Mental Illness Stigma Bingo: Version 1.0
These troll bingo cards are all over the blogosphere and I figured I should create one, too! (Mind you, these are only my first or secondhand experiences of stigma; there are god knows how many more statements I could add to this.) The point, of course, is to be tongue-in-cheek about the prejudicial comments you receive by earning a “bingo.”
The “Free Square” is intended to represent that one judgment, comment, stereotype, or piece of unsolicited advice that just gets under your skin like no other. Personally, my ex telling me I was “too crazy to love” (after he cleaned out my bank account and got arrested for dealing my benzos, no less) was certainly the most venomous thing I’ve ever heard, but, hey, breakups are ugly. I’d say the most obnoxious thing anyone has ever said to me with the intention of- I don’t know- relating to me was: “Yeah my son/daughter is the same way. He/she just doesn’t want to work. He/she would just rather live at home,” followed by a shrug and some flippant laughter. Yeah. Kids these days.
So… what’s in your “Free Square?”
Happy Solstice… FINALLY!
Thank god the days are going to start getting longer! The winter solstice marks both the shortest day of the year and the peak of winter depression, at which point all the vitamin D and full-spectrum lighting in the world could barely make a difference.
My depression this past week has been severe; and the resulting lethargy has made me think about that piece of unsolicited advice I always find particularly maddening (especially when it comes from a health care professional who should know better): “You need to get more exercise!”
Yeah. I know exercise can help me cope with my depression; I know it can further benefit me in all aspects of my life; but it does me a fat lot of good when I am so depressed it literally takes all that I have just to do my laundry or take a shower.
In fact, I was managing my health really well this year, and until about a month ago I was exercising every day. I was even losing weight, which, as anyone on psychiatric medications can tell you, is no easy feat. (Being on psych meds is kind of like being infested with parasites: no matter how much you eat, some alien presence inside you keeps insisting you are never full.) However, despite my best efforts, my depression eventually reached a critical mass and exploded. Now I’m back to square one, so drained of my energy I have to muster every ounce of willpower just to brush my teeth at night.
Of course, the skeptic’s reaction to that statement would be: “How dare you! There are people out there who really can’t brush their own teeth!” All I can say is that many illnesses have to be experienced in order to be believed, and bipolar disorder is definitely one of them. As anyone with firsthand experience will tell you, the physical effects of depression are every bit as real as the emotional, whether or not they can be seen under a microscope.
Unfortunately words like “depression” and “anxiety” get tossed around so much they have all but lost their meaning, giving way to quasi-medical professionals hawking snake oil cures for mental illness and people devoid of all compassion making snide remarks like: “Hey, I’m depressed too! Can I get paid to just sit at home and watch soap operas all day?”
Well, this is only my layman’s opinion, but if your depression was “cured” by flushing your colon or if you can be a flippant asshole about psychiatric disability, I can pretty well guarantee you have never really been depressed. Not in the clinical sense.
It All Descends On Winter
Like most if not all people with bipolar disorder, I also have seasonal affective disorder.
So, Murphy’s Law dictates that because I’m already at my most depressed and vulnerable, every other little thing in my life should go fantastically and even comically wrong. Last winter my car broke down; my pipes burst and my cabin flooded; my satellite dish, cell phone, and iPod all died; and then my identity was stolen. So far this year my troubles are minor by comparison. First there was this ridiculous battle trying to get my prescriptions filled; then yesterday I woke up to discover my pipes were frozen thanks to the 20 below temperatures and the packrats chewing apart my insulation under my cabin (which probably makes no kind of sense to anyone who isn’t poor white trash living in a cold climate). I have no running water in my house for who knows how long, depending on how much ice there is in my pipes, but, hey, at least they didn’t burst again!
Suffice it to say, winter is my least favorite time of the year by a wide margin. However, even if I stacked these calamities on top of each other, the stress caused by all of them put together wouldn’t even remotely approximate that which is created by my annual DHHS reaming. Just getting all that paperwork in the mail, just allowing the possibility- however remote- of losing my benefits to enter my consciousness, pretty much erases all the progress I have made throughout the year.
