Nervous about this because what's in a name, hey? But it's something I increasingly feel strongly about.
I will not for one second dispute that when I was in the depths, it felt worse than any physical illness I've ever had in my entire life. I can read "I had a Black Dog" and I recognise it all and then some.
I just don't think I was ill or that it was caused by a chemical imbalance. I think that my brain was chemically imbalanced in that state because I was dwelling so much in the regions of the brain that store dark thoughts and memories that my brain was bathed in those neurotransmitters. I have no doubt if you hooked me up to a machine my brain would have looked all depressed. I also needed - and need - medication.
My experiences relate to my father's severe alcoholism and watching a man who was once really charismatic, caring and inspiring become an abusive good-for-nothing screaming drunk, my mother's absent presence, being raped in university and other such events which sucked all my faith in the future out of my life bit by bit. I think I just had no skills to support me in not spending my entire life in my head rather than with my feet on the ground and the whole thing short-circuited when I was pregnant and lacked the meagre resources I'd been using to keep it all at bay. I think I had learned to relate events in ways that predicted catastrophic outcomes through virtue of experience.
I've had a year and a half of weekly therapy, groups, psychiatrists, CPNs etc and I just feel so pissed off that this journey and its pain and where its brought me is categorised as being the same as diabetes or a broken leg when for me, it was a product of my life... and not only my life but what other people brought into it.
It just seems to me that the emphasis on the medical model in relation to this is sometimes just another sanitisation and another way of shutting up those who have been abused. I appreciate it's great that people get sick pay and I know it certainly manifests as illness so perhaps it is semantics.
yet when I went to the supervisor of midwives to tell her I'd had a dissociative state during my first forceps birth because of the rape, she said that she wouldn't want any of her staff to know this because it wouldn't be appropriate but it was fine to write OCD/Depression all over everything. The implication to me is that the causes of depression are still pushed into the category of "deeply shameful".... but in that case it wasn't the OCD or depression that was creating my fear, it was a bodily memory that had been triggered. Categorising this as illness just seems to me to be a way of making it be something intrinsic to my brain rather than something arising from human experience of suffering.
Does anyone else feel this way? I think I had a particularly medical model type of team which didn't help - there was constant reference to how ill I was and how I needed to recuperate and how disordered my thinking was and every time I tried to say, I don't think this is illness, I think this is about something that happened and a fear of similar trauma happening again, it was put in a box like "you MUST accept this is illness". I was never disputing I needed meds or therapy... I just didn't find the metaphor of chemical imbalance helpful. I had enough suffering because of what happened, I certainly didn't want that bastard to be responsible for my fricking brain chemistry!