Join the #MedHumChat community as we explore mental health support and stigma in our present day environment and how we might improve it moving forward. Special thanks to Maggie Hulbert (@MaggieHulbert) and Andrew Lee (@Andrewmklee_) for curating this chat.
Anna Mehler Paperny: Hello I Want To Die Please Fix Me
Excerpt 1: Know Thine Enemy
“While pathological despair is hardly new, “depression” as a mood disorder really emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century, as psychiatry sough to cast off both its asylum baggage and its pseudoscientific reputation: psychiatrists were to be consider “real” doctors, treating relatively “normal” people — not confined inside mental hospitals but walking around in the world.”
Excerpt 2: Certifiable
“Here again, my bias shows. Having something as basic as the right to confidential health information trampled is intensely disempowering at a particularly disempowered moment in your life. During my second psych-ward sojourn, my parents met my psychiatrist. Fine. They came back to visit me in my curtained-off bedspace saying the nice doctor had told them my next treatment option could well be electroconvulsive therapy. I was livid. He’d never mentioned that to me.”