A few months ago I was so excited to tell my psychologist that I had written a “to do list” and stuck it on my refrigerator. I’m not talking about some broad-spectrum self-improvement, life goals list, either. I’m talking about a list of simple things like “buy light bulbs” “vacuum the car,” that sort of thing. You would have to live in my head to know just how titanic this was. I’m an extremely private person; and I have a phobia about other people going through my belongings, even something as benign as a to do list. I’ve also been passively suicidal for many years and I have always fixated on the idea that dying would be the ultimate loss of privacy, because other people would sort through my personal effects and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. Posting a to do list in plain sight demonstrated that for the first time in I don’t know how long I felt like I would be alive long enough (as in a week) to finish the list and throw it away before anyone got to read it. For the first time since my early childhood, I felt like I was actually living in my home, not just waiting to die in it.
But when I got my paperwork in the mail, and I had to reapply for Medicaid and food stamps, all that went out the window. Before my mind even caught up to my actions, I had gutted my living space once again. I had removed all trace of life from my home. All the evidence that I even exist- not the highly controlled and edited part of me I show to the outside world, obviously, but the intimate and vulnerable core of my being- once again went on lockdown, password-protected on my computer.
Just to clarify, I’m not suicidal. I’ve been this way for most of my life whether I was suicidal or not. It’s more that I want to erase myself, as if I can hide from fate by making myself invisible (“Before the devil knows you’re dead,” as the saying goes). The possibility that I could lose my benefits is such a terrifying, hideous notion that I just can’t exist in its universe.
I just hope the day will eventually come when I don’t feel like I’m standing on a precipice, waiting for the slightest nudge to push me over.
Mental Health Terminology and Other Things That Piss Me Off
As I’ve mentioned a few times, I have a love/hate relationship with NAMI. All things considered, it’s an organization that has done many great things for persons with mental illness. I’m not disputing that. However, I can never endorse NAMI wholeheartedly because it has a few policies that just irritate me to no end. (For one thing, NAMI refuses to acknowledge inpatient abuse and neglect, and insists the media and its members gloss over it.)
Like many non-profit organizations created to help “those poor sick people,” there is a subtle “white man’s burden” undertone to much of what NAMI does. I believe this subtext is rooted in the fact that NAMI was not a mental health organization formed by persons with mental illness, but by their family members. It may seem well and good to the general public, but for those receiving services from NAMI it’s the difference between approaching mental illness as the issue and approaching- at least partly- persons with mental illness as the issue. In my opinion this mindset is exemplified by the fact that NAMI, and some other mental health organizations, insist on labeling persons with mental illness as “consumers.” I have to contend with this term at least twice a month at council meetings, when everyone is asked to introduce him or herself, state his or her role in the organization, and then denote him or herself as a “consumer,” “secondary consumer,” (a family member of someone with a mental illness) a provider, or two or more of the above. Though I’ve long since abandoned the habit of choking on the word when the talking stick is passed to me, it still makes me wince every time I hear it.
I have two problems with the “consumer” label (aside from the fact that no one outside of the mental health movement has any freakin’ idea what it means). For one thing, it stems from a culture of “helping” those with illnesses and disabilities rather than empowering them to make their own decisions. No one- literally, no one- has ever asked me what I prefer to be called. I just have to be the one gadfly in the room who insists on identifying myself in person-first terms.
Secondly, the term itself bothers me. To me, “consumer” refers to someone who purchases goods and services- perhaps necessary, perhaps frivolous, perhaps to the point of excess. Persons with mental illness don’t “shop” for their treatment. They fight a life-or-death battle with the health care system to receive the services they need to survive, and all too often they lose.
Fatal Attraction: 22 Years Later
Glenn Close’s cloying PSA about her sister’s struggle with bipolar disorder has received mixed reviews from mental health advocates. (In her defense, I think the general public is struggling with the “people with mental illness are people, too” concept and aren’t really prepared for any cold hard facts about mental illness, particularly as it concerns those in poverty.)
