If You Want to work with psych patients

There are a bunch of psychology students from my alma mater (9 years this spring!) visiting through a special arrangement with a professor I suppose I now owe something.

I should have posted this last night, but I was wrapped up thinking about something else, and as I keep telling work, I don't think 2 ways at once. So, I've missed some of you, but if someone still reads this, or if you come back and see it, please think about this and share it.

There is one thing I want people to learn from this blog. I write for many reasons, but there is one main goal. That goal is that as you become a mental health professional you will learn many statistics. By the end of your master's degree you will be a walking heap of numbers and generalizations. It becomes so easy to assume that people fit into these categories. I came out of school with so many beliefs that wound up making my own illness harder because I fought for nearly 2 full years to avoid being diagnosed because I thought it meant that who I was would change. Bipolar patients used drugs, went on impulsive spending sprees, were suicidal, and had trouble holding down jobs. I didn't want to be those things so I avoided diagnosis. And then I was diagnosed and learned I was still me and that my own version of this affects me differently. I learned that some of the things I hate, like being monitored for suicidal thinking, I have to deal with because I am at risk. But compared to others, I am so blessed in that area and so it's less intense monitoring than it could be.

Even after I was diagnosed though I have found myself trying to pigeonhole. I do it much less than most healthcare workers, but I have attributed something to a psychiatric diagnosis when something else was wrong. Once I watched someone die of a painful disease and we had all thought she was just acting out when she complained of pain, because she did that. By the time the cancer was found she only lived three weeks.

But what I ask is that as you go through school and your career, as you memorize and then work with all the statistics and generalizations, please remember me and people like me. I live with severe mental illness every day, and I often must prove how sick I am because it isn't seen at the surface. And I'm not the only one.....