I recently saw a series of tweets by Allison Raskin, a mental health advocate that I respect and admire, and I've been thinking about her tweets ever since. In these tweets, she talks about how she used to "gate-keep" OCD diagnoses. She said that she used to be someone who didn't want people to say they had OCD unless that person had been diagnosed by a mental health professional. She went on to say that she felt differently now because she realized that, basically, she didn't have the right to say whether another person had "OCD tendencies or enough symptoms for it to significantly impact their life."
I hadn't realized it until I read the words of Allison Raskin that I'm also guilty of gatekeeping mental health diagnoses, especially OCD diagnoses. I've had a few people in the past earnestly tell me that they believed they had OCD. A dear friend once told me that he believed he had "a touch of OCD" after I disclosed my diagnosis to him. My response was usually to tell the person something like, "Well, unless you see a mental health professional and get a diagnosis, you can't really just go around saying that." After my dear friend said he thought he had a touch of OCD, I remember telling him, "You can't have a touch of OCD, really. You either just have it or you don't, and you need to see a professional to find out for sure." I have to admit that I was also a bit offended when people would say they had OCD if they hadn't been clinically diagnosed.
My reasons for gatekeeping are similar to the reasons Allison Raskin laid out in her tweets. Like her, I also felt like people self-diagnosing OCD (or any mental health condition, really) would minimize the condition and the struggle of living with it. My other reason for gatekeeping was well-intentioned, but it was still gatekeeping. I didn't want people to self-diagnose mental illness because they might be wrong. I was worried they would self-diagnose a mental health condition and get the condition wrong and then apply the wrong at-home treatment approach or that what they thought was a mental health condition could actually be a neurological condition or some other physical health problem that needed timely medical intervention.
Thinking about it now, of course, Allison Raskin is absolutely right. Who am I to say whether or not someone has a mental health condition? I don't live in their body with their brain. I don't live their life with them every day. Who am I to say whether or not and to what degree something impacts somebody else's life? I don't have the right to tell them that they can't say or think they live with a certain mental health condition because they haven't been given a clinical diagnosis from a mental health professional. Not everyone has access to a mental health professional to even get the clinical diagnosis.
My job isn't to police whether or not someone has a mental health condition based on whether or not they have seen a mental health professional to tell them they have the condition. My job isn't even to observe them to see if they actually have symptoms of the mental health condition so I can disprove or approve their self-diagnosis. My only job is to ask, "How can I help?" and then listen to them when they tell me what they need from me, whether that's helping them find information about the disorder they're concerned about, helping them navigate finding mental health services, sharing what I've learned in therapy, just listening to them as they think out loud about it, or just checking on them every so often.
I'll end with this: Recently, thanks to Allison Raskin, I realized I had been gatekeeping mental health diagnoses and that I shouldn't have been. I don't have the right or the knowledge and insight to tell someone whether or not they have a mental health condition or to what degree it affects their daily life. I don't live in someone else's body to experience the way they think and feel, and I'm not a mental health professional qualified to observe and diagnose them. In situations in which someone believes they have a mental health condition, my only job is ask how I can help and then actually listen to what they need from me.
No comments:
Post a Comment