Of course, no discussion about Glenn Close and mental illness would be complete without referencing her iconic character in Fatal Attraction, who, like me, as EVERY mental health professional with all the sensitivity of a brick has felt the need to point out, had borderline personality disorder. The attention Close has recently attracted to mental health issues has naturally raised questions about her ability to reconcile her role in the movie with her current anti-stigma efforts. According to NAMI, Close acknowledges the negative impact of her role, but also defends the integrity of her character.
I personally don’t feel like Glenn Close owes anyone an apology, or even an explanation, for her role in Fatal Attraction, and frankly I’m glad she isn’t willing to cave to whatever pressure there might be to regret any stigma she might have caused. I do think the morons who thought it gave me any perspective on my illness or benefited me in any way to compare me to one of the most notorious characters in cinematic history owe me an apology. (Honestly, it actually wouldn’t surprise me if there were psychiatrists unscrupulous enough to use, say, American Psycho as a diagnostic reference for their patients, but I suspect that would at least be frowned upon.) Obviously Fatal Attraction portrayed mental illness in a very negative light, but it was also well written and well acted, and though the extreme manifestation of Alex Forrest’s illness isn’t true for most persons with BPD, it was true for that particular character.
I personally don’t believe mental health activists can and should ever completely eradicate all negative depictions of mental illness in fiction, simply because they are just as real as the positive. There are persons with mental illness who commit violent crimes, because of their mental illness, and no amount of stigma busting can ever change that. For me, the real issue isn’t if a movie or TV show portrays a person with mental illness as dangerous or violent, but whether a fictional account of mental illness is provocative for a valid artistic reason or just “insanity porn” for money’s sake.
Another thing to consider is that positive portrayals of mental illness do their own kind of harm. Ableism is incredibly (no pun intended) bipolar, and not only manifests as a presumption of what people can’t accomplish despite their illness or condition but a presumption of what they can. In my experience the people who most enthusiastically argue that, “Mental illnesses are very treatable,” don’t actually suffer from them, and are unaware of the complexities of mental health treatment beyond the “cure-all miracle pills” the pharmaceutical companies hawk on TV commercials. When real-life treatment of mental illness proves much more complicated- due to financial constraints, lack of support from friends and family, co-occurring substance abuse, and so on- such people may weigh an individual’s recovery against the sort of “triumph over mental illness” that simply isn’t realistic for anyone whose life isn’t otherwise perfect. I think the ultimate goal of stigma busting isn’t to censor negative stereotypes of mental illness or manipulate the general public with excessively optimistic expectations of recovery but to advocate for characters with mental illness that are realistic, human, and, above all, complete individuals whose psychiatric disorders do not totally define them.
Med Troubles
One of the problems with having treatment-resistant depression (apart from the obvious) is that, because any of the medications that have been around long enough to have a generic equivalent won’t work for you, no sooner do you finally find a drug that relieves your symptoms do you discover you can’t possibly afford it, and if you are on public assistance your plan isn’t going to cover it without a fight. (No… generic Paxil CAN’T just be swapped for my Pristiq prescription, thank you very much! If Paxil had worked for me 13 years ago my whole life would have probably turned out differently!)
I’m not entirely clear on what has happened, but apparently the last time my psych nurse increased my dose on one of my meds she was unable to prescribe beyond a shadow of a doubt, so to speak, so my increase wasn’t approved, and last Wednesday when I tried to fill my prescription my insurance refused to pay for it because according to my previously prescribed dose I should not be out of my medication already. So, after three attempts to fill my prescription I finally had to contact my nurse to see if she could give me some samples to get me by until this is straightened out, because I have been without this medication at all for several days, which is more than enough time to totally regress into my symptoms.
