Mental Health Trends and Mindfulness: Just Give Me My Damn Pills

 Current mood: wine, bitter, pissed off. Improving.

 This is going to get a bit heavy and rambly in places, as I'm not in the best one at the minute.

 I've been going through some part of the mental health service or another since I was sixteen. I'm not embarrassed about it and I shouldn't be. The majority has been one-on-one counselling, though I had some brief flirtation with group therapy; that was a fucking barrel of laughs and it's just kept getting funnier. It's been wonderful in the past few years to see more people opening up and finally talking about the matter. Yet I've noticed as more people come forward there has been more and more marketisation of services and self-help. One night, at an extremely low point, I rang the Crisis Team and was asked by the guy on the phone if I had tried a colouring book, or a mindfulness app? Of course! Because when somebody is feeling at absolute rock-bottom all the need is to do some pretty pictures or piss about on their phone. Not to mention that sleep deprivation is a key factor in many people hitting crisis point, and the light from electronic devices being proven to negatively impact those sleepy hormones, so hunching over your smart phone is obviously the best thing to do. Anyway, I'm getting off topic. 

 Mindfulness has been lauded as some sort of mental health buzzword in the past few years and honestly? My mind is totally full. I know when I'm being a dick. I know when I'm being irrational. I know why I want to behave like this, even when I know it's not healthy. There's honestly so much crap in there I've reached the brim, and I know I'm nearing boiling point. Tell me one more time to colour in and I might take that pencil to your eye. The mental health system itself has a history of taking the sticky plaster approach: treating the symptoms rather than the root cause. I firmly believe that if service users had more one-on-one work to establish the cause earlier on rather than throwing them into whatever therapy type is trendy at the time then it'd save a lot of time, money, and suffering all round. 

 Historically, if you go back one hundred years or so then the popular thing to do was stick anybody with a mental illness in an asylum. It required two doctors' signatures for admittance, but eight for a release. Fifty years ago they were handing out lobotomies like they were "i didn't bite the dentist" stickers. Twenty years ago it was all about popping pills and self-help books. Now we're in somewhat of a limbo phase of what could be a brilliant mental health service, or the lunatics taking over the asylum, so to speak.

 I get that arts, crafts, and writing can be helpful for mental health. Fuck sake, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't! Half of the posts on here are the result of some crazed manic or depressive moment. I've been through CBT, DBT, talking therapy, psychiatric evaluation, waitings lists, medication, medication changes, medication withdrawal. And what has been most consistent through all of that is my medication. Other than the brief month I had my meds changed and I believed I was the She-Kraken from the depths of Hell. That was... Not fun. For anybody. At all. Anyway. I had my last psychiatric evaluation over a year ago now and, while I have a Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN) to work with and she's absolutely wonderful, I have yet to have an updated diagnosis from that evaluation. And the funny part? My original referral was for eating disorder treatment. Have I had any targeted help for that? Have I fuck! 

 But after countless rounds of CBT and Talking Therapy I was finally referred for DBT with my CPN (I'm busting out all the acronyms here!) I've had a look through what DBT is and to be honest? I get it. I get what Dialectical Behavioural Therapy is, I get what it's used for, and I get how it can be helpful. However I also believe that the whole premise of how it's presented is utter bollocks. In my last appointment I was asked if I'd been remembering my something-or-others, I'll call it my 'Here Man!s' for the sake of this post. And I truly couldn't remember what it was! Because it was, like, six simple points that had been over complicated in order to sound scientific and medical. It was something to do with physical health, eating, exercise and other bollocks. But having it called a 'Here Man!' when I'm trying to finish my final year of uni, at a time when what I should be focused on learning Sociology and key feminist theory, finishing my dissertation, I'm stuck in a counselling room trying to remember what 'Here Man!' stands for. And it isn't even that word, it's some other twisted acrostic poem to make the whole practice of therapy sound more scientific and weighted. Almost like those stupid songs or rhymes you learn in maths and science classes to calculate average speed and other bollocks. I can understand to others that it might make the therapy type seem more 'real' and 'provable', but to me it just makes me want to punch whatever bastard came up with them in the face. I get the principles, I get the helpful methodology, but asking me to remember what 'Here Man!' means makes me feel tested. It puts performance pressure on me in a space where I've come for treatment and I can't do it. It's like asking for help and then being reminded that you're under exam conditions and that you're the failure for not remembering it. 

 My CPN said to me this week that I seemed unusually distracted. She's used to me spacing out sometimes but this session was rife with periods of me staring off into space, partially listening and not really taking anything in. And I wholly agree. I felt that I'd failed, not remembering what 'Here Man!' stood for, as it was something I should have been practicing in order to get better. But again, when you're at such a low point that you don't even want to get out of bed or open your eyes, do you really want to waste your time trying to remember what the H, the E, the R, the other E, etc, all stand for? 

 One of the suggestions from this session was that I check out something called the Recover College Collective. It offers BTECs and stuff and helps with mental health apparently, it's like peer-mentoring for crazy people. I had a look at the 'prospectus' with my CPN and, while it sounds interesting, I completely zoned out. Emotional regulation through interpretive dance? Art classes? Writing? This is the shit that turns me off therapy. I'm sick of sticking fancy labels on simple concepts to make them sound more credible. I'm sick of colouring books being the cure-all solution for anxiety. Because when people hit a bad patch, try these things, and they don't work, we feel like failures. We feel like we're failing at getting better. And it's not fun. It's really not fun.

 I'm not writing this as something against these therapy types or anything else, I'm writing it from my experience. Giving something a stupid name and label doesn't make it a cure, and it doesn't make it helpful. It might make it sound more credible to those who try to measure it as a biological experiment, but for me it just means frustration. It means headaches I don't need, reading I don't want to do, and interacting with new people that I don't want to meet. All I want is a therapy type where somebody will tell it how it is, without making it sound either sciency-fancy or arty-farty. Is that too much to ask?


 Note: this isn't me condemning these therapy types, I can't stress that enough. But shoving them down somebody's throat when they're already sick to fucking death of saying 'help, I don't understand' isn't helpful.