Western psychopathology has developed quite a system for categorizing so-called mental illness into tidy little boxes. In many ways, it can be helpful to have a common language to talk about experiences, challenges, dysfunction, treatment, and even dare I say, healing. The organizing system, however, leaves out an awful lot of who a person is.*
For some, the label of a mental illness diagnosis can become how we define ourselves. We become the label. For others, fighting against the label can leave us struggling to make sense of a world that has become the enemy, blocking us from getting life-saving help.
Who Are We Beyond the Label?
Who are you, who are we, beyond the reductionist judgments, labels, family and cultural experiences that helped teach us who we think we are? For mental illness or no, we all are taught who we're supposed to be long before we're capable of knowing that for ourselves.
Mindful awareness can help us begin making sense out of insanity, whether we have a full-blown psychiatric diagnosis or are highly sensitive to our environments (which can wreak havoc until we learn to manage our sensitivities). We begin to define our lives for ourselves, based on clear-hearted self-inquiry, using the practice of mindfulness.
Elyn R. Saks is the author of the memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. Diagnosed 30 years ago with "grave" schizophrenia, she recently wrote a Los Angeles Times opinion piece.
In it, she says:
Following my last psychiatric hospitalization at the age of 28, I was encouraged by a doctor to work as a cashier making change. If I could handle that, I was told, we would reassess my ability to hold a more demanding position, perhaps even something full-time.
Then I made a decision. I would write the narrative of my life. Today I am a chaired professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. I have an adjunct appointment in the department of psychiatry at the medical school of the University of California, San Diego, and am on the faculty of the New Center for Psychoanalysis. The MacArthur Foundation gave me a genius grant.
Elyn Saks did not mindlessly ignore the schizophrenia. Nor did she try to pretend away her inner urgings to become more than what the "experts" said was possible. She was mindful of who she was beyond the diagnosis, made a series of decisions, and moved through the psychiatric label and out into the landscape of a large and meaningful life.
Mindful awareness is many things. It's a specific form of meditation practice that teaches us to become aware, with a clear mind and an open heart. It can also simply be paying attention to that internal voice urging us on, toward the finish line of our own dreams rather than someone else's.
As we pay attention to the simple moments of our lives, we begin to hear our own voices. We choose our own race, start training, and get on with it. As did Elyn Saks.
10 Marathon Tips for Mindfulness and Mental Illness
Having been diagnosed with a mental illness can feel like being thrown onto the starting line of a lifelong marathon. Lying there in a messy heap at the starting line, clothes and shoes all wrong for the event, people on either side of you in the starting block facing the correct direction for forward motion, you think: What? WTF?!
Here's how to start training yourself to be your mental health and wellness expert.
- Pay attention. Are you often so out of step with folks around you that you think everyone else is nuts? Or you think you're nuts, but really you're just like everyone else except you just don't know it? Get a reality check from someone who gets it.
Got it?
*Note: I'm not saying there's no such thing as mental illness. I am not saying that all Western psychiatry and/or traditional psychology has it wrong. I am saying there's more to the narrative than appears in the DSM bible of disorders.
For more by Melanie Harth, Ph.D., LMHC, click here.
For more on mental health, click here.