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 stigma to use to strengthen their shielding argument against making changes, that makes my job even harder. We, as a society need to help those among us who are ill. Toward that end we as a society need to adjust the way we talk about mental health issues.
I have never heard people referred to as "canceristic". You don't hear of a person being called a "heartdiseasist". But you do hear of people being referred to as being a "diabetic", why is that?
I don't know how many times I've been told things like, "I'm not crazy! I don't need to see a counselor or get medication for anything." By the way I am all for the short term use of medication in most cases. Often, the mental illness or disorder will actually get in the way of the therapeutic effects of psychotherapy without the medication, but notice I said short term'. Medication and therapy should go hand in hand. Also, there is no such term in the mental health field as crazy' and the word insane' is brought to you by lawyers, not mental health professionals.
I really have to wonder what people think goes on in a counseling session. I wasn't taught anything about shrinking heads, or hypnosis, or anything involving dead chickens. In fact I was not taught to do anything to a person. A counseling session really is just about sitting and talking. The client, or patient if you are working in the medical model, provides all of the answers to their questions or issues. The most invasive thing I have even heard of that happens in counseling is teaching the person a skill called EMDR which has to do with eye movement and is a treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It basically has to do with changing the focus of thoughts.
In recent days I saw two incidents of the perpetuation of the stigma in the mainstream news.
One was a description of a program in one of the local elementary schools where a couple of the kids in the program were referred to as autistic'. It seems dehumanizing to me, and maybe that is the issue for the people that use this terminology. It could be that it is easier to take the differences seen in these people if you, on some deeper level, make them not human but their disorder. In this case they are not boys with autism, but they are autistic students.
The other thing I saw was on television. In this case they were talking about a schizophrenic. It wasn't a man with schizophrenia, but a schizophrenic. I think it was even a health related program where they were telling about the disorder, and even in that case he was a schizophrenic, not a man.
This needs to change. People are people, no matter what their differences. We need to recognize the similarities, not constantly point out the differences.