thing.


I think labels do matter. Esp. when it's something psychological that becomes part of how someone thinks of themselves.

[Branjor]

2. Thank you for posting this!

I agree 100% and was really flamed on another board for saying so some years back. It is significant that modern psychiatry has its origins in Europe at the time of the witchburnings. The early shrinks used it to justify the witchburnings by stigmatizing the *victims* of this early holocaust as "mentally ill", not the perps. The "tradition" continues to this day.

I used to go to therapy and take "meds" too, but no longer. Was even hospitalized a couple of times. I am MUCH better off without it.

[ismnotwasm]

3. Oi

Difficult to contemplate. But I have to agree.
I have a personal theory that some brighter minds have explored that some of our menstrual difficulties come from much the some reason--The message is that menstrual blood is gross, smelly dirty--something to be shunned and mentally abandoned. Something to be endured month after month. Cleaned up, prettified, deodorized with toxic perfumed tampons. (I won't go into how I feel about "Panty liners")

From birth, --for eons-- the message is negative. The bible refers to it as menstruating women as "unclean" (Which may be an outgrowth of certain cultures considering it a time of magic--very fearful for males.) Mention Menstrual magic, the hormonal surge and ebb of menstruation as a time for art, contemplation, focusing energy, action, embracing righteous rage, to use as a positive force, Woman just moan, unable to understand, and powerless over negative symptoms. We've been taught no different.
We listen to jokes like "how can you trust something that bleeds for 7 days and doesn't die" without hearing the irony.

So some states of depression and/or certain mental conditions as a part of a unrecognized repressed and unfulfilled state, the constant implication that we don't measure up--and the daily fear we live in, the assaults and batteries, and as someone mentioned, the PTSD, Oh yes, I agree.

I need look no further than my own mother (too long a story) who has been never been able to find her way, has always been male dominated in a very aggressive fashion. I watch her fade away....It's not dementia, and it's not anything that can be diagnosed properly, I believe it's from the woman dying inside while the human being lives on. It's sadder than I can express.

[geniph]

8. I hate that particular "joke" -

the one about "how can you trust something that bleeds for 7 days and doesn't die" - I have a stock response to it that ALWAYS shuts 'em up, too: "You can't trust it. You should fear it. It's obviously much more powerful than you are." Since that is the root of the discomfort that leads to the whistling-past-the-graveyard "joke" in the first place, there's rarely ever been a response to that.

I'd agree that a lot of depression, anxiety, social disorders, etc., in our society are a result of cultural conditioning and PTSD, but not ALL of them are, and we need to be very careful about telling the woman who was born bipolar or with a tendency toward schizophrenia that she doesn't need her medication. The reason I say this is that I'm a lifelong chronically suicidal depressive, and I remember wanting to not BE when I was too young to know there was a word for suicide. Long before I absorbed cultural messages about my own inadequacies, I was already severely depressed and anxious.

So yes - no question the psychological medications and "cures" are overprescribed simply because they medicalize and pigeonhole the very real anger and sorrow women feel at their second-class status - but we must be cautious about lumping all psychoactive medications for all persons in this category.

(This isn't aimed specifically at you, ismnotwasm, by the way - I mostly wanted to respond about that damned stupid "joke.")

[raccoon]

10. Way to go!

'I have a stock response to it that ALWAYS shuts 'em up, too: "You can't trust it. You should fear it. It's obviously much more powerful than you are." '

[ismnotwasm]

11. You're right of course

I have a brother with severe OCD, and maybe an undiagnosed problem. (If I were to explain about my family, I'd have to write a book) My father decided that the mental health system--including medication had nothing to offer him. So here is this young man, nearly 34, with a wife he met in the Filipines and 2 kids, who can't live away from his parents. He is aware of his compulsions, has tried self medicating with things like St. John's wort, and his current obsession is all things relating to naturapathic health. When I say obsession, I mean just that, for any familier with OCD.

So we do have to be careful, the brain can have serious imbalances that respond very well to medication. I agree %110.

And that joke has always summed up mysogyny to me, I still get furious when I hear it.

Tori Amos, when the Taliban blew up those ancient statues of Buddha, said something like this "I'm envisioning a large vagina in the sky, raining blood on those mysogynist motherfuckers. That's a paraphrase, but I loved the original quote when I heard it. I should go look it up....

[politicat]

4. Sometimes you take the drugs so you can manage to fight the good fight.

I spent most of my career working with the most oppressed people on the planet - teenage girls. All of the ones in my office had eating, self-mutilation or obsessive compulsive diagnoses, because hurting themselves was the fastest and most effective way to deal with the pain inflicted upon them. When we got down to root causes of their needs to self-harm, it all came back to the pain of living in a world that did not value them.

Sometimes getting them on to a drug was the only way we kept them alive long enough to get them to a point where they COULD fight back.

I don't like the medicalization of societal ills, either, but when the choices are getting a scrip or getting a coffin, I know which one I choose every time.