Not only do I find all these trips to the pharmacy irritating, I really try to avoid driving when I am depressed. In fact, not feeling safe to drive was the main thing that prompted me to pursue a med change in the first place, and until last week the cocktail I have been using has helped considerably. I’m a careful driver, but frankly my mind goes places no mind should ever go- let alone behind the wheel- when I am under stress. Like today’s scintillating inner dialogue:
“Oh no! My radio just died! I should switch the ignition off and on and see if that fixes it. No, wait, that’s my computer. Wait! I can’t do that while the car is moving! The car is moving, right? It doesn’t feel like I’m moving. Did the radio stop working because I’m upset? That’s one more electronic device I own that has died when I’m upset. I should call Mom and tell her about it. Where’s my cell phone? It was right here a few minutes ago. Could I have made it disappear? Am I that powerful?”
Of course, my cell phone had fallen onto the floor. I realized this once I considered the odds I had actually torn a hole in the space-time continuum.
Hmm… I prrrrooobably need to be on my meds, don’t you think?
Unfortunately my last dose increase needs to be approved before my current increase can be approved, and who knows how long that will take.
This Week in WTF: If You Can Celebrate Your Birthday You Can Hold Down a Job!
In what is truly the epitome of ableism, a Canadian woman with major depression allegedly lost her disability benefits after posting her vacation photos on Facebook. According to Nathalie Blanchard, who was on sick leave from her job at IBM for the past year and a half, her insurance agent informed her she would no longer receive benefits because of Facebook photos that showed her enjoying herself on a few occasions, thereby demonstrating she was “no longer depressed.”
Naturally, there have been numerous scathing reactions to this story, basically cheering on Blanchard’s insurance provider for catching her in her “lie.” (American commenters have further cited this as evidence of all the “lazy scam artists” who will be siphoning their tax dollars under the public health care option.) Sure, her doctor recommended she socialize in order to cope with her illness, and she notified her insurance carrier that she was going to take a vacation, but what does any of that matter? Clearly she is capable of having some basic quality of life; therefore, she MUST not have an illness or disability! Everyone knows “those people” with “real mental illnesses” are nothing more than impotent vegetables, perpetually numb from the brain down, with their faint heartbeats the only evidence they are even alive!
Obviously I’m very upset. It deeply saddens and appalls me how many people honestly believe that persons with “real” depression are never capable of enjoying anything in their lives. Why would any of us go on living if that were the case? Of course we are able to have fun on occasion. We have many joyful moments- alone or with loved ones- made all the more meaningful and precious by the fact that we can never take them for granted. This doesn’t mean we don’t still feel paralyzed by overwhelming sadness, apathy, and lethargy… just not ALL THE TIME!
Statistics of Sexual Violence Against Persons with Disabilities Overlook Institutionalized Population
From Legal Momentum:
There are three primary problems with this report. First, it “covers only those people with disabilities living among the general population in household settings” (p. 10). This critical information does not appear until almost the last page of the report. Because researchers working in institutional settings report extremely high rates of sexual abuse among residents, this key statement should have appeared at the beginning of the study. It is thus likely that the summary statement – “Persons with a disability had an age-adjusted rate of rape or sexual assault that was more than twice the rate for persons without a disability” (p. 19) – is a significant underestimate.
This post critiques two Bureau of Justice Statistics reports: Crime Against Persons with Disabilities, 2007 and Female Victims of Violence, 2008, citing their flawed methodologies (in the case of the former, the glaring lack of data on sexual violence against institutionalized persons with disabilities). Considering how many persons with disabilities live in long-term care facilities, group homes, state hospitals, and (particularly in the case of mental illness) jails and prisons, this gap in findings has pretty alarming implications if the rate of sexual violence against non-institutionalized persons with disabilities is already twice that of persons without disabilities.
(Equally troubling is the fact that Female Victims of Violence presents a rate of 182,000 sexual assaults against women per year, 47% of which are reported to law enforcement, versus 1,000,000 sexual assaults per year with a 16% reporting rate as concluded in a similar study entitled: Drug-facilitated, Incapacitated and Forcible Rape: A National Study. Legal Momentum attributes this discrepancy to the use of behaviorally-based questions specifying the victim’s actual experiences versus umbrella terms like “rape” and “sexual assault.”)
