Little yellow tendril of health

My psychiatrist has said that I can meet with her and my outpatient dietitian and some of the team from the local eating disorders program (this is at the hospital for which I am on the patient and family advisory council). At this meeting we will be able to discuss my concerns with going to the hospital and making it a safe place for me. When I'm talking to professionals, even when I am just as clear about things as I am here, I seem to have trouble adequately conveying to them how hurtful and unreasonable I find much of the treatment I have been given. Last night, in anticipation of this meeting, I thought of a couple extra angles to approach this from.

When I am in treatment, I often challenge or question the therapeutic methods being used. I challenge the banning of the word "should", I question the realism and usefulness of affirmations, I ask about the lack of morality, and sometimes I point out the hypocrisy of the staff. When I do these things, they are a glimmer of the healthy me poking out from all the depression and fear and crap. That is me using my brain and thinking critically, which is what I do when I am well: I don't take things at face value, I am curious, I take into consideration the full complexity of the world as much as possible, and I avoid overly simplistic explanations. When I challenge or question the staff, that is also a little glimmer of me being assertive, which I am more able to do when I am well. It is also a glimmer of me being honest about how I feel about the treatment, of telling the staff ways in which the treatment is not working for me, and of giving them ways to make the treatment more effective for me. When I point out hypocrisy in the staff, that means that I have internalized what I have been taught enough to notice when the staff aren't following the same rules they set for me, like when a child notices her teacher spell a word incorrectly on the blackboard. Generally when I point out hypocrisy, it is because I think treatment would be more effective if the staff were actually modeling the skills they teach patients, so that we can learn them better and practice those skills with staff in situations that actually arise in the course of treatment. Sometimes I point out hypocrisy in staff because I am frustrated about the treatment I am receiving, which I think is valid and important for staff to consider even by itself.

I would compare having aspects of my healthy self coming out in treatment to a tiny fledgling tendril of a new plant poking out from under the soil. My tendril is yellow. I would compare what staff have often done in response to seeing my tiny yellow tendril poke out to smashing it with a sledgehammer to destroy it. They deflect or redirect my attempts to ask them about the therapeutic methods and tell me to focus on myself rather than on challenging them. Each time they do this, it gets harder for my tendril of health to summon the energy to poke up from under the soil. Rather than capitalizing on the health I still possess, they destroy it. I think that the staff want to destroy my tendril because it is yellow, whereas they are expecting the tendril of health to be green. I think that they might assume that any tendril that is not green is a tendril of illness, of resisting treatment and trying desperately to hold on to the eating disorder. I think that staff tend to have an expectation of what the tendril of health will look like and seek to elicit that particular tendril. I suspect that when I challenge the usefulness of affirmations, staff have assumed that I do this simply in order to avoid treatment, rather than to avoid treatment that I think will leave me worse off than I started and to find something more helpful to me. When my yellow tendril of health -- of challenging and questioning treatment, of thinking critically and standing up for the reasonableness of doing so, and of pointing out what isn't working -- stops poking through, I am more depressed and anxious, I am second-guessing my entire conception of reality, my capacity for critical thinking, and everything I know about myself. If the green tendril, the version of health that the staff are expecting to see, is being agreeable to what the staff say about me, doing affirmations without protest, and not expressing beliefs about mental health that clash enormously with the status quo; and if that tendril is seen from me, I am probably much worse off than I was with the yellow tendril, I have probably given up getting better in a genuine way for getting out of the hospital by giving the staff what they want to see.

So much of the oppressive sense I get from being in mental health care surrounds having my intelligence insulted and being told (in many different ways) that I'm not allowed to think critically about therapy. I wonder what would happen if Virginia Woolf or Hannah Arendt or a college philosophy professor were a patient in a psych unit. Would they be expected to abstain from using the word "should" without protest? Would they be branded as "manipulative" for using the word "conspicuous" immediately following a panic attack? Would the staff assume they are resisting treatment because they point out the conceptual deficiencies of a too simplistic explanation of cognitive distortions? I don't mean to imply that I possess the extent of genius of Virginia Woolf or Hannah Arendt, but it seems like staff react poorly to patients outside a set range of intelligence and intellectual engagement (whether those patients be too intelligent and too engaged, or not intelligent enough and not engaged enough, I have seen it both ways).