[bloom]

6. And the writer said that as well.

" I don't blame any woman for being on drugs to help her cope with life in a milleniums-old patriarchy, memories of past abuse and the vast indifference of the world to her pain, or the constant struggle to keep what little legal rights to her own bodily integrity there still are."


And I agree. People need to do what they need to do.


I do think that whatever can lessen the sense that some of this is the fault of the woman as if SHE needs to feel guilty - as if it's her fault that she feels thinks she is fat when she isn't, etc. - should be done. It's like framing the issues in a way that makes sense.

[Branjor]

7. Yes....

and once the girl/woman feels that it is NOT her fault, that she is NOT somehow defective and to blame, the need for medication often lessens dramatically with that liberating realization.

I also don't blame any woman for being on drugs to help her cope. The sad thing, however, is that the drugs are damaging her brain as they help her cope, thus making her less likely, over the long run, to be able to cope without drug assistance. This also leads to a coffin, but it (usually) takes longer to do so.

[politicat]

13. From experience, I disagree.

We know almost nothing about brain chemistry (in terms of what we need to learn), but what we are starting to learn is that when chemicals go wonky, we can supplement them and get the brain back to functionality.

We don't need to have people on maintenance meds anymore. Quite literally, the people in our clinic spend between 6 and 18 months on meds, with an average of 10. The regimen for about half of the clients we see goes something like this one month at a low dose, increase to peak at 3 months, maintain for two months, then decrease to initial dose over two months, to half dose for one month and quarter dose for one month. We help the brain take over the chemical production rather than putting a client on a drug she'll have to take every day for the rest of her life if we can avoid it. We do lots of talk and group work in the months of meds, and in terms of eating disorders, we work with the client, her family and a nutritionist on re-educating everyone about how the body uses calories, fat, carbs and protein. (We're getting a lot of Atkins anorexics and vegan anorexics, young women who radically cut most foods out of their diets, but mask their eating disorder by strictly controlling the kinds of foods they eat, which means we get them far later and with worse physical symptoms than with traditional anorexia and bulimia.) With OCD and self-harm issues, we work in peer groups and stress management, and do lots of alternative direction work and safe-failure settings. It's intensive, time consuming, hard on girls who are academically driven, requires a high staff to client ratio, experimental, rarely covered by insurance and expensive, but it works. We have a very low relapse rate, and something that is approaching a cure rate with regards to self-harm. I wish we could help more (and I am happy that we have the NIMH funding that we have.)

Putting people on meds for life does not work. A year or two down the road, the client feels like the side effects are all that's happening (because it has been so long since she had a down spell)(and all drugs, even herbs, vitamins and aspirin, have side effects) and goes off the meds because she can't deal with the side effects or can't afford them, or gets involved in some alterna-group that pushes her to chuck her meds cold turkey. Crashing out of anything -- aspirin, salt, vitamin C, lexapro, welbutrin, nicotine, heroin, food - causes the body to react negatively, and the brain more so. So we don't do life-time meds if we can avoid it (schizophrenia and some other bio-chem disorders being beasts of another color....)

If I had a nickel for all of the parents who had found the New Age Self Help section at Lighthouse books, decided their daughters could be cured with yoga and chakra cleansing, castor oil and salt packs, vegetarian diets and herbal supplements, then dumped the drugs in the toilet, cancelled future appointments.. And then called, six weeks later, frantic and desperate from the children's psych ward...

Well... my student loans would have been paid off a lot sooner.

[geniph]

9. I used to be a cutter

and, while no one is going to claim cutting is a good thing, there were times when it was the only thing that kept me alive. It basically beat the alternative. It transfers the emotional pain to a physical pain, something you can control and something you can treat. I've always thought control is the root issue behind self-mutilation - we don't have control of our lives, our own bodies, our own minds - and that is something we CAN control.

For me, the drugs finally broke the cycle of emotional pain that led to the cutting and self-mutilation. I was eventually able to wean myself off most of the drugs, and only very rarely nowadays do I relapse. But the drugs were invaluable in breaking the cycle and letting me HEAR something besides the screaming inside my own skull.

[ismnotwasm]

12. I've know a couple of cutters

Ritual agony. It makes sense in a bizarre way to me. I escaped my personal pain in other (destructive) ways.

I know a heroin addict with is also a bulimic. She had a history of self-mutilation, but once the actual physical damage from bulimia started--heart and vascular damage etc.. She stopped. She's beautiful, talented, intelligent, yada yada yada. She will get off heroin, and get full into her bulimia, or vice versa.
There doesn't seem to be recovery for her, she's been in psychotherapy, counseling, 12-step programs, church, medicated, institutionalized--The core of self destruction doesn't seem to ever be reached. In her case, I'm betting sticking with a therapist with appropriate medication would work better than jumping around different "programs" She always goes to what doesn't work for her.

