Dan Muhlenberg: One of the things you mentioned was that the pharmaceutical companies put the emphasis on diagnosis and medication. I was actually diagnosed four days into my stay at the crisis center (at Robert Jaeger). I was grossly misdiagnosed, they diagnosed me as Schizoaffective disorder,* (which was) later downgraded to bipolar type 2, and I had to carry that weight for a long time, because I couldn't even say that diagnosis, let alone think about it. I just wanted to ask you, the harm done by this emphasis, is there really any way to put it into quantitative terms? Margot Kidder: Here's what I do. For example, for me, one of the problems I've had was that there were certain foods which I'm allergic to which were destroying the lining of my gut, which meant I wasn't absorbing B vitamins. Every neurotransmitter is made of amino acids. In order to convert the amino acid to the neurotransmitter you need B vitamins. So I say, I was deficient in gamma, and I was deficient in B vitamins. That sounds a hell of a lot better than saying, 'I'm schizoaffective.' DM: It does. MK: And in fact it demystifies it. And as soon as we demystify it and throw those labels out-because like I've said, all they are is a collection of symptoms, and on the top of the page it has a label, then you'll have a list of 12 symptoms, and if you have seven or eight or nine of those symptoms you get the label on the top of the page. The label has no meaning. You're the person and you can have many things wrong with you, but it's a way of sorting things. People take it as a way of identifying, and that's a big problem. DM: That's exactly what I did, and it kind of begs the question, for me-you mentioned to be wary of psychiatry-should we trust psychiatrists? MK: You should trust yourself, and you should respect that a psychiatrist has been to medical school and we haven't, but you should be, hopefully, distrustful of any authority, the way you would with a cop or a politician or-God knows-this president, hello? So you don't want to go to a doctor and turn your life over to him, and say 'OK I'm yours, tell me what drug to take,' and end your participation in the healing process. You have to be an active participant. DM: Yeah absolutely. I live in the mental health system because after I was institutionalized I became homeless and had to go down that route, and the way that I've been treated there only reinforces the stigma-I don't live in MHA. Do you feel that it's a common problem that the people who are administering the help in the mental health system are often part of the problem? MK: Well the MHA sounds very enlightened. DM: It does, it makes me jealous, (compared to) where I live. MK: It made me kind of jealous too and I listened to it. I mean it sounds so far ahead of the game. They've got yoga stuff, they've got all these programs…the regular old mental health is they just put you there and give you your meds as I remember, and there were smoking times. When I was in-several times-that's all it was. It was not helpful and the worst offenders-in terms of the stigma-were often the doctors. The nurses were great. So you have to know that even though people will try to make you feel that you're the problem-that you're the whole problem-there's a lot more balanced, nuanced truth than that. Stand up for yourself. Don't get angry, but you just have to know that you're worthwhile, and that you're not a label. That's the most important thing to remember, you are not a label. DM: It's tough to realize that though when you're in a crisis center and the staff is all just walking around with clipboards, observing you as if you're an animal in a zoo. MK: Yeah but you know what? Our human spirits are hard to kill.
* The simplest definition of schizoaffective disorder is that it is a combination of symptoms of bipolar and schizophrenia. In my case, there is a chance that the diagnosis is correct, even though that chance is very slim. Behind closed doors people in the mental health system have told me, flat out, that it is wrong. More to the point, they have also told me that the doctors at the crisis center gave me that diagnosis because they have to give everyone who goes through those doors a diagnosis. This is because if they don't diagnose someone, they can't give them medication. That diagnosis in particular is supposed to be given only after years of evaluation.
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