Oddly enough, I scoured the Internet this morning trying to find even a rough estimate of the percentage of persons with disabilities who are institutionalized and I came up empty. Admittedly, I don’t know exactly where to look, but the fact that these numbers are so difficult to locate is symptomatic of the ultimate issue: all the statistics I could find were based entirely on the experiences of non-institutionalized persons with disabilities. The voice of the institutionalized population is largely unheard, their experiences regarded as statistically irrelevant.
What exactly is the point of collecting this data if a massive segment of the disabled population is willfully ignored?
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
“What is the difference between a person with disability and a person without?’
“ About five seconds.”
~Lawrence Carter-Long
Director of advocacy for the Disabilities Network of New York City
In an excellent post on Feminists with Disabilities, the author describes her internal conflict about having to refer to her clients in ableist terms, ironically, in order to advocate for their legal rights, quote:
Because my ethical obligation to my client requires me to zealously pursue their goals of obtaining benefits, I’ll swallow my concerns and write a brief that makes them look as pathetic and incapable and needy as I possibly can. But this tension between serving the needs of individual clients while reinforcing a larger system of thinking about people with disabilities this way is a difficult one.
As someone who has gone through the utterly demoralizing experience of applying for disability benefits, I can certainly sympathize with her dilemma. Although my involuntary commitment probably counted more toward my approval than anything, when I was applying for SSDI I had to assemble a team of medical professionals and family members- people who cared about me and respected me- to testify to my complete helplessness and absolute lack of functionality as though I perpetually experience my most symptomatic and incapacitated moment 24/7. Since then, every single time (literally) I receive a letter from the SSA or DHHS, my heart begins to race and a knot forms in my stomach because until I read it I am afraid this is the letter that informs me the other shoe has dropped and my benefits have been discontinued because I got caught “functioning.”
This post hits me where I live right now because, as I’ve already blogged, I’m seeing a psych nurse right now who is adjusting my medication, while simultaneously trying to insinuate herself into my therapy under the pretense that my psychologist isn’t pushing me hard enough to get back into the workforce. At our last visit she made her most insulting statement yet, and placed me squarely on the other side of her “either/or” assessment of disability by commenting that the “people she sees” (that is, the “truly mentally ill” people she sees) “can’t even function.” Though this is unusual in my personal experience (I have been truly blessed to have a GP and a psychologist who trust me to define my disability) I know that persons with disabilities have to confront this prejudice all too often.
The reality is that many disabilities are not strictly “either/or” but cyclical, and unfortunately the system is only theoretically put in place so that persons with disabilities can work when they are not symptomatic (or at least less symptomatic) and subsist on their benefits when they are. Between full blown public assistance and full blown employment (complete with health insurance) there is an insurmountable gray area in which a person with a disability who attempts to work part-time will have his or her benefits slashed so extremely that he or she will barely break even.
To give you an example from my own life: a while back, being the honest person I am, I disclosed to my caseworker that I made a little extra money taking online surveys. I told her I made about 20 bucks every few months, which was a very generous estimate, and the only reason I put it this way is because MySurvey.com pays in 10-dollar increments. The next thing I knew my food stamps went from 150 dollars a month to 10 dollars a month! Even if they went from 150 dollars a month to 130 dollars a month it would have been unfair but it would have made some kind of sense. In what universe does 20 dollars worth of income translate to a 140-dollar cut in benefits?!
THIS is how the vicious cycle perpetuates itself, ladies and gentlemen.
Unfortunately, full disclosure is virtually impossible for anyone who seriously hopes to receive public assistance. Persons with disabilities are forced to represent themselves as pathetic, one-dimensional manifestations of their illnesses or injuries in order to receive assistance while simultaneously struggling to be seen as multifaceted individuals within their social network.
