Once a drug has received approval in the USA by the FDA (or equivalent body elsewhere) to be prescribed for a particular use, doctors have the discretion to prescribe it for other, hitherto unapproved, uses, known as 'off-label' indications. The marketing strategies employed by pharmaceutical companies to exploit this are well known.
However, when I first heard the expression, it seemed like the psychiatric equivalent of 'in remission'; in which the patient one day fails to meet the criteria for a particular diagnosis s/he once received, and thus goes 'off-label.' Or perhaps there is no formal reassessment, but that the patient has simply moved out of the mental health system, by elopement or ejection or something in between, and gradually loses the self-perception and attendant habits of being 'sick'.
I fall into the second category. I 'fell' into the system at 15 - you could say I both jumped and was pushed. A cocktail of post-traumatic symptoms, boredom and standard romantic notions of going 'mad', combined with an abusive and unsupportive family and a social and educational milieu that regarded with deep suspicion teenage girls more interested in science and literature than boys, clothes and sport, made my descent almost inevitable. What followed were four years of diagnoses, hospitalisations, medications and humiliations which turned a troubled but basically normal kid into a... raving nutcase (I'm not sure how else I can put it).
I got out, but it nearly cost me my life. For many years I thought it necessary to try to forget about it in order to get on with my life, but the ongoing effect it has had on me and, as a consequence, on those close to me, has forced me to abandon that coping strategy and to begin reconsidering my experience. My initial conclusion is that I copped a double-whammy - suffering from the usual consequences of extreme physical abuse as a child (dissociative episodes, lowered mood, and preoccupation with the past), I entered the mental health system with the expectation that these issues would be addressed, only to be re-traumatised by unnecessary hospitalisations, inappropriate (and sometimes outrageous) behaviour on the part of those who were supposed to be 'treating' me and the unquestioned assumption that my problem was strictly biological. I was given many drugs that these days can only be prescribed to adults, and involved in a variety of drug trials and experiments. The ethical dubiousness of this hardly needs to be stated.
I've no doubt that my experience is far from unique, but having long dissociated myself from the 'system', I don't really know anyone who was put through the wringer to the extent that I was, and who could help me understand what happened and why. Hence this blog.
What it is:
- An exploration of some of the ethical and philosophical issues posed by the discipline of psychiatry, and
- Hopefully a forum for sharing and understanding experiences, both positive and negative, with the mental health system.
What it isn't:
- Dedicated to proselytising or damning any particular treatment or approach
- A source of unbiased information or opinion
- A support group for people in crisis, and
- A front for the Church of Scientology!
About Me
- Ruth
- It's all in the files, I guess. Except the bit about being Miss Michigan 2006 and a pharma sales rep.
There's just a fair bit of swearing in it, that's all. I'm a bit pissed off about there no longer being an X-rating, since I wanted this to be the Midnight Cowboy of blogs.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
2 comments:
An interesting post Ruth and very honest ..
If I have learned anything about Mental Health systemn across the world and about families that are intergenerationally abusive in various semi conscious ways , direct and very subtle , its that humans are inadequate at being able to empathise with children if they themselves have been taught feelings are off limits ... People widely are raised to be partly unconscious.
Its as if the internal skill to navigate feelings with others is shut down by degrees in families and empathy and feeling is deselected . Its also reflected in the systems of mental health care that have forgotten that "Care" when pure - is a part of empathy i.e. The internal capacity to feel and emotionally hold the other as another feeling being .
Hell .... When you are abused by parents or others they are not likely to empathise. One is left abandoned . Void . NO wonder the past will need to be resolved again . Emotional responsibility brings with it the job of feeling and attaching into vulnerability and real needs in children ..Why should anyone do that since our cultures are anti feeling and distorted need machines that come from abused structures that are partly unconscious..
Long ago many family structures partly defunctionalised their emotions as a matter of reflex.. MH systems themselves are nearly all intellectualised bureacratised ways we mystify things more ..
You are a smart one ... Good vision to you .....
.
It's very interesting to read this post again now. I discovered you when you only had a handful of posts and I didn't have a blog. Little did I know that I was following your lead.
You write:
"I've no doubt that my experience is far from unique, but having long dissociated myself from the 'system', I don't really know anyone who was put through the wringer to the extent that I was, and who could help me understand what happened and why. Hence this blog."
Although I did know people who had been through the wringer, working as a social worker in mental health, I was so dissociated from my experience--that I held those clients that I worked with at arms length--only vaguely recognizing how we were similar. It has not been until now that I've discovered that I too have to look back in order to make sense of my present experience and to deeply recognize the abuses that I share with so many of us who have been labeled mentally ill.
It was you, more than anyone, who inspired me to start my blog and now I've discovered a world of kindred spirits.
I thank you for being a part in my journey.
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