As a peer specialist I struggle with the desire to assist my
fellow peers in overcoming their mental health challenges and the compulsion to
fix their problems for them. I think this internal conflict comes with the territory.
Ultimately I stand firm on the side of supporting peers and empowering them to
make their own decisions about their recovery. In the final analysis, they are
the experts on themselves and what they need to recover.
I think a lot about the rights of people living with mental
health challenges as I balance my desire to support with my compulsion to fix.
As I traverse this fine line I find that most of the people I work with don’t
know their rights and have not decided what their responsibilities are. For
example, most people don’t know they have a right to control their recovery
process and treatment. For so long they’ve been told to take their medicine,
see their psychiatrist, see their therapist, and so on. However, rarely has
anyone asked them what’s working for them or what direction they want to take.
We have a right to work with healthcare providers who ask these questions. We
have a right to fair treatment in all areas of our lives. We have the right to full
lives absent of discrimination and the debilitating effects of stigma.
People who live with mental health differences have a right to
be treated with dignity and respect. This can be difficult for some to put into
practice especially when the person they are dealing with is experiencing
voices, or visions of some other sensation that has them behaving in socially inappropriate
ways. Regardless of these behaviors everyone deserves to be treated with
compassion, dignity, and respect. We have a right to love and laughter; to make
mistakes and pick ourselves back up. We have a right
to have healthy leisure lives that recharge us and energize us so we can better
handle the dark days. It can’t all be gloom and doom otherwise what is the
point?
We who strive to thrive through these unique and challenging
experiences have a right to have our voices heard and responded to with open mindedness
and empathy. We have a right to asks questions about the diagnosis we are given
and the treatment recommended for us. We
have a right to know our options. We even have the right to refuse any treatment
we don’t feel comfortable with. Many of us have been taught that we have to do
what the doctors tell us. Rather than assert our desires many of us just stop
taking the meds and are labeled noncompliant.
The peers I work with have never been told they have a say in
who is involved in their care. They don’t know that they can fire their therapist
or psychiatrist. We who are learning to manage our differences have a right to
seek out alternative care if that’s what works for us. By documenting our wants
and preferences in Advanced Directives and WRAP plans we even have the right to
choose what hospitals we use, what respite centers we stay at and who can
support us in dark times. If things start to break down, these documents are
our voice.
Thanks to HIPAA we get to choose who we disclose our illness
to and we get to assign meaning to our experiences. What I
mean is, we get to make meaning of what clinicians call symptoms. What a mental
health care provider might call auditory hallucinations, we may decide to call
the experience the voice of our elders. We decide. And really, who care how we
describe these experiences as long as they don’t interfere with our ability to
live a life of our choosing. Other laws give us the right to live in safe
affordable housing-though it is important to note that there is a terrible shortage
of these spaces.
So I have talked a little about rights and only
touched on a few. But what about our responsibilities? What are we obliged to
do regarding our mental health challenges? Well it’s personal. And because it’s
personal, I can only speak to my experience. I feel I have a responsibility to
myself and my supporters to do everything in my power to live in wellness instead
of illness. That means I do everything within my power on a daily basis to be
the best that I can be to live the life I want to live. For me this in means the
clinical stuff like meds and doctor appointments, but it also means I educate
myself about my options. I take the pursuit of self-awareness very seriously
asking myself periodically “what’s working?” or “what do I need to pay
attention to?” I don’t isolate. To live in wellness I exercise, eat right, pray
and ask for help when I need it. Like I said, it’s personal.
