research into self-stigma. I look forward to reading it.
When I was diagnosed with bipolar all those years ago it crushed me and
took a long time for me to accept. I had a very high degree of
self-stigma. I was young. My life had collapsed through psychiatric
crisis and the diagnosis only made it worse. It meant the rest of my
life was going to shit. All my dreams of success were crushed with two
words: bipolar disorder. I can't even imagine what it would be like for
a person to get diagnosed with schizophrenia. Or anti-social personality
disorder.
Understanding what a diagnosis means is often left out by psychiatrists
and doctors. The last diagnosis I got was Mixed Affective Disorder, one
I'd never heard of and one that was never explained to me. When I got a
diagnosis of bipolar disorder and saw a private psychiatrists he made
some effort to help me understand what bipolar was. He didn't recommend
me any literature nor any other information sources to help me with my
journey.
Understanding the psychiatric journey is important. This is what an
individual goes through. It's about understanding the human angle. The
journey of living with a mental health diagnosis is significantly
different to physical illnesses. Getting a diagnosis of terminal cancer
might be analogous though. A person needs to be helped through the
emotional factors that come directly from receiving a medical diagnosis.
It's why I think point-of-diagnosis information is vital in mental
healthcare. It's information at the right time. It's information with
the purpose of helping someone deal with their journey. For all the
anti-stigma mental health promotion Time to Change are doing the
self-stigma isn't something that's been addressed. In relation to
distress it's perhaps more important than the stigma from other people.
When a psychiatrist gives a person a diagnosis they should give them a
set of information. The information shouldn't be psychiatric though. The
aim of the information is to deal with the negative emotions that come
with a diagnosis, something that people who've had to go through would
understand.
I remember meeting a pretty girl in a bar a couple of months ago. She
revealed to me that her brother had recently been sectioned and got a
diagnosis of schizophrenia. She was worried but she didn't really know
what it meant. I tried to explain to her how Abraham in the Bible was a
paranoid schizophrenic with god telling him to kill his son and in the
story he didn't kill his son. I also told her of the film A Beautiful
Mind which features a Nobel prize winning paranoid schizophrenic. I
tried to explain it could be a spiritual experience and that it doesn't
need to be pathologised. I told her where her brother could find a local
support group (I happened to know that Mind in Camden had a voice
hearers group). All he was getting in the ward was drugs to sedate him.
The Soteria Project in San Fransico uses an alternative paradigm of
hospitalisation for first episode psychosis. They keep people in for six
months but they use less medication and coercion than in typical
psychiatric wards. During this period people have a chance to learn and
learn from people who'[ve been through similar experiences rather than
just read stuff out of a book. This is the future of psychiatric care in
my opinion. It invests the help that people need at the most important
time. Results show positive benefits for the Soteria Project and other
experimental treatment paradigms across the world. The UK notably
doesn't have anything other than drugs and sectioning without any other
treatment for first episode psychosis.
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