A personal account of a woman's struggle with OCD and her realization about the flaws in mental healthcare.
I was the poster girl for OCD . Then I began to question everything I’d been told about mental illness
framed it in the same way: illness. This was due to the received wisdom that mental disorders are diseases of the brain with organic, biological root causes; and to the medical language that infused charity campaigns and the media. It was also due to the ideas explicitly promoted by professionals who treated me. One of my CBT therapists said that OCD is primarily caused by a misfiring amygdala, a structure in the temporal lobe of the brain.
“OCD is not a biological reality,” Gillan said, very matter of factly. “That’s what the data increasingly shows.” I would later come to understand that to question the medical model is not to question whether mental health problems exist: they are real and devastating. I would learn that, yes, there are brain changes that correlate with poor mental health, changes that entrench and compound distress. But that neuroscience is far from being able to understand these correlations, much less categorise them into discrete conditions, or explain why brains start to become disordered in the first place.
The following year, with my intrusive thoughts still gnawing, I landed a job as a writer on a Netflix sci-fi series, a role refreshingly removed from my life of mental health advocacy. “What happened here?” a colleague asked innocently on set, pointing to the scars on my arm.She glanced around. No one nearby to rescue us.
In academia, psychiatrists will claim that criticising the biomedical model is knocking down a straw man, since they long ago started considering psychological and social factors . But I’ve seen little evidence of this shift. In England, we’re still five times more likely to be prescribed psych meds than therapy. And the discredited chemical imbalance theory (thatMeanwhile, in clinic, patients’ opinions routinely matter less than those of doctors.
If the trauma model does the same, it may admit that searching for causal agents in the past can facilitate dissociation from normalised dysfunction in the present; from the miseries of consumerism and the 40-hour working week; from the fact that many of us live without meaningful relationships in what psychiatrist Bruce Perry chillingly calls
OCD Mental Illness Invasive Thoughts Mental Healthcare Personal Struggle
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