Difficult Course Leads to a More Fulfilling Life

I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. I certainly understand that I have been either manic or depressive throughout my life. However I don’t believe that there is only one method of dealing with that, and I certainly don’t believe that only a psychiatric drug regimen is the only way to deal with that.

There is a lot of talking in this movement about medication, and about forced consent to medication because of misinformation, and the way the drug companies obfuscate the information that we do have about these drugs. And there is a lot of talk within the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement about spirituality within recovery. But I’d like to talk about two things that are less mentioned, and that is the fact that not only did psychiatry feed me bad medicine and bad science, but they also fed me bad ideology.

When I was in the mental hospital I learned two things about myself. The first was that I was a problem. When a person is pathologized, any of their earlier idiosyncrasies, what were once just oddities of their behavior, become part of their sickness. I was only 15 when I was hospitalized. I remember I had a medical student ask me if there was any particular reason I was painting my nails different colors. Because what was once just a tiny little oddity of youth subculture, was now one of my array of symptoms. And of course, a more politically charged little example, this medical student asked me whether I thought my bisexuality had anything to do with my illness. So all of my behavior was sucked into this vortex of interpretation, where it all became part of my illness.

The second thing that I learned in the locked ward was, paradoxically, that even though all of my behavior was a problem and I was by definition a bad person, a problematic person, none of it was actually my fault, that is, none of it was my responsibility. I had no control. That was the definition of mental illness. The thing that learned in the mental hospital, which has taken me many years to unlearn, was that my behaviors were symptoms — they were not choices. The entire system was built around precluding such a possibility. I would come in to my therapist’s office, to my psychiatrist’s office, and they would ask me how my mood was. And when they ask me what my mood was, the basic format of the response was to tell them how your life was going, as if your life was merely a function of your mood disorder.

For years I was kept on a medication that made it impossible for me to get out of bed most mornings. But I stayed on that medication because it reflected the fear that the medical establishment had of the choices I had made beforehand. Before that I was precocious and had problems with authority. And seemingly these problems were eliminated with the medication that eliminated my mania. Now there were no problems because there were no actions, there were merely reactions, and that’s how I learned to behave.

I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. A personality disorder, just the concept of it — one should think about it. These are a series of behaviors within interpersonal life that become by definition pathological. A series of behaviors that become no longer how one responds to one’s loved ones, but merely functions of a disease, again. The only way that I recovered was by changing the model upon which I acted altogether. It was by realizing once again that things were my responsibility. And therefore my recovery was not a spiritual one, it was an ethical one. It was when I realized I was an independent agent responsible for my own actions that I began to recover. That meant accepting the unconventional choices that I made and for me to take responsibility for those actions.

For once in my life over these past two years, since I stopped taking medication, and since I started getting out of bed, I have to say, things are a lot more frightening these days. I can’t just use this concept of illness as a crutch. When I hurt my friends’ feelings, I used to be able to say, ‘Well, I was just feeling so depressed that day, and I don’t know…’ Which is a way I’ve seen many other young people diagnosed with mental illnesses behave, and it is an understandable way to behave when that’s the program that the industry that is supposed to treat us feeds us.

Now I have to take responsibility for my actions and say, ‘Yes I did that’, and not the illness, not the syndrome, I did that. And actually through a more difficult course has led to a more fulfilling life.