Lookingonthebrightside’s Weblog

I read an interesting blog entry yesterday. Somebody far braver than me gives her account of recovery from DID on her real live non-anonymous blog. It got me thinking a bit more about recovery and what it is.

Anybody who works (or is studying) in the field of mental health, will have done well not to have come across the recovery movement, recovery philosophy, recovery values, recovery approach or something similar. Other people have taken a long time to put together fairly comprehensive information on the world wide web, both from user/survivor perspectives and from the perspectives of practitioners/helpers so I’m not going to go into it. I really should be writing/finishing an essay on the National Service Framework for Mental Health and social inclusion. This link is okay and has other, better, links from it. It’s rethink, the mental health charity so it’s from a service perspective primarily. I like this one but don’t be put off by the outfit. Ron Coleman has been a key player in the prominence of recovery in recent years. He still scares me though.

But basically, the biomedical model, which has underpinned most aspects of mental health provision in the NHS, views mental health as organic in nature (caused by genetics, neurotransmitters, hormones, infections and as by-products of physical disease). That’s because a very clever german guy called Emil Kreapelin said Freud was wrong. He did a lot of researching and identified that people who had family members who were mad were more likely to become mad themselves. He also did a lot of research on the effects of alcohol on the human system. I’ve done some research myself in that area but I struggled to write it down. By the time I could hold a pen, I couldn’t remember anything any more. Emil Kreapelin was clever. He watched other people get drunk. Not as much fun but infinately more useful for research purposes. He noticed that drunk people and mad people did similar things. So therefore (less clever in my opinion) there must be a physical cause to madness as there is with alcohol-induced arseholic behaviour.

Basically, ever since, we’ve been treating people based on this premise. And for people who it clearly didn’t fit, such as personality ‘disordered’ individuals, and sometimes people with DID/MPD aswell, we didn’t do anything with them at all. Treatment has equated to giving medication. If medication won’t work, they are ‘untreatable’. The goal has been the removal of symptoms (abnormality according to the norms of that particular society or distress on the part of the individual). If treatment was successful, the person was now normal and had stopped crying a lot, then the person had recovered. Oh Joy!

Recovery has another meaning in the current mental health climate. A meaning that no-one really seems to be able to define. I like that. Recovery seems to have more to do with the self, the bit people can’t see. It recognises, in my opinion, some very important principles. Firstly, recovery recognises that coming apart is extremely traumatic. It’s like having the rug pulled from under your feet. It’s disorienting. It’s a shock. Nothing makes sense anymore. People need to recover from that. It recognises that anything related to mental ill-health also carries huge stigma. You grow up with those stigmatised ideas all around you. And then it’s you. In a way, you then have a stigmatised view of yourself. Which tears you apart. You need to resolve that, come to a place of acceptence. It recognises that the mental health system causes people further injury, sometimes with the best of intentions. People lose personal freedoms or they’re threatened (verbally or non-verbally) with the loss of freedom if they don’t comply with a treatment regime thay may not be entirely happy with. You may get a label attached to you that makes it difficult to pursue your chosen career, to adopt children, to get insurance, to travel to America (the last one’s not such a great loss I know). People also need to recover from all this, navigate their way through a world with less opportunities than before.

I could say more but I’m sure you get the point. It’s not always the symptoms that are the problem. It’s all the other shit you get landed with as a result. And just when you could really do without it, in my humble opinion. Recovery says you can find a way to be okay, happy in fact, with or without symptoms. Recovery also says no-one else can tell you whether or not you’ve done it. It isn’t externally measurable.

But, back to my original point related to the nice lady’s blog. People who define recovery according to removal of the symptoms (as she seems to) and people who define it by finding a way to make life okay again with or without symptoms (as I do) are often, when you actually get them together, experiencing very similar things. They’re just framing it differently. Faith’s recovery goal seems to have been integration and no longer using dissociation as a coping strategy. As a result, her life is better, she’s happier. She does still dissociate occasionally but not so much. My goal of therapy was very different. I couldn’t give a shit about integration (if anything, it just felt wrong, like some kind of bizarre role play) or whether or not I still dissociated. I wanted to stop being frightened all the time. I wanted to stop feeling ashamed. I wanted to be able to watch a tv programme all the way through and understand what I’d watched. I wanted to sleep at night. I wanted friends. I wanted some nice stories to tell in company. The only symptom-focussed goal was flashbacks. I wanted the flashbacks to stop. To be honest, that was pretty shit. The voices were fine. The flashbacks not so much. But, at the end of the day, parts of my whole self became less separate and I dissociated less. So me and Faith got very similar outcomes.

Yay me and Faith!

[These posts are so long. Over 1000 words. I feel like I ought to reference them. How come I can't do essays this quick?]