At least one person, when I wrote that although I spoke when younger often had difficulty, that the person (who is the parent of an autistic kid) asked what therapy/intervention I had used to improve my ability to speak when needed, that autistic kids don’t just up and improve talking. Truth is I didn’t enter speech therapy until grade 10 I think it was, and really haven’t worked on anything useful up until last week (though I wish I had worked on some stuff earlier; interviews are something REALLY tough for me).

The hypothetical disturbances of neurochemical function that are said to underlie “mental illness” are just that: hypothetical. No experiment has ever show that anyone has an “imbalance” of any neurotransmitters or any other brain chemicals. Nor could any conceivable experiment demonstrate the existence of a “chemical imbalance,” simply because no one, least of all the biopsychiatrists, has the slightest idea what a proper and healthy chemical “balance” would look like.

It’s not either/or. If you are depressed and not getting out of bed because the real conditions of your live objectively suck, then how are you supposed to change the conditions of your life to something you can live with?

Happy pills can help a great deal indeed, if they work as advertised. If taking the pills enables you to take action and fix the problem when otherwise you would be trying to slow down your breathing until you didn’t exist any more, then they work.

I’m pro-choice — there are lots of ways to get out of bed, and lots of reasons not to take meds — but I like to be accurate. The process I summarised here is what happened for me. I was very very very depressed but that didn’t mean I needed lots and lots and lots of medication. Just a little. Just enough to block a little of the pain enough that I could do things I wanted to do, which resulted in feeling like less of an asshole, which resulted in doing more things, and so on. While I happen to think I have an inborn talent for depression — Irish, dontcha know — the life I was leading was horribly depressing too. It’s all circular.

Oh, and while I enjoy labels and analysing what gets covered by them and how they function to draw attention to things I might not otherwise have noticed and dismiss things that might be important — organise knowledge, in other words — in this sense, astrological labels can work as well as DSM labels — I’m not attached to the illness model. I figure, if it’s neither useful nor pleasurable then it’s not good. That applies to depression, for instance; schizophrenia; poverty; mind games your shrink plays with you; side effects from meds; abusive relationships of all kinds; hunger; loneliness; lots of other things all of us are much too familiar with.

By extension, anything that is either useful or pleasurable is good. If meds are useful, then they’re good. If hanging out with your friends is pleasurable, then that’s good too. If your happy little doggie is fun to be with and also facilitates communication with NTs, cool, you’ve got a twofer! The illness model doesn’t really add anything to this picture.

Regarding ‘consumer-run’ support groups, we’ve been fortunate to have been mostly involved in online ones, which you can at least walk away from, but the attitude you described, of “trust your doctor, not yourself!” was something we definitely saw.

We’ve occasionally had the feeling about lj-multiplicity, which we co-moderate, that people are dragging the support group attitude in there; we’ve had to explain several times that it is not a support group. You still see a lot of people with blind faith in psychologists. Not that it’s as bad as it first was when we got online, of course: it was considered unthinkable by almost everyone, then, that it was possible to be plural and simply decide to stay that way, without basically committing yourself to years of therapy. Even after the whole empowerment movement had started, there were still a lot of people hanging on to the idea that the only ‘responsible’ thing to do was to basically give control of your life up to a psychiatrist; only then could you be trusted to ever have a possibility of running your life in a sane and reasonable manner.

The ‘support groups’ that used to exist online (and still do) for multiples were really dreadful. It was very obvious to me, at least, that even if these people really all had become plural as a result of childhood trauma, their therapists were traumatizing them all over again. People talked about how functional they had been before their diagnosis and how their life had degenerated into a living hell afterwards, yet this was all somehow acceptable because their “T” (therapist) said they had to get worse before they got better and that this was the ‘road to healing,’ and their T said that they had to recover and re-live all their buried memories of trauma (whether or not they were memories of real events) before they would get better.

If you questioned ANY of this, in ANY way, you were in denial. If someone really did have a particularly bad therapist, people would sympathize but tell them to find another one.

We tried not to get heavily involved in anything like that, but I remember one particular forum we dropped off of, that promoted itself as being for people who “strive to deal positively” with multiplicity (wording that invites assumptions in itself: it implies that the default is to deal negatively with it). From initial talk about being for empowered systems, it ended up being a hangout from people who believed that thinking plurality was “a gift, not a disorder” was empowerment, despite the fact that many of them seemed to run their systems in a pretty disorderly way. (And people who thought ’empowerment’ meant ‘having psychic powers,’ but there always tend to be a few of those hanging around.)

Many of them seemed to operate under the assumption that any emotional conflict, in-system, was necessarily bad, and a ‘symptom of the disorder’ that would lead to an enormous struggle for dominance. (For a lot of them, it seemed to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

It was partly because of them that we left, and partly because of a lot of other ‘minor’ things going unchallenged, like the woman who kept talking about how her four-year-old daughter needed to be put on medication since she could tell that the child was “suicidally depressed,” because “she inherited my depression gene.” (Not because she was modeling herself off others in the family, of course– only genes could be blamed. She also insisted her daughter was plural and, despite being plural herself, took her to group therapy to have her “corrected.”) Or the time one poster declared that anyone who didn’t see their own plurality as a disorder caused by trauma was basically a loser in denial, and people who got irate at him were later compared to Nazis by the forum moderator. (She later backtracked and claimed she hadn’t actually been reading the threads in question and had no idea what was going on there– she had just received a complaint from that one poster, claiming he was being “attacked.”)

