Tag: Diagnosis

Psychiatric diagnoses have far-reaching consequences for every area of your life: welfare, employment, health and travel insurance, physical and mental health assessment/treatment, adoption rights, and social stigma, to name but a few. Yet they are just subjective opinions with no scientific basis and can change over time.

The workshop was a very powerful experience as we were faced with the immense pain of the stories of indigenous Australians, compounded by psychiatric imperialism. We were also reminded once again that like the Māori and Pacific Islanders, First Nation Australians have an awareness of community, spirituality, identity and connection to the natural world that has been disastrously eroded in Westernised countries, with profound impacts on all aspects of our wellbeing.

I want you to see me...work well with me, and open that can of worms. Not to watch you squirm but to help me see. That I am not rotten. That my ‘mental illness’ and my addictions. Are just a symptoms of trauma not forgotten.

Let’s try to get some other messages out there that challenge the old, tired, damaging narrative of diagnosis and disorder. Messages that offer hope and solidarity to people and messages that put the responsibility for the primary causal factors of emotional distress firmly back where it belongs.

For many people, the current political situation around the world is intensely frightening and not without cause.  Depression and anxiety are on the rise, but we need a social model revolution in order to look at why this is happening.