Through both personal experience and external observation, I’ve become to realize how horrifically isolating our medical method is. Rather than looking at the issue holistically, at the person, most doctors take the route of “this is a problem, and we need to fix the problem.” Often, the situation is far more complex than that. Just because a patient has a malady does not mean that the medical process should be black and white. One pill doesn’t work the same way for one person as it doesn't for another, nor does a treatment. Even worse, the goal is often the sole objective, and that goal can be paired with a journey that is both painful and unnecessary.
Take my grandmother for instance. Right now, as I type this, she is complaining because of her bladder infection symptoms. Loudly. Repeatedly, constantly. Sadly.
The main issue in this circumstance is not, in fact, her bladder infection. It's the fact that she happens to be going through extreme opiate withdrawals, and has dementia. That means that every time she comes back to reality, all she notices is severe physical distress.
Why is this a situation, for an eighty-five year old woman, do you ask?
Well, when the doctors were notified that she had not been monitored, and had been abusing the opiate prescribed to her, they immediately took her off. Cold turkey. About a day before I got to Canada to live with and take care of her.
So you can imagine, when I first came on the scene, I was dealing with hell. So was she, because when her doctor found out that she also had a bladder infection, he didn’t realize how strong of a correlation there would be with her opiate addiction. Hence she was suddenly dealing with severe withdrawals, and severe bladder infection symptoms that the opiate had been masking. Then we had almost a week to wait before her symptoms were supposed to subside, with no opiates, with nothing to ease the blow. It was close to animal cruelty, and the whole time, she begged to die. How is it that we can send a man to the moon, invent drones, genetic engineering, and computers built into shitty looking glasses, yet our medical process seems to be so shockingly underdeveloped?
My experience wasn’t much better. I’ve dealt with eating disorders my entire life, and have had to deal with both the physical and psychological grey areas of Western medicine. I’ve been thrown in and out of clinics, tricked my way out of several, and got to see firsthand how entirely unrealistic it is to attack mental disorders the way in which we do. For as long as I can remember, I've been told “you’re never going to be happy until you fix your eating disorder.”
The medical professionals saying this to me weren’t wrong. I cannot stress enough that they absolutely weren’t right, either.
It took several years of hell, of terribly prescribed anti-depressants, of people making me count the seconds out loud whenever I went to the bathroom, for someone to finally say something to me that made sense.
One of my best friends, a Persian woman my age, has been one of the few people that I have admitted to that I still occasionally suffer from these issues. Her response was “well, think about the order of what you’re saying…it’s not that you need to fix your eating disorder to be happy. It’s that you need to be happy in order to fix your eating disorder.”
I stared. In shock, in disbelief that this young woman with very little background in psychology simply nailed it on the head. Not only that, but it has actually, truly helped.
She explained that in her culture, you begin first by loving yourself. You fully accept what is wrong with you. Then, you work on fixing it. The order in which this is achieved is apparently cardinal to success. It made so much sense that I almost started to cry. I probably did cry.
This whole time, I have been a victim of the Western medicine ideology. I have been told that there is something wrong with me, a “dis” order, I was abnormal, broken, wrong. The way that we treat mental health in the west centers around shame, and if you suffer from any kind of mental illness, or know someone who does, it becomes immediately clear how that is the last way in which we should approach it. Why do we do this? To make money off of pharmaceuticals? To scare our population into submission? To make the reality of being a human taboo, for the sake of power and control? These are my questions. These are my grandmother’s questions. These are the questions of anyone who has been to a therapist, who referred you to a psychiatrist because they got commission, who prescribed four different kinds of prescription pills, because they got paid for it. Who made you wired during the day, knocked you out every night, and brought you back to life with yet another pill.
These are the questions from the people who are sick of hurting, because we are not told to love ourselves, but to fix ourselves. These are the questions from the people whose entire lives, minds, bodies, and brains have been so wrapped up in this facade, that they forgot that it is okay to have problems. These are the questions from us - the humans, who want to know why we’re not allowed to be just that.
