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

On Home, Location, and Permanence

So today I registered to vote in Virginia.

Shocking, I know.  Because it's not like I care about Virginia politics.  (That was sarcasm.)

What that really got me thinking about, though, ties into a concept from class yesterday.  Historically, we think of location as permanent, and a home as a sense of permanence.  This came up as we were talking about how census data and the people who research it conceive of location -- in a way that doesn't account for frequent movement, especially in areas for poor or migrant families.

And today, registering to vote in a state that I do not think of as "home" although I also no longer live in the town I think of as "home" (as in it is not my current permanent or temporary residence), made me think a bit more about permanence.

I moved around a decent bit growing up.  Not like the army brats in movies who move to entirely new cities every six months and never get their roots -- I never had a problem establishing a sense of home in a general sense.  But changing circumstances led to a lot of literal moving: between one parent or the other, the amount of time I spent living in the same room in the same home was pretty limited after I was about six.

Now that I've once again gotten some sense of settled, here in Richmond, I'm already preparing for the likelihood of being somewhere else for graduate school, and my sense of permanence and stability is once again pretty shaken.

Most of the moves I have made in my life have been the result of conscious choices -- new relationships/marriages, going away to school, etc.  Yet they still impact my ability to think of a plot of land or building or physical location as a stable point that I can call "home."  I can only imagine what it must be like when even the sense of home that surrounds a group of people or family has gotten taken away, and the need to move is prompted not by choices but by circumstance.  With how much we consider home and location a part of our identity (my family, the fact that I'm a "Yankee" going to school in the South), it must be hard to craft a sense of identity when you're pushed away from a feeling of home.

Locally grown,
Rachel Leigh

On Identity

Thanks to the internet, we've learned over the years (and had it driven home with the whole Te'o fiasco), we can be anyone.  We can be any version of unreal we want -- whether it's simply the best possible version of ourselves or someone entirely different.

We've been trained in the Lady Gaga school of Identity: reveal enough that interests people, and you can control the questions they ask.  You can end up an entirely different person, simply by marshaling what you share and what you choose to keep a secret.

This pliability of identity can be liberating, and to some extent, it can be amazing.  But, of course, it also has its negative upshots -- complete anonymity and shifting identity lets people believe they can't be held responsible for the things they do...in spite of the fact that, very often, you can.

But the fact of the matter is that I can be the best, wittiest, happiest version of myself on the internet... more so than I ever could be in the offline world.  Even the name I use in my blog is a partial construction, pruned to be the person I choose to be.

I'm still tossing this idea around, but I think this idea of constructed identities is really necessary.

Identifiably yours,
Rachel Leigh