Posted by Racer on April 11, 2004, at 12:57:03
In reply to When diagnosis becomes identity, posted by skeptic on April 10, 2004, at 20:53:06
This is a recurrent topic for me, too. I try, very hard, to be a whole person, and not simply a diagnosis. I have my history, my interests, my abilities, and my challenges. I also suffer from Major Depression. I've seen what you're describing, though, and it worries me. At times, I feel as if the depression is the defining characteristic of my life. I look back at my failures, and see how so much of each was caused by my depression, and it worries me a great deal.
I've also seen a lot of people who define themselves according to their diagnoses, even though they may have many other qualities that would be much healthier to use as self-definitions. And I've known people who wanted to be my friend solely on the basis of complementary diagnoses.
It kinda reminds me of Mensa: Most members of Mensa that I met were involved because they had nothing else in their lives to get involved with. Had the same people been able to join, say, Junior League or the TriLateral Commission, they would have joined them instead. (Many Mensa members, of course, join for reasons having nothing to do with getting involved. They have other interests and get involved with those. Some members of Mensa, however, do seem to join because they have nothing else to be involved in.) I think that's true of the PsychoBabblers of the world, too: some of us have outside interests and define ourselves by those. Others have nothing else to focus on, so we focus on our dx. Mind you, I don't think that those groups are static. I think that, in times when our diseases are more controlled, we tend to get involved in other things, and think less about our dx. When our symptoms are worse, though, we may not be able to see beyond them, and at those times we define ourselves by them.
It's really no different from physical disease, though. I've got an incurable, progressive physically disease. When it was first diagnosed, I went through months of real hell -- everything reminded me of it, it took up a lot of my attention (crying "why me?" a lot), and everything I saw seemed to be filtered through it. After a few years, though, when I learned to control it better and it was no longer new, other things took on more and more importance in my life and this disease fell into the background. Nowadays, unless the symptoms flare up, it's nothing more than an annoyance that I can dismiss pretty easily. Same thing with the depression: when it's adequately medicated, I can shove it aside in favor of more important or more immediate interests and needs. Does that make sense?
So, another long rambling from Racer. Maybe I should change my handle to RamblingRose?
Hope it helped, and feel free to ask for clarification.
poster:Racer
thread:335038
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040409/msgs/335209.html