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Something’s not right

Volklaw
Casual Contributor

Pejorative Diagnoses and Harmful Treatments Because I Wasn't Protected from Extremism?

NEAMI has helped me a lot over the years, and recently my case worker and I put in an application for the NDIS. It meant that we had to do a Freedom of Information request for the Mental Health service that I had previously seen.

The document I got back from mental health was all news to me. They said I had "Cluster B Narcissistic and Emotionally Unstable Traits" and "Bipolar Disorder Type II". As a psychology graduate and current PhD student, I must say that I'm a bit offended. For a start the diagnosis is incorrect. When I was 14 I acquired Post Traumatic Stress after myself and my friends were shown footage of Al Qaeda torturing and executing a hostage in the middle east - It was a horrific experience and I still have the occasional nightmare and flashback even now over a decade later. This event, to put it mildly, had a very negative, disrupting effect on my mental health at the time. Before that I was a high achieving, hard working student but afterwards I was trying desperately to prepare for all manner of cruelty while trying to forget what I had seen in the hopes of reducing the flashbacks and nightmares.

Anyway, I became quite militant after waking up to the cruelty of this world. I was hyper-vigilant, and prepared to defend at any time. I was hiding knives around the house in the event that I had to defend my family from home invaders who might torture and execute them and film themselves doing it. I admit this was not rational thinking but rather the thoughts of a young, hormonal man incensed by the fear of violent extremism and extreme violence. I soon came into contact with law enforcement and mental health. A psychiatrist was quite rude to me and I believe it was he who has made this assessment of me. He had me taking twice the standard doses of three drugs, an SNRI; an anti-convulsant and a mood stabilizer. I would take each of these every morning (five tablets). I soon got liver toxificity and my skin turned yellow. I could not sleep at night, I ground my teeth until four of them fell out and would get dizzy and fall over all the time, leading to several head injuries. I would fall asleep in public places due to insomnia and once woke up to a man violently kicking me while waiting for a train.

 

In the context of medications, their side effects and my previous trauma I have no doubt that I would have come across as rude, possibly self absorbed, and as lacking in empathy to other mental health proffessionals. But manners and empathy aren't things you carry around with you when your mind is in a war zone in the middle east. And I do wonder in to what extent a mental health professional who would characterise their patient in this way could truly be said to have their patients best interests at heart.

Anyway, I have previously raised the issue of the toxic coktail of drugs I was prescribed with Health Regulation Authorities. No evidence base exists to suggest that at the combinations of drugs, or even the drugs on their own in such high doses would effectively treat anything. By contrast they have been found to cause the exact side effects I mentioned.

 

I now find myself further embittered, however, by these diagnostic labels that I have been stigmatized with and which were presumably supposed to serve as justification for my highly irregular, and health compromising treatment. As a part of my PhD in psychology I have been researching DSM "conditions", particularly the personality disorders. Thus far my research is suggesting that they are ideological conditions, which is to say that they are ideas... concepts... rather than medical conditions in any legitimate sense. They are purely correlative and based heavily in the old days of psychoanalysis where physicians would often speculate about the whimsical nature of others. In doing so they often commit something termed the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is where a person tends to believe that their behaviour, for example; being rude to others, depends on environmental circumstances ("I'm having a bad day"), whereas the behaviour of others, for example; someone being rude to them, reflects some deep seated "rudeness" of the person ("They are a "rude" person"). To characterise others as narcissistic or emotionally unstable is, therefore, a rather flawed notion because, in reality, most people's behaviour is heavily moderated by circumstance. The only time this tends to change is when a person identifies in such a way that they continuously act in a manner designed to validate their view of themselves or the view that they believe others have about them.

 

In some respects these "personality disorders" are worrying in this regard also. Many of my friends who were stigmatized with personality disorder labels when they were young actually believed the diagnosis at the time. Considering they were supplied by medical professionals this is hardly surprising. Most, if not all of them, however, did not realise that these disorders are pejorative stereotypes with little to no good support in the psychological or medical research literature. Instead they read lots and lots of information that is freely available on the internet and which suggests that personality disorders are actually very legitimate conditions. Subsequently their behaviour and beliefs about themselves and others began to radically change. They started modelling many of the criteria of their labels that they did not feel they adequately fitted. Indeed, even to myself and others these individuals could not be stereotyped fairly or accurately in such a pejorative way - they were all relatively nice young men and women, who had been through considerable hardship. My female friends were given a Borderline Personality Diagnosis, and they identified heavily with fears of abandonment and emotionality which are perfectly natural and common to many young women. They then joined mental health groups online to be around others with the label. Some people in these groups, however, challenged the person's view that they belonged to the group, suggesting that they weren't "really" that "type" of person. To demonstrate then, to themselves and the group, that they fully represented the disorder criteria, they began to engage in more extreme behaviours associated with the conditions. They began to engage in self harm, for example, and other dangerous behaviours that they were not engaging in before they had received the label and read the DSM criteria. My friends who were given an Antisocial Personality label began to identify with psychopaths in popular TV and film and ultimately wound up in prison as a result of trying to demonstrate that they did fit the criteria they had been given. Many of them believed that by committing crimes, they could show that they were "psychopaths" like Dexter and Hannibal Lecter, which would in turn mean that they were "highly intelligent". Or at least this is what they believed.

So I am writing today to say that something is certainly not right with the labelling and treatment that I have experienced in my dealings with mental health. Regardless of whether we now find ourselves in an age of deinstitutionalisation and the costs and benefits of such a movement, it is clear to me that mental health and law enforcement need to get better at checking a person's issues and not accepting, at face value, pejorative and ideologically driven slurs masquerading as mental health conditions. It is easy to accept nonsense if it comes from a psychiatrist but in reality they are just as capable (if not more so) of making the fundamental attribution error like the rest of us.

 

I maintain therefore that I had Post Traumatic Stress as a young man after being shown Al Qaeda execution footage and that, had I been protected by the government of the day, that I would not now find myself "treated" in this manner. Furthermore, these invalid, pseudo-scientific stereotypes and labels, which have been shown by several researchers to cause discrimination, do not reflect me or, for that matter, anyone else. My research thus far has found no good support to suggest that many of the DSM's "disorders" are  anything other than fundamentally flawed pejorative slurs capable of radicalising our vulnerable, impressionable youths.

 

I have raised the issue with the mental health service that has provided me with this information and they are now trying to claim that I am "Psychotic". This makes sense of course; one might expect they would do whatever they could to discredit me with a label that implies anything I say is nonsense. Regardless, I can prove (with scientific evidence) the ideology nested within their trade, and will show that what they are doing to people is not nonsense but a continued process whereby they persecute those with genuinely complex lives.

 

If anyone else has had a similar experience then I would like to hear from you. Rest assured, you are not alone.

Take Care

2 REPLIES 2

Re: Pejorative Diagnoses and Harmful Treatments Because I Wasn't Protected from Extremism?

Thanks for sharing your story @Volklaw, we're sorry to hear about everything that you've gone through. It sounds like you've done extensive research into the subject, was this the topic for your PhD? 

Re: Pejorative Diagnoses and Harmful Treatments Because I Wasn't Protected from Extremism?

Hi Ali11. Thank you for your support 🙂


Yes, the research is part of a PhD. I'ts not published yet so I can't say much more about it at the moment. But bear in mind, there is already a large amount of previous research that sheds considerable doubt on the concepts of personality disorders as valid conditions.

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