It wasn’t nearly as bad as it used to be (possibly still is, but I don’t want to check) on some of the Usenet groups like alt.support.dissociation, where there was stuff like people talking about how wonderful electroconvulsive therapy was because “it makes the voices go away.” (Destroys communication, in other words.)

It was funny that while most of these people saw plurality as a disorder, they saw it as a disorder caused by life circumstances, having nothing to do with one’s brain being different (other than the usual ‘it takes a person who is exceptionally creative and intelligent’ crap), and yet a lot of them still talked about medication as if it were the only thing standing between them and complete loss of control.

And even when I’ve found those particular experiences an unbearable nightmare (and for a long time, my whole life was a combination of quite literal nightmares while asleep and nightmares while awake, basically, it never stopped), the drugs psychiatry has to offer (whether neuroleptic, minor tranquilizer, beta blocker, or anti-depressant) have not been an option for me. They are either counterproductive or ineffective, usually both. And a few (neuroleptics and beta blockers especially) I can have directly life-threatening reactions to.

So whether I’ve enjoyed it or not, I’ve had to muddle through that stuff without psychiatric drugs or to fall back on. There hasn’t been much of a choice in that regard, they do not work as advertised on me, even when I have all the so-called “symptoms” of the so-called “illnesses” they are used to treat.

I’ve been treated for Bipolar and PTSD for the past eight or so years. I had tried to live without meds, and it was a nightmare for me. Doctors have given me the wrong meds time after time with differing results both physical and mental. But once I was put on Prozac and Seroquel, things started really turning around for me. Meds ended up being the right choice for me.

One of us (Ruka) was once speculated to have ‘severe mania’ by a psychologist because when being given an IQ test, he got up and paced the room very rapidly and repeated the questions to himself after they had been asked (because it helped him remember– and the pacing because it helped him to concentrate). He was definitely agitated, but I don’t see why agitation isn’t understandable when someone else’s opinion of your intelligence is at stake. Then he proceeded to put a bunch of things in his report about us that had little to no relation to anything we actually said to him. We later found out that he had a track record of diagnoses of this sort; specifically he diagnosed all females with depression or bipolar disorder and all males with ADD.

(I would probably have become an adult “revolving door schizophrenic” even with the autism diagnosis. And then I’d probably have died of a drug reaction eventually.)

We have a relative who’s done the chronic schizophrenic route. Her parents have had her declared gravely disabled and cut her off from the rest of the family; she lives in something like the ‘mental health housing’ you described, and the last time we even talked to her on the phone was eight years ago. Her mother is a big NAMI activist now. I try to do the smile-and-nod thing whenever she brings it up; it’s a bit like how we respond when our partner&’s oldest uncle keeps sending political propaganda.

The funny thing is that several of her ‘symptoms’ as described to us didn’t sound very different from things we had felt or experienced at various times in our life. We tried to tell this to a few people, all of whom denied it and fervently insisted that things had never been ‘that bad’ for us, that we couldn’t *possibly* ever have been ‘as bad as her,’ that we only *thought* things had ever been that bad for us because we were too young and were supposed to have something wrong with us whereby we supposedly couldn’t tell how bad an incident had actually been and thought everything that had happened to us was much worse and more extreme than it really was. (This seems to have been idea our mother came up with, but other family members bought into it too.) Of course, they ‘knew’ that the reason our experience had been different from hers was because we hadn’t gotten the same diagnosis.

It can be hard to say “Yes, I perceive this, and what I perceive is real, dammit,” and of course the energy it takes do so so can easily be mistaken for “being angry”… etc.

Yeah– there have been a few times when we’ve been asked why we were ‘being so defensive’ and ‘attacking others,’ etc. We weren’t attacking specific people, so much as the attitude that the things we saw, felt and perceived were not real or reliable.

We’re also pro-choice about drugs, which can be difficult sometimes if we end up trying to explain to someone with the authority to prescribe them for us– even a M.D.– that we just want a temporary course of a mild tranquilizer or something, because ‘temporary course’ doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s vocabulary any more when it comes to psychiatric drugs. In the past, anyway, we’ve run into several people who liked handing us lectures on how bad and irresponsible and foolish we are for having not ‘stayed with’ earlier prescriptions and having not ‘sought help earlier,’ how the fact that we ‘waited so long’ is indicative of a problem in and of itself because it meant we were too sick to realize how sick we were. Even mentioning that we had difficulty finding doctors we can work with can be twisted into something negative.

…I sometimes wonder if it’s just us, or a general constant that the psychiatrists’ offices with the most ‘beautiful and relaxing’ environments, the ones with the dimmed lights and wall hangings and fancy furniture and potted plants and little waterfall machines, are also the ones where you’re most likely to be yelled at and lectured and told how sick and irresponsible you are if you don’t want to take drugs, or at least not the ones they give you, and how you won’t be able to get along without them, and treated like you’re sub-human. It seems like it’s designed to lure you into a false sense of security, to believe that you’re in a place of love and humanity where there is actually neither, so that you’ll be open and vulnerable to those accusations and find them harder to shake off than if they had taken place in a more office-like environment. We’ve gotten to the point where our first instinct, if we walk into a clinic and see that kind of decor, is to turn right around and walk back out again.