Realizations

One of the very few benefits of a 'mental illness' diagnosis is that medical practitioners tend to leave a person alone from the cranium on down. However ... can such a diagnosis be authentic if the body -- and the whole person -- is routinely ignored, or if embodied symptoms are judged as imagined, 'made up', supposed proof of a person's 'craziness'? Can such a diagnosis be true if a label is ascribed without the physical enquiries that accompany suspicion of a condition that can be affirmed through examining a person within -- blood tests, scans, biopsies, etc.?

I think, No. I've long known -- and finally, my sense of 'something more' is being validated through monthly blood scans and other concrete, examined evidence of bodily distress -- that the psychiatric diagnoses ascribed to my situation are at best incomplete, and at worst, false -- for they do not reflect my entire embodied experience.

One of the psychiatric labels adhered to my situation is 'major depression, recurrent.' Depression is considered a 'mood disorder' -- and I know it most deeply as a metabolic disorder. It's been said that the brain is our 'master gland' -- and if we suppose that 'mood disorders' are based in the brain, we might ask ourselves:

Where is this 'mentation' that is evidence of a mind ... and where is this mind that a diagnosis of 'mental illness' derives from?

In the brain. And what is the brain?

An organ.

Where does the brain reside?

In the body.

What does this 'master gland' do, all told?

It regulates ... everything.

I'm not a medical or scientific professional. I am a scholar and a person whose professional background is in the field of psychology and psychotherapy. I am also a person who knows in my bones that every diagnosis given to a person's condition reflects, in its part, a facet of one's entire embodied experience.

I think of diagnostic enquiry as a teasing-out of truth ... and the dear human body cannot tell a lie. Bless the body for the irrrefutable truths it reveals ...

During my own diagnostic journey, I've not wanted to pile 'wrong upon wrong' -- It is no joy to be confronted with grave medical facts, such as I have been given over the last several months. It is a relief to have my embodied experience and knowledge of same finally validated. New information gives me something concrete to work with ... and it raises the bar of the quality of medical care that my condition receives. I don't want to be known as a constellation of symptoms ... and those symptoms, once confirmed and validated, offer information to learn from and to work with in my everyday life.

The 'mental illness' recedes in importance. The brain, master regulator that it is, does not. The body -- this home in which my entire person resides, is the nexus of truth, and will not be ignored in the entire person's quest for understanding.

All images found at brainharmonycenter.com