Personally, I was raised to behave a certain way in public. I was taught to be friendly, respectful, and polite, and though I’ve probably internalized this idea to an unhealthy degree, and even if I were bleeding out of my ears, if someone asked me how I was doing, I would probably smile and say I was “okay,” I still believe it’s important to behave in such a way that puts other people at ease. And it absolutely pisses me off that my disability is called into question when I do so, or that I have to justify the notion that mental illness is not mutually exclusive of intelligence or creativity, or that I seriously have to be concerned (and believe me, it has crossed my mind) that if I style my hair or buy myself some nice clothes once in a while people might take it to mean I am faking my diagnoses. The fact is: I do pretty well in between periods of mania, depression, panic, and disassociation. Functionality in one dimension of life does not imply functionality in all ways, at all times.
Back From the Conference
Well, I’m back from the State NAMI Conference and, though I’m still processing the whole experience, it’s a mountain I’m really glad I decided to climb, as I am now infinitely more confident that I can attend events like it in the future without facing an inevitable psychological crisis. I made it through, I stayed “safe” (I didn’t take too many benzos or injure myself), I made some important contacts, and I even looked halfway decent in my Halloween costume if I may say so myself. All things considered, it was a very beneficial- if utterly draining- experience.
First of all, Fate- God/dess, the Cosmos, whatever- intervened at the last minute so that I didn’t have to visit the State Hospital after all (although I think the fact that this conference was important enough to me that I was even willing to do so counts for a lot). Instead I got to attend the SAA Summit, which was a much better fit for where I am in my advocacy efforts, anyway.
What’s an SAA Summit? Well, in Montana each county has it’s own “Local Advisory Council” (LAC) made up of mental health and co-occurring clients, providers, and- hopefully- public officials and representatives of law enforcement who brainstorm about public policy and try to improve the level of care in their community. Each LAC sends one or two representatives (a position for which I was recently elected) to its regional “Service Area Authority” (SAA), which, in turn, sends one or two representatives to the statewide SAA Summit, where the fate of bills related to mental health care are ultimately decided.
Attending the summit was equally interesting and irritating- interesting because it was a higher tier in the legislative process; irritating because the SAA’s have been trying to move the same damned bills forward for years and have somehow never succeeded. Finally the moderator basically told each SAA to pick one issue, go home and draft a bill that moved and even made some kind of sense to the voting public, and come back in a few months with something the Legislature could actually use.
She also cautioned the people at the table not to divert funding to community services to the extent that the State Hospital suffers, which of course is exactly what I’ve been saying for three years, but this brought the ire of some (which, in turn, set my teeth on edge) who insisted that the state will always provide for the hospital and (effectively) that we should just let the census overflow again to prove to the Governor that advocates have been right about the need for community services all along (never mind all the people who would have to die or be permanently traumatized in order to prove that point, or the fact that the only reason the census at Warm Springs is down is because Montana’s criminal justice system has received a sharp increase in funding and many of the would-be patients have simply been diverted to jail). Sigh.
The conference was far more encouraging. The Shut Up Sisters were outstanding, and were able to captivate my attention to the point I forgot how long I was sitting in an extremely crowded room, which is not an easy feat (although it probably bears mentioning that I learned from the last conference I attended to sit in an aisle seat or not sit at all. Those narrow chairs pushed seamlessly together cram me more tightly between two people than I could ever stand to be, which was probably what triggered my crisis the last time. More on that later.) To anyone who hasn’t heard of them, these are two sisters- one of whom has a daughter with bipolar disorder and one who has a daughter with Asperger’s Syndrome- who co-authored a book titled: Shut Up About Your Perfect Kid about their experiences raising children with disabilities. Although I’m sure some people coming from a neurotypical* mindset and even some persons with disabilities would be offended by their humor, it was obvious to me by the way they described their initial revelations about their daughters’ respective illnesses that their ability to manage their terror and pain with levity was sincere.
Montana’s own Wendy Parciak, author of Requiem for Locusts (how freakin’ cool is that title!) was equally compelling in a different way. She gave a presentation called “Writing your way towards sanity: A sibling’s tale” about how she was able to translate her sister’s battle with profound psychosis as the result of a genetic disorder called Velocardiofacial Syndrome (VCFS) into a novel that was both engaging and truthful.