I haven't seen her in a couple of years, and I don't know if she's dead or alive. She's a "old" soul type. I think of her often. She's one of those people that it hurts to know and care about.

[politicat]

15. Pain gets good for us.

Pain is almost as good a high as heroin, and bulimia causes pain. Switch programs, and there's always fresh pain, because the beginning is the most painful process of a therapy. Once a person starts getting good at surviving in the therapeutic environment, there's success, and when there's success, the pain goes away. And when the pain goes away, the high goes away, too. So if a person starts over, the pain comes back, the success goes away, and there aren't any worries about a permanent change of status. (The fact that we humans made it as far as shoes impresses me sometimes... we're gluttons for punishment, and evolved with both a panic and pain system that rewards us for contra-survival behaviors. You'd think that someone who stays cool under pressure and whose hormones don't drop a load of speed into their systems at the slightest provocation would have been selected for, but no! We get a panic system that makes us think slower, destroys our ability to plan and makes us jittery....)

I hope your friend finds the place she needs to be, and gets the help she needs. And I hope you can know she's safe. Worrying about the lost ones is almost as painful as being a lost one, sometimes.

[politicat]

14. You did what we do professionally, it sounds like.

Some background on our clinic staff: I'm a food controller, the woman who set up the initial funding is recovering bulimic; we have other therapists who are recovered binge eaters, purgers, self-harmers, and two with controlled OCD. We have several others who contract (like I do) when we have something a bit more rare, like over-exercising, surgical/scarification issues, etc. Most of us are out of the cycle, but we have all been there and all managed to get out, and the program is based on the shared processes as well as the best bio-medical knowledge we can assemble. We're funded by the University of Colorado, and most of our clients are teenagers and university students from the local area, though, since the program has been in existence for four years now, we're getting a few parents who move here deliberately to get their daughters in.

I'm glad you've come through the other side. It's no picnic when you've got lots of help, and it sounds like you did it without much help. Congratulations, and I'm really, really, really glad you're still here and still talking about it.

[geniph]

16. Food's probably the only thing I haven't had issues with

(knock on wood). I don't know why, it's just never been much of an issue. I do quit eating when I'm really in a bad state, but it's not anorexia, I just don't have the energy to deal with seeking or preparing food. I used to have issues with OCD behavior, too, but mostly anymore it's OCD thinking, not the behaviors - I can keep the behaviors somewhat under control.

What I point out to people who expect drugs or therapy or whatever to "cure" them in six weeks is, how long did it take you to become depressed? In my case, I've been learning my depressive responses for more than 40 years. I expect it will take just as long to totally unlearn them. But they can be unlearned. It's not what happens to you that makes you a depressive, in my experience - otherwise everyone who had traumatic experiences in their lives would be horribly depressed. And we've all met those sunny, optimistic, happy people who've had horrible lives. The reason is that they learned different RESPONSES to stress. Depression is a LEARNED response to stress (not all of it, of course, but a lot of it). It can be unlearned. You can teach yourself different, healthier responses to stressors. It isn't easy, it isn't quick, but it does work.

I've been totally self-teaching myself cognitive behavior therapy, mostly because I'm a bit too resistant to therapy from someone else, and group therapy was absurd to me (it turns into a Can You Top This Queen For a Day My Life Is Worse Than Yours cryathon). It doesn't always work, but it sure beats the hell out of the alternative (uncontrolled depression and anxiety).

Drugs can be very helpful in breaking the unhealthy emotional cycles that lead to depressive thinking and OCD-type responses. In my case, it was that never-ending tape loop in my head, "she shot herself, she shot herself" - I had to stop that tape loop and force myself to not respond to stressors with immediate suicidal ideation. In order to stop that repeating mental cycle, I had to have drugs, at least at first, to be able to hear anything else. I weaned myself off of everything but Valium, which I only take occasionally and in small doses when I find myself falling into bad old emotional habits. But I did the weaning very gradually and slowly.

You're so right about lifelong antidepressant use - everyone I've known on long-term drug therapy did, at some point, decide that all they could notice was the side effects and try to quit. I've seen enough people end up back at the ER in leather straps with a Haldol drip to know that THAT isn't the way to go!

[Nikia]

17. Sometimes, I wonder if I should go to a different therapist

Recently she told me that I was probably so sensitive to sexual harassment because I was sexually assaulted. She said that I shouldn't worry so much when someone sexually harasses at work or in a public place because I probably won't end up getting sexually assaulted by them. WTF.
Being sexually harassed often isn't harmless. It isn't all good fun for men to do when their bored. It's attitudes like that which make the world so threatening.

[Warpy]

18. I was on SSRIs for a couple of years for fibro

I'm not convinced they did a damned thing for the fibro, although they did seem to make my mood considerably more placid.

They were pure HELL to get off when my back said I couldn't work any more.

I sometimes wonder if I'll ever be over the effects, and it's been over two years since the last tapered dose.

I know people for whom those drugs were literally lifesavers. I just wasn't one of them.