🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured:
Sweets sits outside the bathroom door and meows. I splash water on my face and turn to let him in. Dripping on the tile, I don’t open the door far enough. Doors are something of a mystery to him. Instead of pushing on the door itself, he paws at the space between the door and the doorjamb, which doesn’t achieve his intended aim.
I dry my face and walk to the kitchen. He trots after me, hopeful because any trip to the kitchen could lead to a treat.
On my phone are more emails from people who’ve read my memoir Pathological, which recounts my twenty-five years in the mental health system and investigates the flaws in the psychiatric diagnoses we use in treatment. I open one:
While I do find it useful and validating to understand that my brain does function somewhat differently than the norm, I have also been gravely harmed my misdiagnosis, over diagnosis, and over treatment (including being so over-medicated that years of my life are mostly lost to my memory.) At some point in my life I have been diagnosed with: adhd, ocd, PMDD, PTSD, bipolar II, Bipolar I, bipolar I with psychotic features, BPD, major depression, GAD, SAD, panic disorder, specific phobia, body-focused repetitive disorder (that's just what I can remember). I've been hospitalized 3 times, been to 3 partial hospitalization programs, and been prescribed literally every psychiatric medication available at some point. Once I stopped letting these diagnoses define me, I became healthier and happier. I have a family, a successful career, and my mental health. Yes, my brain can be a bit outside the norm, but not like I was led to believe. I don't know how to share this experience. How to find others who have experienced similar harms. If I speak out, I'm afraid that people will use it as evidence that I actually am crazy. I'm also afraid of that my diagnostic history being used against me (legally, career-wise, etc.) Thank you for your book, for this campaign. I hope that I can contribute my story and voice to help move this campaign forward.
Another is like the many others I’ve received from parents worried about their children who started in the mental health system young:
My 32-yr-old son started on a path of so many diagnoses we've lost count AT AGE 4. I'm ashamed to admit this although I fought it at the outset while my now ex-husband and the pediatric neurologist/psychiatrist agreed something needed to be done. So at age 4, he was prescribed Ritalin for what we were told was ADHD. Through the years, the diagnoses have changed along with a mile-long list of medications. Today, he considers himself a failure, an ugly, obese, waste of a human life. He's tried to work, but ultimately gives up every job within two or three months. He's never dated and probably never will. My heart aches for him.
I want so much to help him—to help all of them, to tell their stories, too. To say to people, We need the truth. The truth empowers us.
A Google alert on my phone tells me when the words mental health appears in a news story and links to the articles. The media is hooked on what has been called the teen mental health crisis by the White House, the U.S. Surgeon General, The New York Times, and others. As The Times reports, it isn’t all due to Covid. Between 2016 and 2020, diagnoses of anxiety increased by 29 percent and depression by 27 percent in children and teens.
For a young person struggling, a psychiatric diagnosis can be a lifeline, but young people are romanticizing them on social media and elsewhere. Some diagnoses are “cool” and “trendy.” They’re memes. TikTok therapists advise about them, and TikTok videos convince teens they have rare ones. Self-harm has been glamorized on Instagram and normalized on Tumblr. In a Vogue video, Kylie Jenner hears from a clinician in real time that she has social anxiety. News blogs encourage self-diagnosis via symptom checklists. Anxiety and depression are merchandized. Teens are self-diagnosing via Tik Tok videos and other social media.
These teens aren’t faking their mental and emotional pain. They want a simple reason to explain why they feel the way they do, and diagnoses seem to offer that.
Occasionally, diagnoses are empowering, like in the autism community. They all could be if people knew the truth: They’re invalid and typically unreliable, not caused by and “chemical imbalance,” and none is necessarily lifelong.
I want to say to every young person entering the mental health system: Please don’t think of yourself as a diagnosis and use it to limit yourself. No matter what is happening, it is possible to recover. Please don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
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