On Mental Illness and Identity

Watching a PBS Frontline documentary about the rise in diagnoses and medications for young children with mental illness, I was caught by something.

This documentary, which is supposed to objectively address the controversy surrounding early childhood mental healthcare (particularly early exposure to psychoactive medications) and which featured psychologists, and psychiatrists, experts in the field, was making a glaring error.

"My patients were bipolar."

Your patients are not bipolar.  For a lot of people struggling with mental illness, the recognition that they do not have to be defined by their battles, is a massive step forward in recovery or control.  You would never tell a cancer patient that their diagnosis made THEM cancerous.  We recognize that an illness does not have to fundamentally define the person who has it.

And yet, one of the most stigmatizing things you can do to a person with mental illness is to define them by their illness.  Your patient is not bipolar.  Your patient has bipolar disorder.  Your patient may also have acne, irritable bowel syndrome, blue eyes, or a debilitating disability.  None of these things define that patient.  They are a whole, complex human being, defined by their wants and needs, goals, history, friends, family, talents, weaknesses, and more.  You provide a huge blow to their sense of self-worth to reduce them to their diagnosis.

Especially as a care provider, this kind of stigmatizing language is incredibly unacceptable.  How is a patient supposed to see themselves as something beyond their disorder if you, as the expert who is supposed to help them, cannot?

Identifiably yours,
Rachel Leigh