Recovery vs. Diagnosis
Submitted by sweetmadness on Tue, 04/13/2010 - 10:03pmI'm not someone who's easily convinced of something. That should say something about my brain, and that my instincts are pretty normal too. I'm always wracking my brain and trying to figure out what it is that is the source of my condition. This has been brought up time and time again to clueless psychiatrists.
When it started, I had also developed an acute sense of "tinnitus" or ringing in my ears. Not only the tinnitus, but constantly listening to music and trying to drown out my existence which seemed futile at fourteen. At fourteen I was the misfit who would lock herself in her room to write poetry in notebooks.
Then I went to boarding school. In my parent's mind it was to solve the problem of school bullying, and yet they were proven wrong. I went to boarding school with the notion that I was escaping my home life, my problems, the bullying. The summer before I left, I had been experimenting with self-hypnosis a lot. This caused spontaneous dreams of being awake when I was asleep. So I'm staring at this book, "Conscious Dreaming" tonight and feeling like I'm losing it finally, for good.
Losing it to me is not hallucinations, it's a mental collapse.
It's a mind state. It's not some chemical misfire. It's a literal misfire....when you aim for something and you get something entirely different. I was a healthy baby but maybe, maybe a little too introspective for my age. A little too aware of my surroundings, and of the pain inside a person's voice when they were upset.
Nothing like this is noticed in psychiatry and yet, I want them to know. I want them to notice. I feel trapped. I'm trapped in a never-ending cycle of escape. My problems are being quelled by a chemical restraint. I seriously mean this, I have psychological pain when I stop taking the medication, not delusions. The pain is gone, but for how long until I go out in a big bang? Then what of the pain? Will it just disappear? If only it were that easy.
I may collapse now without taking pills, and that's even scarier for me. The kind of desperation I feel, to be lied to or mistaken for some magical illness. As if its physical like diabetes or cancer....as if its eating away at you, and yet would I be sane enough to write this without the medication?
Well I wouldn't be at peace but I'd still be able to write this. There is genius in madness and inspiration. "The answer is yes. The answer is no. The answer to your madness is: there is no answer." But there is an answer, you see. Perhaps I'm just being manic by making sense of the whole idea that I'm not insane.
I've grown up taking pills. I mean teenage years are crucial to personality and brain development. I grew up from age fifteen up until twenty-one taking medication. I feel like a little girl in a woman's body. This is what it's done to me. It has completely stunted my growth. I mean I took the college SAT at thirteen and passed. At seventeen I dropped out of highschool. Psychiatry has ruined my life pretty much.
It really bothers me because I don't think I did anything but mess myself up for years. I went to the therapist who wrote down all the stuff and tried to soothe my bandaged soul. It became like a trap, like never-ending numbness and repression of my feelings. Because who was answering that nagging question, "when will it all be ok?" other than the insurance company and drug industry and mega million dollar psychiatric machine??
But I can't give up. Even if they say I'm wrong. I still know it's a lie. Yes, they never taught me their lesson by isolating me and raping my mind and destroying me down to the bitter end. I still said, it's a lie. I refused medication for a reason. Yeah, I was a dependent. But my parents were not the ones who should have been making that decision. And this is a BIG BIG BIG problem. Not only is the very inequality of it terrible, but a child who is mature should be valued for her maturity. Instead, I was degraded by this system. I was debased and treated as a worthless animal in a cage.
But no one is listening. No one is listening...
I am a worthwhile individual who deserves to live her life. I am not garbage and if the real mistake is based on trying to escape my problems you should blame my parents. They instilled this idea in my head by sending me to boarding school as if it would make everything better.
So I can think of that when I look to someone who has had a mental collapse, their world fell apart. Their brain did not fall out of their head. And if a person is there enough to listen to you, why don't you explain it to them. That's also a major difference between me and most people who had experienced "psychotic episodes" because I would have negotiated my bad behavior for a reality which didn't burn like fire.
What causes tinnitus? It could be either hypersensitivity or it could have been trauma from my parents screaming all the time. It could have been the constant music playing, and escapism. I was drowning something out though, and what I wonder is--was the noise a coping mechanism to drown things out? Or was the noise drowning me out? It seemed as if as soon as I walked in my room my ears were stinging and this noise was everywhere.
When I was little I used to get ear infections a lot. I was sensitive, but not the extent of madness. I think something else was definitely going on. I would go to bed and the walls would start to sway, and sometimes I would hear this piercing shrill noise. But only when I was quiet and not distracting myself. Perhaps this noise caused the hyperactivity, some excitation thing....but I don't think it was dopamine or seratonin.
I was afraid of the dark.
These labels: paranoid schizophrenia, psychotic, schizo-affective, bipolar
How do they explain a state of consciousness?
How can you sell a theory that's a total lie like this?
Who's listening?
Is her life worth throwing away simply because she believes her madness is her right? What if her resistance were crucial?
What if the very reason I'm still here is because I denied psychiatry? The lie I am still being force-fed.
Believe me, I've accepted it. Yet I must be mad to have this nagging fear that it's a lie.