Some thoughts on a Saturday morning

I don't know how many people, if any, read this blog. (Robin, hush, I'm not discounting you, sweetie!) As such, I feel the things I say here have some anonymity in that they are a drop in the sea of a very large blogging ocean, and I generally speak my mind while keeping details about my past private. But lately I've been wanting to write down, journal style, some of the things I've been mulling over about my past that are a common theme for me. I don't usually discuss this side of my life, as I'm generally afraid of public perception surrounding this topic, and having been labelled one thing or another the entirety of my young life, I tend to avoid it.

Having a child, however, causes you to look some demons you'd rather keep hidden square in the face. Any leftover trauma you have regarding your parents (and I have legion) gets pulled out and put on the table to be dissected. If you're a basically healthy person, you suck it up and dive in, hoping that you'll come out of the experience with a better understanding of yourself and the people around you. We are all, after all, human. We have weaknesses and faults, missteps and oversights. But the ability to examine these and try to change for the better separates us from our lesser selves. So it is in the spirit of self-examination that I print this for all to see today. Because by declaiming it quasi-publicly, I am hoping to set myself free of the shame it produces in secrecy.

For most of my youth, I was considered a bad kid. My mother and I did not get along to a pathological degree, and in the early 80's she discovered that she could have me locked up in the psych ward of our local hospital. I've found out in recent years that such forced semi-incarceration was en vogue during the Eighties for many parents who had medical insurance money to burn. Horrific as it was, there was somewhat of a trend. Without resorting to the legal (read:juvie) system poorer kids had to go through, you could have your child locked up, medicated, and out of your hair for as long as your insurance company kept footing the bill. I won't go into the details of my incarceration, only that all told, it took up nearly 2 1/2 years of my life, and it was fairly horrible.

I've been suffering with the stigma of (however misdiagnosed) mental illness for years, even though I adamantly believe I do not and have never had any of the illnesses that the doctors who cashed my mothers' checks diagnosed me with. It's telling that once I was out of my mother's home the symptoms of such 'illnesses' vanished, and I was able to live a normal happy life. Certainly at 38, with a child, business, husband, home, and active social life, I bear no hallmarks of being a maladjusted or 'sick' person. (my mother, on the other hand, is the same narcissistic hyperactive nutjob she's always been.)

Still, the stigma lays dormant in the back of my head, and like all mantras repeated to you when you're young, part of you will believe it to be true even when all evidence speaks to the contrary. It is primarily to fight this inner voice that I search the internet for reasoned dissent or calls to reasonably reform the psychiatric community, which I believe needs an overhaul, particularly for minors forced to be the sacrificial lambs of family disharmony.

So this morning I found an article on Norah Vincent's book "Voluntary Madness" and added this comment to the fray, and after some consideration decided to repost it here, because by broaching the subject voluntarily, I can take some of the sting out of its secretive status.

"I was the product of an unhappy broken home, with a mother who I now believe to have Munchausen By Proxy syndrome, a condition where the sufferer gets the attention and sympathy they crave by causing false medical conditions in their children. I was a teenager in the 80's, when forced juvenile psychiatric incarceration was enjoying a malevolent heyday.

I was diagnosed with everything from paranoid schizophrenia to psychosis to borderline personality disorder (which I now find out is pretty much a BS diagnosis to many in the field). Had I come of age in the ADHD fury, I'm sure I would have been slapped with that label as well. I was forcibly medicated for these conditions, none of which I had, or have ever had, with horrible side effects. (vomiting, zombie-like sluggishness, excessive sleep, weight gain, unstable mood swings, thoughts of suicide.) All of these conditions magically vanished when I was finally out of my mother's care. Once I got over the trauma of having spent 2 1/2 years incarcerated against my will and all that had happened to me as a result (including, but not limited to: molestation, assault, witnessing hard drug use and suicide attempts) I was a happy, healthy, highly functioning adult. I now run my own business and am raising a wonderful son.

My point is this: the psychiatric community dropped the ball en masse for me and many of my peers confined to these places. For every person actually struggling with a disease or condition, there were at least 10 others who were simply dropped off so that lazy, cruel, or clueless parents wouldn't have to do their jobs. That these hospitals were doing the job for them at an enormous profit sends a red flag up for me. It's seemingly very easy, in a family therapy situation, to side with the one holding the purse strings. Since every therapist not paid (directly or indirectly) by my mother said there was nothing wrong with me, I find it curious that the ones who did always had my mother's check in their hand. Whether deliberate or subconscious, the conflict of interest renders the diagnosis in such cases highly suspect, to say the least.

I am not a Scientologist, and I don't believe we should do away with the industry, which can do good when kept in check. But there is rampant abuse of the system, and it needs an overhaul. There is no such thing as a 'bad' or 'sick' individual in a healty family unit. The family dynamic should always be considered as a whole, because save for an organic or obvious physical defect, it is the entire family who is responsible for the behaviour of its members. No kid who acts out does so in a happy, healthy, functioning family, and if even a mismedicated teenage kid understands this, it boggles my mind why a slew of supposedly educated psychiatric professionals could have missed it.

Medication should be treated with caution, particularly in young people whose bodies are still maturing and developing. Great harm can be done by mismedicating."

I could spew volumes of text on this, but let me just say that the things I experienced have left in me a healthy dose of disrespect for the psychiatric community, especially where it relates to medication or incarceration of minors. Any teacher recommending Ritalin for my child better do so wearing a HazMat suit, because I'm holding the ball of my son's care, and I don't have the butterfingers my parents had.