The author of the Secret Life of a Manic Depressive blog has been an on-off acquaintance of mine for some years.
She made a post recently that left me a lot to think about, in which she suggested that accepting a diagnosis of mental illness is comparable to a grieving process.
After my diagnosis, I did go through, “The Five Stages of Grief”:
1.
Denial. Manic depression? Look, that shit is serious. There’s nothing seriously wrong with me. I’m just a bit, y’know *whistle*. Don’t be stupid.
2.
Anger. I was raging! After all I had been through in my life, why did I have to be manic depressive as well? This isn’t fair! Can’t something good happen to me? Why can’t I be normal? I’m so young! How could I let this happen? How could I let this happen to myself? I’m so weak. I’m so pathetic. Why wasn’t I stronger? What is wrong with me?
3.Bargaining. Right, look. Okay. Yeah. I might have a problem. But it’s not manic depression! It’s, like, something else. Isn’t it? What if I, I don’t know, be quiet for a bit, does that make it go away, yeah? So, right, if we stop this whole jape and I stop taking these pills and I’m okay, doesn’t that prove that I’m okay? That I’m not ill? Can’t we try that?
4.
Depression. I can’t believe it. I have manic depression. I am 21 years old and as well as having a dead alcoholic dad, no prospects and no talent, I’m fucking mentally ill on top of it. I really believed that I’d be Okay one day. That everything would work out and I’d get a bit of counselling and life would be okay for me. That I’d write a lovely book and on the back of it, I’d look really happy and be called “a survivor” or something. I can’t believe I have this mental illness for the rest of my life.
5.
Acceptance. So. I’m manic depressive. Well, I guess that explains all those mood swings. And the hallucinating. And delusions. And why I act so weirdly. And why I have a shit memory. Could be worse, I guess. Could have cancer or something. And there’s medications, isn’t there. Right. Let’s do this.
And there you go.
The rest of her blog is worth reading too. Definitely one to add to your blogrolls.
Life, I`m afraid, is a sexually transmitted terminal disease. When people routinely lost a couple of siblings in childhood and killed the pig in the garden every autumn this was accepted fact. Nowadays, meat originates in a cellophane wrapping machine, you`re treated as a war criminal if you enjoy the thrill of the hunt and you can easily get to thirty without losing a significant other.
What the hell is a grieving process. Bereavement is dreadful and some people find it harder to come to terms with others. However, the very fact that there are 6,000,000,000 of us on the planet suggests to me that we can cope.
I`m not, for one moment, suggesting that those who struggle with bereavement shouldn`t get some help. I`m just suspicious that there are some vested intersts out there hoping to gain financial advantage ( either directly or indirectly through security of employment ) by intimating that grief is a “process” requiring guidance to negotiate.
As for whether there is a process involved in accepting a diagnosis of mental illness, I don`t know.
At the risk of getting all academic, Repper and Perkins in their book on Recovery talk about this. My interpretation is that they point out that most professionals talk of “lack of insight” instead of denial, Anger as “hostility towards staff, – lets do a risk assessment” Bargaining as “more proof of lack of insight”, depression as “lack of motivation to get better”, and acceptance as….well “they haven’t got any insight so how can they accept it”.
Given a choice between the language of the medical model and the language of a bereavement process, I know which gives me more hope!
I do think there is a process of accepting a dianosis of anything and with mental illness this can be quite hard as it normally for life. suddenly everything you had before has gone and you dont know what to do next. The way I used to look at it myself was my life was over and that was that, over the years I have gained insight, and eventually acceptace and moved on, sometimes looking back and wondering what could have been, but mainly looking forward to what is now. what the medical model is on this i dont know.
i think i went through something resembling this process myself … although i spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards from 1-4 before finally getting to 5! (albeit with occassional relapses back to stages 2 and 4)
OSB, of course grief is a process. It’s not always as straight forward as 1 to 5 mentioned above, and the process obviously takes longer to go through than to read about, but it’s still a process.
I agree with Slurry that “there is a process of accepting a diagnosis of anything” and also with SurvivorWorker that a person can go backwards and forwards between 1 and 4 before reaching stage 5, and then sometimes still go back to stages 2 to 4 even after being at stage 5. I know this because of my own health problems.
Good reference Zara, I already had this one on my list to add to my links. Bizarrely enough I was going to do that tonight and then I read this! Great minds and all that…
Add me to your blogroll you cheeky git
I thought it was a secret life ?