Misdiagnosed Anonymous

Category: Psychology

Our thoughts stemming from the field of psychology, whether it’s about the unconscious, or thinking about important works in psychology we read through the lens of our experiences as misdiagnosed persons. Psychology means many things to many people, here we regard by its roots: “Psyche + Logy” = Dialogue with the psyche / soul.

  • Can We Own “Psychotic” Behavior?

    Can We Own “Psychotic” Behavior?

    15 minute read

    Is it possible to own “psychotic” behavior? Or is it implied, by the very term “psychotic”, that the behavior under question is not exactly owned or can’t be owned by an individual or any sane self, or even that if an otherwise sane self were to officially take responsibility for (responsibility which therefore could dangerously be associated with pride) the behavior then such a self could no longer be considered sane? Along these lines, if the behavior under question is labelled by others as “psychotic”, can merely accepting others’ / the labelling parties’ views as your own constitute real repair or real growth?

    The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

    Carl Rogers

    Carl Rogers, in positing a phenomological theory of personality in 1951, put forward nineteen propositions, the thirteenth of which is: 

    In some instances, behavior may be brought about by organic experiences and needs that have not been symbolized. Such behavior may be inconsistent with the structure of the self, but in such instances the individual does not “own” the behavior.

    These propositions are not specifically directed toward developing a theory of psychosis, but toward a general humanistic theory of personality. I personally like this language, and don’t think his ambition toward a universal theory of psychology should necessarily be regarded as an overreach even if there may theories today that are more “evidence-based” or focused on specific “illnesses”. Including this non-ownership makes me feel like any (even “psychotic”) experience can be included within this universe, and therefore dialogue is possible — those with “sick” minds don’t need to be quarantined off in some corner. The next proposition, fourteen, elaborates on the former:

    Psychological adjustment exists when the concept of the self is such that all the sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are, or may be, assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self.

    I love this definition of adjustment. This totally reframes it for me. In my experience of misdiagnosis, I would try to offer as a sign of previous mental continence that a year before the onset of my “illness” my college counselor remarked I was maybe the most well-adjusted student she’d encountered. External psychological authorities (the medicaid counselors mainly trying to ensure I accepted I was fundamentally sick and would comply with the drugs, and in different ways my father) pejorated the term “adjust”. Well, what does adjustment mean? What are you adjusting to? It’s no great adjustment to adjust a sick society.  I remember encountering the Adjustment card (in place of Justice) in Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, and I remember thinking that only a total “psychotic” Satanist like Crowley could begin to have sane views of Adjustment. Yet here, Rogers, without being at all wacky, instead while being maybe even a bit normative, is meaning with the word “adjustment” in psychology something that that makes a lot of sense. It’s not exactly about an individual adjusting to a situation or to a set of societal beliefs. I don’t know if the belief “Your mind is essentially sick, or essentially sickness; because people around you believe this you need to take the underresearched altogether medically inappropriate meds without question” can ever be actually adjusted to, and even if it could be, should it be? Real psychological adjustment may include adjustment to situations or social groups but is actually something in a way much bigger than that. Much bigger, though less external. It’s about a self adjusting to its actual experiences. How tragic it is when this distinction gets lost amid misdiagnosis and its many performances of “care”.

    In this sense, I do believe that “psychotic” experiences, or memories of a self from when one’s behavior was labelled as “psychotic”, can be reviewed and eventually assimilated.

    This, I think, is a very important belief in recovery.

    Share what you feel comfortable sharing, own what you feel comfortable owning.

