Tag: psychiatric diagnosis

The idea of schizophrenogenic or refrigerators mothers was an embarrassing era for psychiatry, and so psychiatrists were only too happy to explore the brain and the genome to unlock the secrets of mental illness. Today, the rhetoric has shifted away from intrapsychical conflicts and traumatic ruptures, and instead aberrant neurochemistry or delinquent genes are held as the source of mental illness. Regardless, the message is clear: mental illness is beyond our control and requires psychiatric intervention. The moral authority the mental health industry claims over our mental life rests on this claim.

Of all the beliefs that I have had about my experiences, the belief that I was ‘schizophrenic’ was the most damaging. In adopting the story that others told about me, and abandoning my own sense-making process, I held on to a belief that both hid my traumatic life experiences and rendered them irrelevant. Does it matter if we sometimes slip into the language of illness when we all agree that these experiences are meaningful, personal and have value? Yes. It does.

As co-chair of the Diagnostic Summit Committee of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, I am pleased to announce that today we officially launch the Global Summit on Diagnostic Alternatives (DxSummit.org), an online platform for rethinking mental health. Our goal is to provide a place for a collegial and rigorous discussion of alternative ways to conceptualize and practice diagnosis. Today's launch is marked by the appearance of our first eight posts. These posts come from a variety of prominent people in the field, each offering a unique perspective on the current state of diagnosis and where we might take things as we move forward.

Since I left the psychiatric prescribing trenches and came south for the winter, I’ve been staying in a beach town within driving distance of a technology metropolis. I take breaks from my writing and walk to the beach. There, I meet and talk with the winners of the American dream. They are intelligent, highly educated and financially successful. They take their beach vacations here.

I do not understand how we can continue to avoid the conversation about psychiatric medications and their role in the violence that is affecting far too many of our children, whether Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Kip Kinkel, or Jeff Weise (all of whom were either taking or withdrawing from psychotropic medications) or the scores of children and adults they have killed and harmed. It is not clear what role medications played in the Newtown tragedy, though news reports are now suggesting there is one.

Yes, a psychiatric diagnosis can be a dangerous thing to have. But, these days, so is having any medical diagnosis. The names and words of the diagnoses themselves are not so much to blame for the harm. Rather, the harm comes through the ways the diagnoses are created and how they are used.

To Readers: I've decided to sway, briefly, from my traditional story-telling style on this blog in order to post my short speech from this...

A deep blue blanketing of 1AM sky envelops my car as I sit in my parents’ driveway in February 2010, pondering my next, last...

It is Christmas Eve of 2008. I am leaning against the kitchen counter of an old friend’s house, arms tucked tightly across my stomach,...

During my first few days on the locked psychiatric unit of the hospital on the hill in early December 2008, I counted the passing...

As we made our way out of Boston and to the psychiatric hospital on the hill, I watched the ‘normal’ world— the world beyond the Plexiglas rear window of the ambulance I was strapped into— drift past me into the distance.

Bright, white light pours into my eyes, which have opened themselves slowly.  I clench them closed again, hoping to push the light out.  For...

COUNTDOWN- THREE DAYS It is mid-morning on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008.  I am staring at a computer screen in my cubicle, one among many at...

After I left my research position on the acute inpatient psychiatric unit of a Boston hospital towards the end of 2006, my life started...

In the months following my five-year high school reunion in the summer of 2006, I drifted about in a sea of indistinguishable days. Amidst...

A few weeks after my college graduation in the summer of 2006, my five-year high school reunion was upon me. I had expended a...

While my fellow ‘Class of 2006’ graduates celebrated with embraces and high-fives on Commencement Day, jumping excitedly into group photos with caps and gowns,...

Dazed and confused, I was discharged from ‘The Haven’ in September of 2004 and entered an intensive outpatient day program (IOP) on the grounds...

A Note to the Reader: Thorough searches of my memory reserves have failed to provide me with a complete and detailed account of my...

Although the drive to the psychiatric hospital in White Plains, New York, in September 2004 was a mere fifteen minutes from home, the trip...

There I was on my first night of Outward Bound, lying under the big Texas sky in a little town called Redford, amidst waxy...

By January of my junior year in college, I had reached my first true emotional bottom. Though surrounded by people on a daily basis...

Frantic, fearful, and desperate to get my life together, I returned to Cambridge in the middle of August to move into my off-campus apartment....

Upon arriving home at the end of sophomore year in college, which had been devoted to hyper-control and a carefully maintained, entirely black-and-white existence,...

Subtly and insidiously, my medications, once merely inert composites of chemicals, acquired an agency of their own and took center stage in my life...