Читать книгу Welcome to the Jungle - Hilary T. Smith - Страница 16

You didn't get diagnosed with bipolar because you're ugly or because the doctor doesn't like you. Let's face it—he's uglier, and his personality needs improving. You got diagnosed bipolar because your symptoms more or less fall into a common, distinct pattern, observed in millions of people. We're currently calling that pattern “bipolar” and treating it with pharmaceuticals and talk therapy. In the past, the same pattern has been called by a different name (hello, “hysteria”) and treated by different means (like lots of cold showers). In the future, it will undoubtedly be called something else entirely and treated with mind melding and cosmic nanoprobes. In other cultures, what we call “bipolar” has other names and other symptoms and explanations entirely.

Psychiatric illnesses aren't like herpes. You can say, “You have a cold sore, therefore you have oral herpes,” but you can't say, “You have insomnia, therefore you are bipolar.” Insomnia can be explained by a hundred different reasons; cold sores are always due to herpes.

A bipolar diagnosis doesn't extract something hidden in you and reveal it (“All along she was a mutant!”); it merely describes what's already there (“Ah, these symptoms are part of the bipolar pattern.”). Being diagnosed bipolar doesn't change you and make you into something you weren't before; it just says, “Hey, you're a person who could probably benefit from taking mood stabilizers!”

Thinking of your diagnosis this way is much less painful than thinking of it as a life sentence or a siege on your identity. No matter what the psychiatric community wants to call it, you're still you—whether you have bipolar, hysteria, a wandering womb, or just plain sand madness. Everybody else changes their mind about what to call it, so there's no reason why you can't too. Don't think “bipolar” is an accurate description of your experience? How about Chronic Sleep Taxationitis or Acute Porn Star Overidentification Syndrome? No matter what you call it, no matter how you think about it, no matter how you treat it, you're a person—not a collection of symptoms or an entry in the DSM-IV (the hefty diagnostic manual produced by the American Psychiatric Association that you've probably seen lurking under your psychiatrist's desk). Nothing can change that. Don't dwell on whether or not “bipolar” is the perfect way of describing your condition; just consider whether the solutions available for bipolar are helpful for you.