Consumer Stories: Julie Irish
Although never formally diagnosed, my life has many patterns a psychiatrist might diagnose as personality disorder and possibly mild bipolar disorder. What this means in terms of quality of life is that I have often been alone, often felt self-hatred, and have sabotaged any chance of happiness I had over and over again. By the time I was 50 I was out of excuses, and out of hope. Having been a mental health technician and vocational counselor, I was familiar with the typical treatment options available to someone with no money and had no desire to pursue this avenue. I guess I pretty much figured it was hopeless and it would be best to end the failed experiment of my life.
Well, it’s a year later and I’m still here, so something changed my mind. I pursued one final avenue … I took my courage in hand and decided to spend a year trying to stop escaping, stop hating myself, and start redefining my understanding of who I am and what kind of universe I live in. And guess what! This has been the most fruitful activity of my entire life. I have had plenty of help from the great teachers of mankind and friends I found along the way. I have had the courage to look at my own belief system and I discovered that first and foremost I have hated myself, and I have also hated this world. This makes perfect sense of my choices and actions.
Most important of all things I learned is that a relationship built on hatred will breed dysfunction, and that most definitely applied to my relationship to myself. If I could not find a way to be loving and kind to myself, my chances of relating with loving kindness to the world and building a beautiful life were slim to none. And as years of self-hatred and self-sabotage accumulated, my habits and choices became increasingly dysfunctional. The ultimate solution was to break with myself and reality by entering a psychotic state, or to commit suicide. Since psychosis did not occur, I was left staring at the final solution. I believe that if you take most “severely disturbed” individuals, whether diagnosed with schizophrenia or mood disorder, at the foundation you will find self-hatred.
I guess where I’m going with all this is that the really interesting question about transforming the mental health system is, where did all this self hatred come from? And as I look around me, at the choices people make that are self-defeating if not downright masochistic, at the relationships they build which breed unhappiness, I see a lot of self-hatred around. It seems like an epidemic to me.
Well, some good news is that I no longer spend all my time hating myself or escaping from my own self hatred. In one year I have reprogrammed my beliefs, monitored my thoughts, and changed my understanding of the world. Was it difficult? Sometimes it was; I guess I had my share of dark nights of the soul. But there really wasn’t an alternative.
Now ask me if I believe attending the typical treatment program for depression would have been effective. I believe it would not for the simple reason that I don’t think most treatment models get to the heart of the matter: reaching to the roots of self-hatred. Given today’s definition of a "worthwhile" human being, very few of us deserve to live. We’re not pretty enough, successful enough, happy enough or rich enough. We fail to meet society's standards and we’re well aware of it. We were born and raised in the knowledge that we had failed to meet "the standard" and that was in part the cause of our downward spiral into self-hatred.
My hope is, that if you’re really talking about transforming the Washington State mental health system, I think any treatment program that wants to succeed should encourage people to redefine their understanding of their own purpose and value and the nature of the world. Of course that’s really in the spiritual realm of activity. Yes, there is separation of church and state, but how can you transform people without dealing with the root cause of the problem? I believe that if a community mental health program does not include a spiritual dimension to its treatment, then it will end up being a tool to diagnose and warehouse people rather than one which transforms their mental health. At best it can teach people to manage their symptoms, but transform? They’d be better off going to a 12-step program.