    There were significant social forces in my journey of misdiagnoses that were adamantly opposed to anything approaching this kind of work. I’m thinking of my mother. I’m thinking of her rage. I first witnessed this somewhat unhinged rage when it was directed at adults who she perceived as being a threat to me as a child, mainly teachers. Within the gravity of the rage, there was her righteousness and a sense that I ought to feel guilty for feeling embarrassed or doing anything but accepting my vulnerability to the outside adult and the rightness of her raised voice, her angry (psychotic?) words and tears. It was this same protective rage that was turned on me when I would try to persist with an interest in psychology or in the circumstances of my “diagnosis”. She would demand ”acceptance”: “You were/are sick”. And I think that if I actually did  “just accept” without also retaining hope for psychological adjustment, it wouldn’t be ten years since an episode of psychosis, instead I would still be on that cycle. In an experience of misdiagnosis, it can seem to be almost a form of heresy that you (your own mind, your own self) reviews and learns from your experience. If the mind is an agent is learning, that necessarily means that the mind will be making changes. And if it’s a “sick mind”, necessarily these will only be the wrong kind of changes, so in this paradigm, better to ”nip it in the bud” (a common phrase in the early years of my misdiagnosis) by ensuring that the mind doesn’t learn on it’s own or doesn’t believe it can or that its learning or competence is not believed in or given any value to by the “care team”. For me, writing about misdiagnosis helps to me to fight against these kinds of attitudes, as its very easy to internalize them when you’ve interacted with them regularly for years.

    Though it may be difficult to think about given what we associate with the term “psychosis”, I do believe behavior that has been labelled either internally or externally as “psychotic” can and should be owned, assimilated, adjusted to, from, against, and with. What happened happened. Your choices weren’t perfect, but who made them? Keeping it all totally packed away I see as ultimately a kind of disorganization, and it can be a slippery slope if more and more of your personality gets devoted to hiding, to not-being, to not-remembering, to not-experiencing. I resist the idea that just because you’ve had something like “psychotic” experience, or just because you’ve been misdiagnosed, you therefore have a responsibility to “own more” than other people. I feel like that can lead to another extreme, where so much of you is caught up in trying to own every facet of your experience so as to defeat accusations or a sense of inferiority. I’m thinking specifically of oversharing, or feeling guilty about not mentioning the fact of the situation of my misdiagnosis on a job interview, or a date. Misdiagnosed persons should not feel morally wrong for not embarking on extreme or unusual quests of ownership. Share what you feel comfortable sharing, own what you feel comfortable owning. I feel comfortable saying that we should seek to assimilate and own even our “psychotic” experiences, just as anyone should seek to assimilate and adjust to aspects of their experience that at first don’t seem to fit, with the hope that you’re not going carry this should beyond what feels sensible for you.

    The more that we assimilate and own the “psychotic” parts of ourselves, the more we will naturally expect our counterparts in the business of healing to do the same with their own business, the less we will end up hurt again, and the more we can actually hope.

    There are those I’ve met who feel embracing a label of psychosis for themselves, imbuing it with medical validity, gives them a kind of ownership. I’m happy for them to experience this, it is often described as a feeling of relief. Above I mentioned the importance of distinguishing psychological adjustment as being different from adjusting to a group or norm or negative self-belief. I’ll also mention the importance of distinguishing between a feeling of relief associated with a way of thinking (hedonic, feeling) and with a sense that a way of thinking actually does help (eudaimonic, sensing). A feeling of relief can be rooted in unconsious thinking like: “Well I’ll export these functions of self to those external agents who I feel I have to trust because they’ve given me no choice, and then maybe the world will leave me alone.” That’s quite unfortunate in my opinion. A life lived to be left alone? It feels sad, and neurotic. Maybe it helps some people survive, but is it worth it? A feeling of pleasurable relief is nothing I want to hold against those that experience it, though it can be manipulated, or the pleasure of it can be used in place of virtue in a kind of psuedo-moralizing: “Why don’t you just give yourself and everyone around you some relief (by giving up on yourself and life)?” If you had chickens being eaten by coyotes, and you bought some anti-coyote spray, would it be somehow be more moral or wise to try to experience a feeling of relief before you have any evidence of the spray effectively deterring coyotes? No, but that is what we ask of people on anti-psychotic medication — only the intervention we’re talking about might be coming as an order from the state, or from the family (who may have bred the coyotes to begin with), and we ask them to comply with it even when it kills a significant number of their chickens.

