To me, ultimately, the worst one is the denial by design, which is why I focused on that in my statement. There were so many other aspects I could go after.
One that does occur, and I have given conference papers on this, is the way we use some of the language on operational stress injuries. This is associated with the stigma as well. When we refer to it as “mental illness“ or “diseases of the brain”, this itself is a stigmatizing form of language that ignores what has actually happened, which is that we have been hit with an injury.
Fundamentally, what is the difference between someone who has had a limb blown off and someone whose sense of self has been so fractured that their life seems like it is coming to an end? This is my challenge toward the very way that psychiatry, and the industry of providing support and care, has become dehumanized in a way that, through its biomedical drive and through the principles it uses, dehumanizes the patient, dehumanizes the person who is injured, and in a way almost blames them, or that is how it is perceived by many of us with operational stress injuries. We are being blamed as not being worthy enough.
“Oh look, you caught the flu of the mind”, is almost what it feels like. “Hey, it's okay. Just take some time. You'll get over it.” It is this idea of illness instead of an injury. We can learn to cope. We can learn to come back. We can find new ways of being with these injuries. When we talk mental illness, it immediately implies a cure. When those cures don't happen, that strikes us even harder. When we come in expecting that CBT will help us, it is only good or takes 6, 10, 12, 20 weeks take effect, and yet three years later we are still scratching the surface. It is not a cure. It is a way of coping.
The very language that we use—that Veterans Affairs and psychiatry use—turning around and implying mental illness, creates a situation of expectations of “outcomes”, to use the wording that Brenda used. Those outcomes can never actually be met. That cascades further. When we keep having those dark, demonic moments, we are not able to come out of them.
We end up blaming ourselves, but then we end up wondering, is it really real? Then other people turn and go, “Oh, you are not better yet. Are you really that sick? Are you faking it?” Then you add in the pharmacotherapy, which is the first line. When those don't work.... I also referred to the way you end up on one drug and you need another drug to treat the symptoms of the first one. It is the Pfizer wheel of death. You need drug after drug after drug just to handle the side effects, and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse, with the expectation that we are going to be cured.
Even if the medications are working immediately on the symptoms, it is not curing. All it is doing is masking the distress that is happening. It zombifies us. It does not actually help.
You can tell that is one of my really passionate areas of....