To Be A Mental Patient
and other observations

To be a mental patient is to live in a confusing world where everyone else seems to know what is going on and how to react and behave. It is if they all have a script and you are the one who has forgotten your lines.

To be a mental patient is to be told over and over again to disregard their health care professional’s advice. No one would think of telling a cancer patient not to listen to their doctor, but so many people have no problem telling a mentally ill person not to take their medicine . . . or to not listen to what a therapist has advised.

To be a mental patient is to be told by others that there is nothing wrong with you. Normally, mental illness cannot be seen by the naked eye. Consequently you are told “oh, there’s nothing wrong with you” which is usually followed by “ all you need to do is.....” When you cannot do as was advised, or then behave in a odd or dysfunctional manner, you then find yourself being asked, “what is wrong with you?” or shunned for your actions.

To be a mental patient means to live with your worst enemy day in and day out. It means to be a prisoner of your own mind and thoughts and beliefs and behaviors. You do not get a vacation from being crazy, it follows you wherever you go.

To be a mental patient means to be constantly questioning and on guard. Each of your likes and dislikes, your actions and your inactions are questioned. If you spend the day in sweats and don’t leave the house was that because, like others, you just needed a day to kick back and relax or was it because you are isolating and hiding yourself away. If you become angry with a situation is it because you were truly wronged or was it because of some past trauma or hurt that went unresolved. Is your choice to wear a lot of black because you honestly like the color or because you see the world as black and dreary. If you find solace in a religion are you celebrating the mysteries of life or are you hiding behind dogma and looking for someone else to take responsibility for your life?

To be a mental patient is to have your vocabulary changed and corrected. A mental patient is not allowed to say “I can’t do that”, and if they do they are corrected and told “I am unable to do that at this time.” Words like “trigger”, “non-compliance”, “coping skills” and “self defeating behavior” become de rigor. You no longer have “good” and “bad” behaviors...you now have “healthy” and “unhealthy” behaviors. Nervousness becomes anxiety, daydreaming is disassociation, and stuffing is not something you eat at Thanksgiving.

To be a mental patient means that those around you, those closest to you, often have a vested interest in keeping you ill. If you become well, happier, self-sufficient you might disrupt the flow and balance in their lives. They might have to look at their own problems instead of focusing on yours. I do not mean to imply that these people knowingly want you to remain ill. In most cases they want you to feel better, they just don’t want you to change in order to do it.

To be a mental patient means to be given drugs that disrupt your body, make you gain weight, give you a dry mouth, headaches, take away your sexuality and sometimes rob you of your personality. Drugs which are so new, in some cases, no one really knows what the long term effect is. It also means to be yanked off those drugs and put onto others over and over again in a type of hit and miss frenzy of a pharmaceutical nightmare. Then there are the drugs to try and undo the harm that the other drugs cause to your body....

To be a mental patient often means to have to hide and to be disbelieved. If part of the mental illness is something that can be seen outwardly, like bulemia or self-injury you are aware that people are watching constantly. You wear more clothes than necessary sometimes to hide your pain from the world. If you catch the flu and lose a few pounds will they think you have been purging? Will they believe that the marks on your arms are really cat scratches? If you are just sad one day, sometimes it is easier to hide it rather then to be asked a hundred times if you are OK, or if you need to go to the hospital - which, by the way, is just a polite way to ask if you are going to harm yourself.

To be a mental patient often means it defines you. You are not a person with BI-polar disorder you are a manic depressive. You are a schizoid-typical personality, you are a depressive, a borderline personality disorder, you are your illness and it covers anything else you may be with a shroud.

To be a mental patient means you lose a lot of your rights. Many times you lose the right to be angry or sad or to have just woken up on the wrong side of the bed that day. It is always attributed to your illness. Family and friends, doctors and sometimes the courts get to make decisions about your life, often with very little input from you. Insurance companies and the government get to decide how much treatment you will get and what facilities you have access to.

To be a mental patient means to live in fear. Not just the anxieties and phobias the sometimes stem from the illness, such as fear of crowds or darkness or abandonment, but the fear of losing your home if you cannot work or having your children taken from you if someone with more power decides you are not competent to care for them.

To be a mental patient means to live in a world not of your own making. To be told your reality is not based in fact. To constantly search for answers, for some peace. It means crying yourself to sleep, your first thought upon waking being “Not another day!”. It means being so tired that getting out of bed to go to the bathroom takes every ounce of energy you process, or not sleeping at all for days upon days.

 

©2000 SJW