One of the most difficult challenges to overcome when dealing with a mental illness is the temptation of the excuse.
With a psychiatric diagnosis comes an excuse for everything. Any bad behavior, lack of motivation, or failure can be passed off as a symptom or the result of an episode. The excuse is always available. Don’t take it.
No one’s asking you to take responsibility for having a mental illness. That’s not your fault.
But you have to take responsibility for your actions and for your recovery. Sure, unexpected things happen as a result of serious mental illness, but most of our behavior is within our control, or at least our influence. And the behavior that most influences our wellness is treatment compliance.
Before posting, please read our blog moderation guidelines. The comments below begin with the oldest comments first. Click on the last comments page to jump to the most recent comments.
Before posting, please read our blog moderation guidelines.
Post a Comment:
Copyright © 1995-2013 Psych Central. All rights reserved.
Site last updated: 20 May 2013
|
“Any bad behavior, lack of motivation, or failure can be passed off as a symptom or the result of an episode.”
But sometimes it really truly is. And this can be the case despite the patient’s working with a doctor as best they can. Compliance with treatment (I had the term “compliance” – we’re not children or criminals) doesn’t necessarily equal symptom control.
Sometimes it takes years to find a treatment that works well (“treatment resistant cases”). In the meantime, the person may still be suffering in any number of ways, and probably feeling frustrated at not yet having the results they so desperately want. The tone of this article has an edge of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps and don’t be so irresponsible”, which doesn’t do anyone any good who is ill.
I remember having terrible motivation and execution problems. Things just weren’t getting done and I was terribly distressed about it (and this after having always been an overachiever). It was not laziness; it was part of my depression. After four days on a particular drug, the biochemical light switch turned on and I was able to function again! I was back in the saddle. But it took quite a bit of trial and error with my doctor until we got there.
My point is, I agree that it’s not our fault we have illnesses, and like any other medical condition, it is our responsibility to plug away at treatment in a partnership with our medical professionals. But as we work on it, things may still be going badly (otherwise we wouldn’t be in treatment).
I’ve known a bunch of other people with mood disorders – if anything we are all *way* too hard on ourselves. Understanding that those “failures” or lack of motivation, etc. are part and parcel of what we’re dealing with can help us give ourselves a break, not waste energy blaming ourselves over it and get even more depressed, and help us just stay focused on plowing ahead with treatment.
I echo what Martina said above.
Also, blogs with this tone often have the opposite result than the writer intends. People already struggling to do everything and anything to get better feel guilty about their lack of progress. People who do use their illness as an shield don’t even see themselves in the writing.
This post does have a bit of the “those naughty psych patients” vibe to it. I often hear (and read) discussions about psych patients who miss medication as if this is unique to psych patients. It’s not. Not by a long shot. Most people will at some point in their lives not finish a bottle of medication – whether that’s an antibiotic or whatever it is. Let’s not pretend that this is a psych issue. Adults with every kind of illness are not perfect, they miss medication. There are a variety of reasons patients miss medication – sometimes they get sick of taking medication (which is perfectly understandable), it’s expensive, sometimes the side effects suck, sometimes they just forget, sometimes they feel like it’s not working so what’s the use, etc.
I would recommend that anyone who might be tempted to see this as a problem of psych patients widen your horizons, you will find that this is people being human – it’s not limited to people with mental illness. People don’t always take their mediciatons, that’s true in all areas of medicine.
(I would imagine every person on this board has at sometime in their life missed a medication. We’re human. It happens). Visit a stroke unit and you will see a large number of people who are there because they didn’t take their antihypertensive medicine and follow the treatment recommendations -this is not a psych issue, it’s people being people.
This is the most egregiousness type of Mental Health Stigma, It releases the responsibilities of the mental health system when they fail to help provide successful care. This attitude is prevalent because the system believes failures are due to difficult clients not antiquated approaches and under-trained staff. This is an attempt to explain away the dismal success rates of the present practices of our mental health systems. By blaming the client instead of sharing the responsibility, the system assures a steady stream of repeat customers. Until research into wide spread greed and a real scientific objective study of the human brain is done, the system will continue to be the ones who are not motivated to heal mental illnesses!
I have posted the article and the comments including mine on my Facebook page. Any response as to the validity of my comments can easily be researched by looking at NIH documentation.
The resistance to the idea of providing effectiveness evaluations of the present mental health treatments is proof that Psychiatrists and psychotherapists want to be excluded from public scrutiny.
If the mental health system is so confident in it’s efficacy, then this common way of making sure what works, works then why the resistance?