    This reminds me of something of another subject, which I’ll try to wrap things up with. I’ve been really enjoying reading Erik Erikson’s stages psychological development. In each of these stages, there’s a virtue that is formed through a positive and negative aspect of the stage. In the very first stage, infancy, there is trust and there is mistrust. And hope, the real skill or virtue of hope, is not excluding mistrust, but incorporating both . So a system of “care” that demands zero mistrust, is an infantalizing system of the worst kind, is a system that can make you maladjusted at this stage if you weren’t already. Hope isn’t believing in a medicine (or something being called a medicine) because it’s there or because people are telling you to just shut up and take it. Hope isn’t complying with “care” that infantilizes you or never actually makes any sense despite endless promises. Real hope necessarily includes a willingness to mistrust, and we ought to adequately mistrust systems of economics / medicine / alleged science that still require the submission our hope for their functioning, no matter how far they hide behind “evidence-based” languaging.

    As an ending thought, maybe the more that we assimilate and own the “psychotic” parts of ourselves, the more we will naturally expect our counterparts in the business of healing to do the same with their own business, the less we will end up hurt again and the more we can actually hope. The virtuous kind of hope that doesn’t just expect or imagine the world to be a certain way, but is actually something of an active participant in its improvement.

  • Is The Unconscious Real?

    Is The Unconscious Real?

    I just recently finished watching this video from the Institute of Art and Ideas. If you’re interested in intellectual conversations, it could be up your alley.

    Sneaky technical secret for watching if you want to watch the full video:

    When I watched on my phone, there wasn’t a subscription paywall, but there is one on my computer? If you hit a subscription paywall, and don’t want to subscribe (thought I’m thinking of this myself) then consider watching on your phone


    I really enjoyed it! At the end of the discussion Barbara Tversky remarks how beneficial it would be if there was a Buddhist also on the panel. So more intellectual diversity would be a plus. But I still think there was enough diversity of opinion and backgrounds for a lively and illuminating discussion.

    This is my first review for an iai.tv video, but I’ve been peeking at a few of them. They remind me of the promise of ted talks, but with a much more public interest than private interest focus.

    Freud is someone I read and regret admiring when I was a teenager, and a college student. I had an influential (British, so his words were minted into my brain perhaps in a weirdly more proper way than otherwise) college teacher who was extremely into Freud, regarding him as, alongside Marx, one of the top two modern “thinkers” to ever have existed. I’ve since read Freud: The Making of An Illusion by Frederick Crews, which is an incredibly damaging biography, though most Freudians don’t seem willing to address its accuracy / facticity and their defenses all seem a bit desperate and gross once you’ve read it. Thinking of his patients’ perspectives, especially Fritz and Eckstein even though Dora is the questionable case history most psychoanalysts will want to discuss, makes it clear in my opinion you should be glad not to have been a patient of Freud’s. I find it unfortunate that Freud so deeply attached his name to the concept of psychoanalysis, as there are psychoanalysts such as Josh Cohen on this panel who I find to be intelligent in their views — many of them contrary to Freud’s.

    Eduard Harcourt’s cogent speaking on the subject reminds me that Wittgenstein continues to be a thinker whose work it might interest me to read more or study in depth. Though, what might be called a well-documented verbal abusiveness in his personality (at least as a school teacher) suggests that perhaps none of these twentieth century Great Men were the gods they may been in icon hungry imaginations. (Or is it that men who’ve tried to mean a lot about meaning often end up a bit mean?)

    Overall, though it feels funny saying about a video less than a hour in length, I feel liberated.

    As a misdiagnosed person, maybe I’ve been trying rather hard in the background to develop a “correct” view of what “the unconscious” is and whether or not it really exists. Maybe I’ve wanted to shout at certain “providers” some of the observations elegantly observed by the speakers on the stage, or even those declared “self-evident”. What toll does it take on a soul to have those purporting to help them with their psychological processing routinely deny that which is self-evident? And then to have your concept of self brought into question, with all its insufficiency resting solely on you?

    Seeing how the speakers handle each other’s discourses, it feels in a way inspiring, and in a way that might be more of an embodied kind of inspiration than what I would feel if I read them discussing these views through text. The civility and the curiosity, the alighted expressions, the kindness and humility. While this is a subject I’ve thought about before, and read about, and talked with therapists about, I found watching this video didn’t exactly grind away my misconceptions as much as increase my confidence in the subject area — and that confidence includes knowing how even top experts recognize its intangible nature.