by David Frazee

Created on: April 22, 2008

A Person is not Their Diagnosis

I work in the mental health field as a counselor and I work with adults with Developmental Disabilities. Every time, in every case, when I sit down with a client to get to work, I am sitting across from, guess what a person.

I have never seen a schizophrenic though I have worked with people with schizophrenia.

I have never seen an autistic but I have spent years now working with people with autism.

I have never spent time with a manic depressive but I have done work with several people with bipolar disorder.

Like wise I have working relationships with several people who have Mental Retardation as a diagnosis, and thank goodness, the term retarded' is falling out of use. I hope the American Psychiatric Association takes the hint and changes it in their next update of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

People are people, and people with cognitive and mental health deficits or issues are no different.

Normally I am not a person who is a Nazi about being politically correct', not at all. However, in this case, I think the way we make statements is important. There is such a stigma around the concept of mental illness and developmental disabilities that many people who could really use help with these issues will not access that help because of the stigma.

The fact of the matter is that mental illness is like a physical illness, and very often has either a physical component that made the person vulnerable to the expression of mental illness, or the mental illness affects the physical health which perpetuates the negative effects of the mental illness. And just like physical illness, it needs treatment.

The medical establishment has tried to attack mental illness like any disease, first going to invasive surgical procedures, and then to attempts to adjust the chemistry of the brain. The thing is that the more that is learned about the brain the clearer it becomes that there is very little known at all, and it seems that just pills will not cure' anything. In fact the long term use of some psychotropic can actually rebound and cause the issues they are taken to get rid of. But one thing seems very clear to me; thoughts and the adjustment of the thoughts, adjustment of the way they occur and the meaning they take on for individuals are the only things that make real positive difference in the person's life.

But we come back to this stigma. People are resistant to change anyway, but when they are given something like a

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