Wonderful essay. Look at this quote "I had been trained to view severe mental disorders fundamentally as biological dysfunctions, leaving me with the belief that I had a lifelong dysfunctional brain in dire need of medication, with little hope for healing or cure." With this in mind, why do many psychiatrists wonder why there is major pushback against them? Their interventions can induce deep despair. This is in complete contrast to the first psychiatrist, who gave no diagnosis or pills, but guided her out of her deep teenage anxiety.
Thank you so much for your post - so inspiring - I also work to create these forms of ‘third space’ as researcher - doing collaborative practice research from the margins. I co-produce research with former gang members - with experiences within forensic psychiatry. And I learning so much - it is deeply Meaningfull.
“My professional self did not have the power to silence my lived experience self.” I am battling this out now. My professional self unfortunately does have the power to silence and abuse my lived experience self. It’s worsened by antagonistic healthcare experiences and professionals “just doing their job”. It’s a scary dilemma but hearing stories like yours help me visualize next steps. I appreciate this immensely. Thank you.
Beautiful essay. It is hopeful to see therapists/psychiatrists with various conditions or with particular psychological distress using their lived experiences to help their patients and to influence other practitioners. It also makes me despair when I hear yet another story of how nearly everything is due to luck—in particular, the random luck of the (good or bad) character, practices, and beliefs of the practitioners and institutions we encounter, and especially the first ones because they shape us the most. I guess this will never change. But it can be ameliorated with proper training. How?
Given that no practitioner can have personal experience of everything, what can be done? I suggest that all practitioners read a memoir once a month, that this should be required in training and encouraged throughout the life of the practitioner. Memoirs of those with various conditions and various forms of psychological distress. I just finished Raising Wrenns, a wonderfully insightful memoir that taught me about what it’s like to grow up in poverty, in a dysfunctional neighborhood with dysfunctional parents. I believe practitioners could learn much through these memoirs that they will never get from their training.
Whenever I read a personal story like this, I get a knot of rage in my gut. The people who are still being harmed are always missing from any story about the mental health struggles of some afflicted practitioner. How clever and charming this essay is, which so easily slides over the benefits to professionals in the very field it claims to critique. There's no real opposition to institutional power being used over others in the same situation as the author. There's zero advocacy for patients being harmed by common practices openly stated as having harmed the author. She surely must know that many others are not so lucky as to be able discharge themselves when they have been poisoned during an admission. This piece is nothing but a self serving confection, with no purpose except as intellectual decoration. The scoffing dismissal of any framework which disturbs the power structure covers murderous bureaucracy with the facade of authority. If I ever saw any active opposition to the continued harm I might reconsider and think this discipline is salvageable - but there's not even any regrets. There's only sadness about the author's own pain and suffering.
I enjoyed this article which was interesting and well-written. It did make me wonder about the phrase "people with lived experience" and the way it (potentially) divides people into those who are experts on mental health issues and those who have lived experience of mental health issue. I find both sides of this dichotomy rather dubious. I find any expertise worth having in this area is living to the expert's lived experience as a human being, while I think we need to be cautious about the idea that people who have experienced a particular mental health issue (e.g. depression) have a special authority in talking about. They have a special authority in talking about their own experience, but this does not make them experts on depression in general. Expertise (among other things) is based on experience with a multitude of different cases.
Today people have the choice to see a peer specialist, it's a lot cheaper without the risk of a distorted perception in thinking a professional would know best what's "wrong" with me. I guess the concept of breaking the space into thirds and creating an approach that's better than the two binaries is preferable but ideally the therapist should know the difference between putting concepts into the space to use and actually using the whole of space itself.
I would love to read more from Dr. Speyer. What a fantastic, searching, and erudite essay.
Wonderful essay. Look at this quote "I had been trained to view severe mental disorders fundamentally as biological dysfunctions, leaving me with the belief that I had a lifelong dysfunctional brain in dire need of medication, with little hope for healing or cure." With this in mind, why do many psychiatrists wonder why there is major pushback against them? Their interventions can induce deep despair. This is in complete contrast to the first psychiatrist, who gave no diagnosis or pills, but guided her out of her deep teenage anxiety.
Thank you so much for your post - so inspiring - I also work to create these forms of ‘third space’ as researcher - doing collaborative practice research from the margins. I co-produce research with former gang members - with experiences within forensic psychiatry. And I learning so much - it is deeply Meaningfull.
Really liked reading this. Thanks so much.
“My professional self did not have the power to silence my lived experience self.” I am battling this out now. My professional self unfortunately does have the power to silence and abuse my lived experience self. It’s worsened by antagonistic healthcare experiences and professionals “just doing their job”. It’s a scary dilemma but hearing stories like yours help me visualize next steps. I appreciate this immensely. Thank you.
Beautiful essay. It is hopeful to see therapists/psychiatrists with various conditions or with particular psychological distress using their lived experiences to help their patients and to influence other practitioners. It also makes me despair when I hear yet another story of how nearly everything is due to luck—in particular, the random luck of the (good or bad) character, practices, and beliefs of the practitioners and institutions we encounter, and especially the first ones because they shape us the most. I guess this will never change. But it can be ameliorated with proper training. How?
Given that no practitioner can have personal experience of everything, what can be done? I suggest that all practitioners read a memoir once a month, that this should be required in training and encouraged throughout the life of the practitioner. Memoirs of those with various conditions and various forms of psychological distress. I just finished Raising Wrenns, a wonderfully insightful memoir that taught me about what it’s like to grow up in poverty, in a dysfunctional neighborhood with dysfunctional parents. I believe practitioners could learn much through these memoirs that they will never get from their training.
Whenever I read a personal story like this, I get a knot of rage in my gut. The people who are still being harmed are always missing from any story about the mental health struggles of some afflicted practitioner. How clever and charming this essay is, which so easily slides over the benefits to professionals in the very field it claims to critique. There's no real opposition to institutional power being used over others in the same situation as the author. There's zero advocacy for patients being harmed by common practices openly stated as having harmed the author. She surely must know that many others are not so lucky as to be able discharge themselves when they have been poisoned during an admission. This piece is nothing but a self serving confection, with no purpose except as intellectual decoration. The scoffing dismissal of any framework which disturbs the power structure covers murderous bureaucracy with the facade of authority. If I ever saw any active opposition to the continued harm I might reconsider and think this discipline is salvageable - but there's not even any regrets. There's only sadness about the author's own pain and suffering.
I enjoyed this article which was interesting and well-written. It did make me wonder about the phrase "people with lived experience" and the way it (potentially) divides people into those who are experts on mental health issues and those who have lived experience of mental health issue. I find both sides of this dichotomy rather dubious. I find any expertise worth having in this area is living to the expert's lived experience as a human being, while I think we need to be cautious about the idea that people who have experienced a particular mental health issue (e.g. depression) have a special authority in talking about. They have a special authority in talking about their own experience, but this does not make them experts on depression in general. Expertise (among other things) is based on experience with a multitude of different cases.
Today people have the choice to see a peer specialist, it's a lot cheaper without the risk of a distorted perception in thinking a professional would know best what's "wrong" with me. I guess the concept of breaking the space into thirds and creating an approach that's better than the two binaries is preferable but ideally the therapist should know the difference between putting concepts into the space to use and actually using the whole of space itself.