By laura Turner
This is the age of information and misinformation. At the touch of our fingertips is a neutral keyboard with easy access to both. Sad to say, there's more misinformation out there than information. And misdiagnoses abound!
Medical diagnoses, in general, weaken. Never, ever never do they strengthen. When a diagnosis comes your way, either inadvertently or head-on, don't panic. Panic only serves to further weaken. Whether it's yourself or someone you know, just separate the newly diagnosed from the diagnosis itself and the energy of all others who carry this label. How? Put some attention to this end and it will happen. (Energy flows where attention goes.)
In the case of most mental diseases, diagnosis is based on the self-reported experiences of an individual, as well as so-called abnormalities in behavior reported by family members, friends or co-workers. First strike diagnosis is then followed up with an 'analysis' by a psychiatrist, nurse, social worker, clinical psychologist or other clinician in a clinical assessment. Next step is meds and/or hospitalization, depending on whether the person is considered to be an immediate danger to himself or others.
As soon as anyone gets saddled with a mental health diagnosis, the whole family, along with friends and co-workers, jump on his back and ride. They begin to expect certain things out of this person and, lo and behold, they find them. This further serves to lock a diagnosed person into behavior patterns, not to mention it creates the problem of being watched. Who likes being constantly watched? Raise your hands.
People who expect certain behavior patterns from themselves or others, leave very little room for a different behavior from themselves or others. Very mindfully, they find the behaviors that fit the diagnosis box. A person with a Bipolar diagnosis, for example, has 'scary' things to watch out for–like not sleeping or showing small signs of excitement, for example.
A simple thing like not sleeping one night gets blown out of proportion mentally and can trigger every behavior associated with past episodes which were diagnosed as manic or depressive. The fact is, family members and friends get trained to watch for the slightest divergences from the norm and aren't strong with any 'strange' behavior from this person.
Strange behavior is subjective. We laugh at the cartoons of the blind leading the blind. Well, in this case, it's more like the demented looking for signs of dementia. The truth is, none of us can stand up to the scrutiny of our own minds or each other's. So we make ourselves strong to both—put some attention in strengthening ourselves to what other's think of us and our own issues of mental self sabotage. What kind of attention? The kind that doesn't require words.
Speaking of words, why did the mental health experts change the clinical diagnosis from manic/depressive to bi-polar? A 'wacked out' human cycling between extremes is still a 'wacked-out' human. The pain didn't go away with the new name. Treatment success rate didn't get any better with the name change. A wacked-out and suffering human by any other name still stinks!
In general, if a diagnosis doesn't immediately make a person better, we need to get rid of the effects of everything attached to that diagnosis and all who are privy to its consequences. In other words, one of the first of orders of business with any mental, spiritual and or physical reaction that a person is having to his life is to separate the poor bastard from the diagnosis, 'poor bastard' being non gender specific. How do you do this? Put some attention to this end and it happens. (Energy flows where attention goes.)
Along with any diagnosis comes the baggage of much misinformation—the more studies, the more baggage. The more you read about the diagnosis, the worse it gets. You find out there are pre-conditions and pre-pre-conditions ad infinitum. Finding all the symptoms to a diagnosis and insisting something is the problem when it most definitely is not makes the problem so much worse.
Insisting you are bipolar and having your family or a doctor insist you are bipolar is weakening beyond anything imaginable.
The fact is, imagination pretty much shuts down with insistence, along with intuition and logical thinking, so that no real source of truth to the discomfort a person is having can be accessed. It is by getting to the source of the symptom that you relieve the symptom.
A medical diagnosis is never a direct path to the source. It is a direct path to meds which further weaken. It is a direct path to a prognosis that is carried to the grave and beyond. Diagnose a person Bipolar and you not only weaken the carrier, you weaken the offsprings.
A disease never ends with a diagnosis.
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