The NAMI In Our Own Voice presentation was very… well… NAMI, but I’m still willing to give it a try. It will be interesting to see if I can compress and sanitize my “voice” enough to effectively participate in the program, but looking back over my previous blog entries I would say I’ve made significant progress. (Oh, I’m still angry! I always will be. But I’m on just the right medication and I’m just jaded enough to channel that anger effectively, without getting so incensed when I think I’m being ignored or belittled, or when policies I’ve championed die on the table.) The next IOOV training seminar is scheduled for next spring, so I guess I’ll find out then if it’s a good fit.
I got to visit my friend C.M. (the advocate who investigated my complaints against the hospital last year) and though we didn’t get to talk about Warm Springs as much as either of us would have liked, I must say there are very few people who can read the explicit details of your stay, and your experience of sexual violence, at a mental hospital and still make you feel comfortable enough to chat like old friends; and he’s just that kind of person. I also struck up a conversation with a member of the Montana Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence and discovered a clerical error was indeed responsible for the fact that I’ve never heard back from the organization since I joined it several months ago. (I thought paying a membership fee and not even being signed up for so much as an email newsletter was a bit peculiar!) So hopefully the next time there’s a MCADSV conference I will know about it in time to actually attend it!
I also got a huge wad of literature to read from various booths, and a few things to Google when I get around to it. On the way home I also had some very interesting discussions with a co-occurring counselor I know from the LAC. At one point she asked me if I planned to go back to work, and for the first time (still feeling optimistic from the conference, I suppose) I just flat out said, “If I do, that’s fine, but not if it interferes with my ability to do things like this. It may be controversial, but if SSDI covers my expenses so I can be a full time advocate I think it’s worth it.” Without hesitation she said, “I think that’s a good use of my tax dollars.” It was a refreshingly supportive statement, especially with my psych nurse riding my ass these past few months. Being a high functioning person with mental illness is a double-edged sword, and reactions run the gamut from, “You have such insight into your illness and so much to offer,” to, “You’re obviously doing just fine; get a job.”
Unfortunately, the conversation took a nosedive when the subject of religion came up (but what conversation doesn’t?) She asked me if I still have faith even though I’m no longer going to church. I choked and told her I was “agnostic,” although in retrospect I think “spiritual” would have been more accurate. It’s probably a moot point, anyway, because one is bound to evoke the same reaction as the other.
In all honesty I’ve struggled for quite a while with how to label myself. I can always find something with which I disagree about a religion, which makes it impossible for me to fully claim any particular religious identity. (Which is, incidentally, fairly typical of borderline personality disorder.) Recently I happened across the term “Goddessian” to denote women’s spirituality, which seems more like where I truly am in my spiritual journey, and is a broad umbrella term I could live with as long as no one tries to institutionalize it. (One can only hope.)
The only time I really felt like I was losing control was when I was at the banquet on Thursday evening. The more it dragged on, not only did I get really bored, but I also realized how much I had actually blacked out the last time I attended the State Conference. That was by far the worst disassociative experience I’ve ever had. I have one flash of sitting at the banquet table and another flash of going to the restroom, and the next thing I remember I was home… the next day. What the hell happened in that amount of time? I know I somehow got to my room, went to sleep, woke up, got dressed, attended the rest of the conference, and- this is the really disturbing thing- drove myself home afterward. But I’m curious: did anyone notice? Did I go on speaking and acting normally? I assume so; since no one commented afterward that I seemed really “out of it,” but the more I obsessed over the idea this time, the more it began to trouble me that I couldn’t retrace any of my steps. However, I managed to avoid any self-fulfilling prophecy and by Friday morning I realized I was going to make it through the entire conference. All things considered, it was a few days very well spent.
*I recently encountered the term “neurotypical” (as opposed to “normal”) on Feminists With Disabilities and fell in love with it instantly. (I’ve also kind of been mulling over the term “psychologically privileged,” though I don’t know if anyone has coined it yet.) If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Internet it’s that you can always count on feminist bloggers to stay on top of the latest politically correct/person-first language.
