the bipolar anti-psychiatrist

Let’s just cut to it. I’m bipolar and also anti-psychiatry, and it’s not as contradictory as it sounds.

I actually fell into anti-psychiatry before I fell into my diagnosis. My dive into anti-psychiatry started after my dad’s needless death at the hands of the psych system. I started to question its efficacy, its usefulness, its ethics. How come it’s okay to lock someone up when they haven’t committed a crime? Is that supposed to make a sad, angry person less sad and angry? It hasn’t sat right with me for many years. It was only a year or so ago that I got the language for this, and fleshed my view out.

For an overview, my view is this: You can’t ever prove anything scientific in the psych world. My A-Level Psychology teacher used to phrase this as “you can’t test everyone who has ever lived, is living, or will ever live, so you can never prove anything.” It literally isn’t possible, yet we act like it is. Why do we act like we have a concrete, scientific answer (like low serotonin causes depression – what if depression causes low serotonin? We can’t prove otherwise!) to these complex human emotions and experiences? Why do we, despite the myriad of evidence to the contrary, just accept flawed science as biological fact? We shouldn’t. We should be looking deeper – at the societal, at the political, as well as (read: more than) at the biological. My view is also that using this flawed science to attach lifelong, often detrimental labels to people based on common clusters of experience can sometimes do more harm than good. Committing them to an institution against their will is also not the answer, when the statistics show that inpatient suicide rates are far higher than outpatient. Before anyone says it: If inpatient worked, the suicide rate would be lower. It isn’t, therefore we can’t assume that inpatients are simply more likely to be suicidal outside of their context of institutionalisation.

My view is not, though, that a shorthand in the form of a diagnosis can’t be useful. Nor is it that medications, therapy, even hospital stays, can never help anyone. They can, and they do! We can’t, though, ignore the bad science and the abuse that comes hand in hand with them.

My diagnosis and medications have helped me hugely, even when they’ve hindered me in other ways. In January, I was diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder (with mixed and psychotic features, how very slay). After a lot of trial and error, I’ve ended up taking 20mg of Prozac and 5mg of Abilify every day for the foreseeable future, maybe forever. I also sit patiently on waiting lists for therapy.

My diagnosis has opened language and communication up to me – I now have two words I can give any doctor, friend, relative, to explain my experiences. How convenient is that?! I no longer have to describe every sign of hypomania out of fear of being met with a “you’re not diagnosed though so let’s not call it that,” I can just say “I’m hypomanic.” Diagnosis has also given me the language of Madness, which I find quite liberating, honestly. Becoming psychiatrised has its serious drawbacks re: all the abuse, but to be able to find a community and an identity within that that reclaims the abuse? It’s something I didn’t know I needed, but desperately did.

Not to mention the gatekeeping of the drugs I needed behind white coats and latex gloves. The gate has been opened for me – I was deemed sick enough, but not so sick I need to be put away. It’s a fine line to walk, but I walk it whilst taking my meds like a good Mad person. I wanted those meds, I think I’d be dead without them, to be very blunt.

Then what? If my diagnosis has opened up language, identity, and being alive to me, why – or how – am I still anti-psychiatry? Sure, it’s because the system abuses people and is built on bad science. It’s because diagnoses are historically constructed categories, oftentimes rehashed racism or sexism. But how can I balance this with how much psychiatry has helped me?

The answer’s actually pretty simple: There is nothing inherently broken about me.

I experience these mood swings for some unknown, unprovable reason. That’s a fact, and it’s a pretty shitty one to reckon with. I wish there was a way to ever prove this was a biological illness with a definitive cause-and-effect relationship between some neurotransmitter and my emotions. However, I don’t like patchy science. So there isn’t one of those. Now, I could take that to heart in one of two ways; I’m just broken, or actually, I’m not broken at all, I’m just human.

I choose the second. There’s nothing inherently broken about or wrong with me that needs to be fixed. That label that hangs over my head is there, and the things it describes are very real to me, but that doesn’t mean I’m broken. Actually, there will never be evidence that I’m just wrong. This is simply the way I feel and maybe there doesn’t need to be a deeper explanation than that. I’m a bipolar anti-psychiatrist because I choose to question the idea that there’s something wrong with me, and that deep down, I can “be normal again.” Maybe I never will be, maybe I’m Mad forever, in spite of all I do to feel better. Why is this a necessarily bad thing? If I learn to take care of myself, to better manage the emotions I don’t want to experience, why is it bad if I’m still Mad? How is it “anti-recovery?” These things get thrown at me a lot, I don’t understand them.

I’m also a bipolar anti-psychiatrist because I recognise the reality of my drugs. They aren’t acting on a specific biological determinant of my symptoms, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work. They do work for me! They flatten my highs and lows out a little, which is the point, no? However, I’m anti-psychiatry because I realise that a) they’re not doing what psychiatry would have you believe they are, and b) they’re drugs. They’re not fundamentally different from any other substance that acts on mood, neurotransmitters, etc. The difference is control, regulation, gatekeeping, racialisation, and war on drugs rhetoric. The war on drugs has been lost – get over it, do some drugs.

The final part of my bipolar anti-psychiatry is my self-confidence. I know what’s best for me, period. I know that, no matter what, being stripped of my belongings and relationships and put into a new, unfamiliar place and routine will only make me feel worse. I know what makes me feel better, and I won’t let anyone tell me I don’t know those things. What helps me is my meds, drugs to put me to sleep, music, being around my girlfriend and friends, having my own space, a hot shower, a bowl of my favourite soup, and a trip down the pub. I won’t let anyone in a white gown or scrubs tell me they know what’s best for me and my brain when they don’t even know my favourite band, my hobbies, my middle name, for God’s sake.