What Do You Think Of "traumatic Psychiatric Injury" Versus "mental Illness"?

[MT Johnny]

I assumed I was "crazy" aka mentally ill for a while a couple years ago when the s hit the fan. I was told I was, after all, and treated for it - which did nothing for me, it certainly didn't improve my mood or attitude or outlook or resolve my deep despair and anguish over the situation.

And I deeply, deeply feared and resented "mental illness" as a diagnosis, as a label, as a concept, as an entity in my life I had to deal with. "Before" things were much simpler, i had no real awareness of all of the things I must deal with, emotionally and logistcally, in the post-After aftermath.

About 8-9 months ago, someone told me about the theory that PTSD isn't "mental illness" but rather "traumatic psychiatric injury". To me, it kind of sounds like "the emporer's new clothes" - just a game of semantics, "call it what you want" - because the day to day reality is still the same.

But it still gave me a lot of comfort - maybe I could shed the label and belief in my "crazy" and go back, at least a little bit, to being me. Like I didn't have to be so ashamed 24/7/365.

Yes, no, maybe?

 

[darrenS]

you are still you , it is a label and yes a very painful one - it takes some of us a while to accept our true situation. But there is no running from the truth and the more you deal with your issues the less important it becomes. I was not given that label until i was 48 yrs old , i have lived a very full life and been successful in many areas. Does it now stop because of the label - hell no , sure the roller coaster ride got more turbulent for a while , but i am still the same person -

There are actual groups you can attend that help you accept the label and learn to live with it , it is nothing to be ashamed off , many successful people have a mental illness , even some of our founding fathers were possibly mentally ill

The more time you spend trying to throw the label or redefine it , the more frustration you will experience , put simply , we can define ourselves any way we like , the label doesnt stop you from living and achieving, but burning your energy fighting it will

 

[scout86]

Words can be powerful things. I'd say if you find that to be a useful way to think of it, go for it. Myself, I don't think in those grand terms. This is the way my brain works and I'm working on learning how to make it work better. People can call it what they want. Doesn't matter to me.

 

[digger]

For me, I think losing the 'crazy' tag from mentally ill would be the most beneficial step forward. I don't consider myself to be crazy. I do have mental health issues.

Why do you feel the tag 'mentally ill' is shameful, but 'psychiatrically injured' isn't? Just curious.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

I sort of take offense to the "traumatic psychiatric injury" term. (Maybe its just me though.)

I agree that at the end of the day, our symptoms are the same. I know that there has been a lot of argument about changing "PTSD" to something else in order to reflect the fact that it is an injury, but when push comes to shove, it will ALWAYS be a mental illness of sorts and a name change will only delay the stigma....that is, you can't run from the stigma, you can only work to change it. And the thing is, if you change the name, you're also going to lose a lot of support, too, because a name change will only function at confusing people. This is the LAST thing we need as PTSD is still widely misunderstood.

I agree that acceptance is your best bet. Own the fact that you have PTSD, because if you don't, it owns you. This is my new motto in life, as it keeps me out of denial and it keeps me from feeling shame and guilt. Acceptance allows us to move forward.

Is it possible that you are struggling with the term because you don't want to work on actual healing? Its a pretty common concept. That is, we pick on the things we cannot change because we don't want to face working on the stuff that we can change. (It can be too overwhelming.)

 

[shimmerz]

traumatic psychiatric injury

Trauma is an injury. I use the term psychiatric wounding as the word trauma does actually mean wound. This way of thinking, for me, actually propels me forward in my healing because mental illness (to me) feels more organic. Like it is a part of me and I was born with it. I don't know who I would have been without the wounding but I do feel that I am healing many wounds, not an illness. It works better for me. As far as I am concerned whatever helps you move forward in your healing is what is right. Nobody should be telling you what term or label to be using. Call it whatever feels most empowering.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

But....

Other mental illnesses CAN be an injury. Ours is the only one that MUST be an injury.... I think this fact eludes a lot of people.

 

[garden]

To me, it kind of sounds like "the emporer's new clothes" - just a game of semantics, "call it what you want" - because the day to day reality is still the same.

