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During conversations with family members and those who know about my diagnosis of schizophrenia, there were many times where I sensed hierarchy within our discussions due to me having a mental health condition. We would be talking on equal footing for brief and longer time frames but as soon as mental health topics came up there was a superiority being cast over me and a hierarchy. This has happened with many people and it’s fairly commonplace societally. I feel that some of this superiority comes out of fear and some of it out of stigma.
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For years it was frustrating to interact with family members and others who assumed a role of hierarchy within these conversations without them knowing it. Another difficult facet of these conversations was that I could sense frustration but I also couldn’t pinpoint the frustration with concise language which made it difficult to process. When it was unprocessed it just sat in my psyche and in my emotions and caused distress and clouded my mental clarity. My frustration would cause me to just utter the least amount of words possible to get through the conversation in order to make it known that it wasn’t a conversation that I wanted to have. The something or somethings I wasn’t happy with were not tenable for me, however, they weren’t tenable for others either. Therefore when I had this frustration we both knew elements of the conversation were wrong but neither party could identify specifically what those things were.
The first part of the conversation that was frustrating, as mentioned, was the hierarchy. I think people fail to realize that mental conditions can happen to anyone. Most mental health conditions are a result of some sort of life trauma or traumas, and most people who have been working on their mental health for a number of years have awareness that their mental health struggles have evolved because of life events. These are life events that many people will tend to inform you can happen to anyone and were not life choices by the individual experiencing the mental health struggle.
This being said, it’s important to approach mental health conversations with the understanding that the mental health struggles someone else is going through very easily could have happened to you. This might be a difficult truth to accept, but it’s truth nonetheless. Accepting this doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you or that you’ll invite it into your life, but it has more to do with having the humility to understand that you aren’t a superior human being to someone who has had a mental health condition. It has to do with having the humility to understand that had you gone through the same life events, the very same condition could have and most likely would have occurred.
There sometimes tends to be an aversion to wanting to accept this truth, or be superior to the person who has had the struggle, but of course this is never helpful to be in a position where someone is establishing superiority and trying to pull you up to their level. In some ways it feels haughty and ridiculous and I’ve found my best personal growth has happened through equality. Also, within these moments, I have felt like people were trying to control me. There’s a fear that sets in to the conversation and control tends to be the way to mitigate the fear.
To some people, if you have control over the thing you’re afraid of there’s safety. When I’ve felt like people were trying to assert superiority over me and control me, it has made me more averse to them and it welled up negative emotions towards them as well as fearing them rather than wanting to gravitate towards them and listen. Much of this is subconscious and has to do with body language, tone of voice, diction, and isn’t necessarily explicitly stated, however, it still exists within daily conversations I have and it’s still incredibly apparent when it happens.
Another facet of speaking with people about mental health is expert mentality. Many people hear my diagnosis and they want to project that they know something about me or they have insight into my experiences. Sometimes there’s an assumption that since you have a mental health diagnosis and they don’t that they must have expertise on mental health that you don’t have. Afterwards, there’s sometimes an assertion where people try to give you mental health guidance as if you’re in need of guidance from someone who knows nothing about you and nothing about your life. Most of the time, people with lived experience tend to know far more about mental health than the majority of people who have never had a mental health condition.
I’ve been a peer specialist working forty hours per week at McLean Hospital for almost four years now and I’ve met hundreds of people with mental health struggles. The thing I’ve learned is that everyone’s individual experiences are different no matter how many people are given the same diagnosis. All the life experiences leading up to the same diagnoses are different, and the way each person describes what they’ve been through is also very nuanced. Our society has a culture of projecting expertise which is where some of this comes from.
Sometimes no matter what someone talks about they’ll assert expertise. Sometimes this comes out with assumptions about who we are, what we’re like, or what we’ve been through simply from having stated a diagnoses. It feels distancing to have people assume they know things about you just because you’ve mentioned a diagnosis when they really have no clue who you are. Along with this, when people have assumed they had expertise about me it made me less inclined to want to talk to them which felt isolating at times and limiting. Who really wants to make friends with people who have a number of beliefs and opinions about you without you having told them anything about your life?
There’s research from Motivational Interviewing stating that when our autonomy is threatened, we become less inclined to speak. Before people project they’re an expert on me, my original goal is to just have some good conversations and relax. However, for me, when people project expertise on my life, it feels as though my autonomy is threatened and the conversation becomes about me asserting my independence and autonomy over myself and making this apparent to whoever is being domineering.
Expert mentality is a form of enmeshment and it crosses psychological boundaries. I’ve felt when people do allow me to make up my mind for myself on what my life experiences are and how I assess them, I’ve been far more willing to talk with them as opposed to when they try to assert their assumptions as if these are truths I somehow don’t know about myself or which I’m needing to adopt.
The last part that comes into play are feelings of inferiority. In the past, when people asserted superiority over me due to me having a mental health condition, I internalized inferiority. It generated self-stigma and I felt like I must be inferior to others because of my mental health. Self-stigma is a difficult struggle to overcome and it’s been ongoing for me. A lot of it has to do with feelings of inferiority and this ties directly into my emotional well-being. Any time you’re asserting expertise or superiority over someone due to their diagnosis, chances are you’re contributing to feelings of inferiority. These feelings usually aren’t helpful to overcome the mental health struggle and for me they made it worse for a number of years.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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