The Trouble With Labels Man, have I been having trouble with labels, or what. I dont really even want a label, but if the medical establishment is going to process me through their sausage-factory system, at least they could be consistent. In my late 20s, 1998 to 2006, I saw maybe 30 psychiatrists, and down to the last one they didnt diagnose me, though sometimes hinting at terms like drug-induced psychosis to state the diagnostic category best descriptive of what led me to five short-term hospital admissions. Thirty, and the last one I saw in 2006 after six months of weekly visits released me, saying In our time together, I have seen no signs of illness. So, flash-forward to early 2011, and I saw a GP for a couple of perfunctory ten-minute consultations, during which she voiced her annoyingly certain opinion that I have (sic) schizophrenia. And I carried around this godawful label for the next three years, feeling terrible about myself, frequently visiting pits of abject despair, coping with this debilitating verdict that I was somehow sick, broken, abnormal. Now, in 2014, I have seen a Doctor of Psychology seven times, an hour each time. Part of his bread and butter duties consists of training GPs in psychological diagnostics. He lectures and teaches medical doctors how to diagnose their patients accurately, and says that many GPs are woefully unskilled at the finer nuances of reaching reasonable assessments of which label(s) to apply. He tells me that mine is a clear case of misdiagnosis, and that currently I have no mental illness whatsoever. That I do not have schizophrenia, and have never had schizophrenia, ever. Which is a view seconded by another Doctor of Psychology, a prominent author and semi-famous man of exceptionally well-regarded stature in the Melbourne community, who now spends his days training clinicians himself, consulted fortnightly for four years at the turn of the century. Now, my presentation at times of acute sensitivity, bears a semblance to schizophreniform functioning, but there are clear clinical differences between me and someone who is diagnosably schizophrenic. It is well known, for example, that while 1% of the general population is schizophrenic, indeed approximately 20% of people hear voices, which is statistically true, despite sounding like an overblown figure. The GP previously referred to had one single piece of information about my history at her disposal prior to diagnosing me as schizophrenic, that I (self-reported) had heard a voice, following me around wherever I went, for a year and a half, every waking minute, seeming to emanate from just beyond visual range, from mid 2009 until late 2010. Without further information to assess, simply doing the math is adequate to reveal the flawed thought behind the conclusion... Frankly, I am sick of the nurses and reception staff at the local small-town clinic looking at me like I was somehow not quite human, talking down to me, and treating me with kid gloves. I am fed up with medical doctors seen subsequent to the aforementioned misdiagnosis vacantly towing the party line and just because I was foolish enough to bring this label with me to this new town and advise them of my oh-so serious condition, being under the false impression created by the misdiagnosing GP, having the term as a black mark against my name on the patient summary document. Part of the reasoning for blind adherence to such false doctrine seems to be thus, that once a person is regularly taking a pharmaceutical substance primarily designed to treat schizophrenia, even though the patient may show no florid symptoms of schizophrenia, they are quite clearly schizophrenic, because they are are on the drug. And therefore, as thoroughgoing clinicians, we need look no further for a diagnostic description. But what if the drug was administered while the patient was in the throes of a transient drug-induced (of malnourishment-induced, which in this particular instance is more befitting the actual circumstances) psychosis, which mimicked the textbook signs of schizophrenia, but was of a brief duration nature, with prognostic likelihood of spontaneous remission without the long-term schizophrenia drug therapy regime? That is, what if a person without schizophrenia was kept on the drug for (as I have been) three and a half years, rather than being treated with a more appropriate short-term anti-psychotic agent until the most disturbing symptoms had settled down? Moreover, aside from namby-pamby affront to being unfairly labelled (and by the way, as I was taught while studying psychology at Melbourne Uni, Labelling Theory states that a label, once applied, generally predisposes the patient to adopt behaviours and modes of functioning in accordance with the label, a largely unconscious and autonomous process, whether or not application of the label initially is at all justified, further complicating the diagnostic picture), there are very good medical reasons for minimal interventions with the medicine involved. Specifically, it is likely that in the time I have been taking it, the drug treatment has had the very serious side effects of raising my lipid levels (cholesterol) to dangerously high concentration, and inducing the condition of impaired glucose tolerance (also known as pre-diabetes), both of which I am now being treated for, both potentially life-threatening. So, I smoke a bit of pot every now and then, and end up in a psychiatric ward experiencing the equivalent of a three week LSD trip, and it takes a month or two to recover. But there is no reason to call me schizophrenic, and medicate me into an early grave because of the incompetance of a small-town and poorly trained medico who wouldnt know the difference between mind and brain even on a good day. I am pissed-off that my life is being shortened by doctors who have made me feel absolutely squalid as a human being, by the simple act of labelling me where no such label is warranted. I will continue to smoke pot, and I will continue to trip the hell out as deeply as I wish, since its how I gain vision for creating my art - it is *my* bread and butter, visiting these visionary realms and documenting the journey - and the medical establishment can bend over and wear a label Ive prepared for them with great and studious care for their welfare = quacks.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 00:15:12 +0000
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