How we name things, or frame things does impact our perceptions. So while the name you give it is irrelevant, irrelevant because your day to day reality does not change simply because it's name does, your perception of yourself may change by what you call/name it because of what that name means to you personally.

But it still gave me a lot of comfort - maybe I could shed the label and belief in my "crazy" and go back, at least a little bit, to being me. Like I didn't have to be so ashamed 24/7/365.

Call it what you need to for your own comfort. Frame it the way you need to for your own healing. From your post it does not seem like you're fabricating a altered reality, you're simply choosing not call yourself something that, for you, carries a negative connotation, and in doing so you've found comfort. Self preservation is natural, and I could be wrong, but I don't think it's unhealthy in this instance.

Getting to a place where you can feel good is what we all want. Maybe you can revisit the label of 'mental illness' later down the line and it will have a different impact. When I was first diagnosed the label of mental illness really messed with my head, and it's only now beginning to settle in for me without feeling like a prison sentence.

 

[Anarchy]

I'm very much with Scout on this.

Words are a way of trying to describe reality, they are not (and never will be) the reality that they try to describe.

The words, or the model which we use to try to understand the real world around us, can lead us badly astray if we are not careful.

An example of this would be:
From economics; the "classical" economists came up with a paradox, why is water, which is so vital for human existence so cheap, when diamond (which Adam Smith described as a frippery and absolutely useless), is so expensive?

From this confusion, some economists concluded that markets were foolish and didn't work (that view still persists in mainstream keynesian macro economics), and Adam Smith, who was a Calvinist, concluded in about the 1740s, that price has nothing to do with usefulness and supply and demand, and is instead derived from the labour that went into making something - ie spending a month polishing a turd should make it valuable...

Marx, picked up on Smith's labour theory of value (via David Ricardo) and built his whole edifice for the "scientific inevitability of socialism" on it.

Three economists (Jevons, Walras and Menger, in around 1870) independently and simultaneously worked out the solution to the supposed paradox of value: we are never actually faced with the choice between all of the diamond in the world or all of the water in the world, we choose in marginal units, say a diamond ring, or a glass of water. In most places, water is common and eeasy to come by, and diamond is rarer, hence a glass of water is usually cheaper than a gem quality diamond. In the middle of a desert, that might be different...

The collection of theories which are generally accepted as describing a part of reality are called a "paradigm"

There's a wonderful sociology book by Kuhn, called "the nature of scientific revolutions"

In it, Kuhn describes how more and more exceptions to a paradigm have to be accomodated, until the point is reached when consensus opinion moves to a new model which its followers believe better describes reality, and it becomes the new paradigm.

This isn't just a case of ancient history, of finally understanding that the earth is not flat and that it infact orbits the sun, or that a bonfire burns because of reaction with oxygen, rather than release of phlogiston...

It happened in a mainstream science in the late 1960s (a few years after Kuhn's book was published) with the adoption of plate tectonics as a paradigm for understanding geology, the idea that continents can move around relative to each other had been down to a single high profile advocate (Arthur Holmes, prof at Durham) only a few years before that (Holmes had earlier come up with the first isotopic estimate for the age of the Earth - taking it from a few millions of years old to several billions of years old).

The medical model used by psychiatry is a paradigm - it is an attempt to explain a reality, rather than being the reality itself.

that map may describe the territory - or it may be found to be more or less incorrect.

Don't get too attached to it, and be willing to look for problems with that paradigm, when paradigm changes come, they tend to happen quickly - the old paradigm is replaced by the new within a year or two.

 

[scout86]

that map may describe the territory - or it may be found to be more or less incorrect.

But it's still just a "map" it's never the territory. Not really.

 

[Friday]

I've generally thought of it as an injury, since it was something that happened as a direct cause of something else.

I was corrected recently, and agree; except in cases of TBI or similar, it's not an injury. It's a neurological change, the structure of the brain itself changes, but injury isn't required for that. Experience is.

 

[greenleaf]

I have been preferring "injury" but after reading various posts, I now feel that neither injury nor illness fits! :-)
However illness, to me, has either a pathogen or genetic internal cause... so I still feel that the external focus of the word "injury" fits better, and I prefer that the focus of "causation" be directed toward the perpetrator, not the victim of the incident(s)...

We need a new word though...