Anyone think its funny how psychiatrists can label us and we get programmed in to believing we have an illness??
It seems being crazy sometimes is univeral. Maybe I dont have the same problems as othera on this forum. I have had psychktic episodes and other stuff but I feel I at one point was coeirced by the psychiatry establishment… to believe things.
It’s nothing that you cant shrug off. Especially if your in a state of being better. You could even use it to fuel you. F the establishment I’m gonna get better. I really hate how they dont help you.
I don’t feel labled. I feel in agreeance with my diagnoses. Either everyone experiences the same psychotic crap I do and has some great secret in containing it, or… I am most definitely mentally ill. I know the last is true.
EDIT: I was self-diagnosed before I was diagnosed by the medical community.
No, I don’t think it’s funny. It took decades of pain and misery for me to finally believe that I have an illness.
I don’t think that a person is necessarily programmed into a life of life-long schizophrenia. Diagnoses can change over time.
What I find funny is how a doctor can diagnose diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or the flu and nobody bats an eye. But diagnose a mental illness, which is no different than the others, and people deny it, reject it, and become defensive about it. Psychiatrists get a lot of undeserved crap about their diagnosing people.
An official diagnosis is usually life long - there is also a stigma attached to that label. It seems to me that my doctor is not concerned with the stigma that is connected to a severe mental illness diagnosis or label.
A schizophrenia diagnosis is a hard pill to swallow - I mean once you are labeled - it basically means that many people are not going to believe you, you lose credibility - everything you say becomes a delusion.
One of my first doctors diagnosed me with some obscure vague diagnosis - Anxiety NOS - but he told my mother that I actually suffered from schizophrenia. Maybe he knew that stamping me with a schizophrenia diagnosis would create negative responses from others - I mean this guy was not nice but maybe he was trying to do me a favor?
Denial is a river in egypt and all that…
In my opinion the label is nothing more than a way to bill my insurance. If that label allows me to continue getting the medications that have literally saved my life they can call it whatever they want. I’ve stopped worrying about whether or not what I have is schizophrenia, major depressive disorder with psychotic features, or whatever icd-9 code they want to use. All that matters to me is that I never have the symptoms I had in my early twenties again. If that requires them labeling me a mountain lion i’ll happily support them in it.
As far as being coerced to believe things, I do feel I coerced myself into believing wild things based on the diagnosis I read on my billing sheet but I realize now the psychiatrist wasn’t trying to sell the diagnosis to me, she was selling the diagnosis to my insurance company so she could help me get what I needed to be healthy and happy again. As long as I continue to have access to my medications I’m not schizophrenic as far as anyone in my daily life need be concerned.
I view the diagnosis as a tool for treatment, I don’t view it as a personality profile.
Psychiatrists make diagnosis’s based on what they hear and what they observe. They take those into consideration and use their years of training, experience and schooling to make as accurate a diagnosis as they can. In my own case, I can look back to around the time right before I got diagnosed and see, yeah, I was thinking some weird thoughts and acting pretty crazy. My thoughts and actions were so crazy that I couldn’t function for about two years. Sure you can make a good argument argument that everybody is crazy, but it boils down to a matter of DEREE. You could also argue that having schizophrenia is on a continuum. But personally from seeing many mentally ill people for many years i would say that it is NOT on a continuum. That schizophrenics make a clean break somewhere along the scale and we get crazier than the average person and we are apart. There’s a gap between our mental state and others. That’s why most of the population is not diagnosed with schizophrenia no matter how weird or crazy we think they are. Call it hiding how screwed up they are or call it being able to control how screwed up they are. Nevertheless we’re a little different in some ways. BUT…also the same in many other ways…
As Daffy Duck would say, “It’s all the Thame”.
Yeah i know im not sick, it’s more like being murdered to be honest, invisibly tortured.
But if i don’t take the drugs it just happens again.
Now on to figuring out if the drugs actually do anything or not, i wonder.
I think it’s best to look at it as treatable but not curable at this point in history.
A common comparison is with diabetes, but I see they’re near a cure for diabetes using stem cells which can be induced to produce insulin.
Maybe down the road something like that will be found for mental/emotional problems.
Right there… Can I get an Amen 
Thank you in the back.
I’ve been trying to articulate that idea for a while… the paper label on the paper folder is just away for others to understand and a way for me to get what I need. Thank you for that.
I don’t think they are making us believe anything. Some of us are in denial about what we have, but after suffering from schizophrenia for years, Im okay with having sz.