Night Shift

@Mazarita I did try the search bar before I joined and spoke to someone on the helpline here too. I was screaming out to find someone to talk to about it. It was mentioned very briefly in a once off post. You can probably work it out as I saw a post you liked today where I partly gave it away. It has a D in front of it.

Your last post contained much food for thought too. I'm still mulling over it @Mazarita. I know I have let mine consume me. I don't know how to separate out the parts and whether it's possible although I am starting to work out the borderline parts more readily. Borderline for me is the secondary diagnosis. I am just beginning to identify things but not able to change the behaviour easily yet.

I love this observation @Mazarita ......

I am personally quite annoyed at all the pigeon-holing I am seeing happen in the education of children these days .... the readiness to assess, diagnose, label, early intervention over everything ..... what happened to children being children ?? An education being slowed down or sped up according to the needs of the individual kids ? Praise for strengths, a leg-up for "weaknesses", but an over-all acceptance of the colour and diversity brought in by the beauty of individuals ?

Grrrr .... !!

See the person first ..... accept who they are at their core ... celebrate diversity .....and individuality in all its array of forms .....

💕🌷💕

@Former-Member,

Recognising and turning it off, that's where it does get blurry for me. The answer is probably sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the severity of what I am experiencing. It's a lot better than what it was though before getting bipolar medications. Then I was very extreme and really thought that running around town taking huge sexual risks or crying rivers for 12 hours straight was in some way just how I was. It was my normal, I'd never known anything else, and I wasn't then able to see how out of whack it was with everyone else.

About your diagnosis, I think I can guess what it may be. I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of. I met a man recently at a support group who had the same diagnosis (if I'm correct in what I am thinking). He and I ended up being there alone for about 90 minutes at the end and just talking between us. I wasn't put off by his diagnosis. I just found him interesting and rewarding to interract with, like anyone else.

It's funny @Faith-and-Hope @Mazarita When I first started coming on here there was a fair bit of discussion on the term mental illness. At the time I didn't really care. Lately I really dislike this big generic term. I don't think it's helpful to anyone. Just my opinion.

@Faith-and-Hope, I know what you mean about early intervention. I think there may be circumstances where the extremity of a child's condition warrant that. But I have a feeling this all may be getting overdone with kids who, as you say, are just a bit 'left of centre' in a potentially good way.

@Former-Member, I don't personally have a problem with the term mental illness as I relate to it as an illness in a similar way to my crohns disease and take medications or treatment for it as needed. But I know that many people do really object to the term and understand why. It does seem to have some negative connotations.

I think @Mazarita most of the harm that has been done to me re diagnosis has been from mental health professionals. I've watched them jump back from me so much. I'm not allowed face to face contact or an assigned worker. They have put me into such a tight box I was becoming more and more suicidal from not being able to breathe or be a person. I felt like a leper. It's only in the last few weeks that I've started to work through this with my therapist.

@Former-Member, I now really understand why you are not keen on psychiatrists, that really sounds like additional trauma added to what you have already experienced. I'm so glad you have found a therapist who can help you with this. Sounds like putting your diagnosis on a separate chair is a really good idea. And not labelling yourself with it is probably a good idea too. If I have guessed correctly about your diagnosis, it's my understanding that there is controversy about it even being something brought forth in patients by psychiatrists. As you know, I have had mostly positive experiences with psychiatrists over the years but I know that we need to take at least some of it with a grain of salt too. We are the ones who have to live our lives after all and we ultimately know our lives more intimately than anyone else. Sending hugs for what you have gone through.

My kids and I are highly visual. It took until D3 was being persecuted in a school setting over her Greek-English dialect, by a fault-finding educator, for me to come across the mental processing differences between visual-spatial learners (look that one up and see how victimised VSL's can be !!) and audio-sequential learners, who are a better fit with the traditional education systems used in schools. Add in kinesetic learners .....

With so many differences in learning styles, and combinations of these, how it is not recognised that they all come with "strengths" and "weaknesses", which at the end of the day are just variations ?? And if these variations can be accepted, why can't wider variations, which are currently labelled and scrutinised, just be accepted as wider variations ?

For instance, visual spatial learners can quite literally manipulate visual images within their minds ...... I can so easily spin the letter b around in my imagination to turn it into a d, or a p, or a q ....... to a small child, what does it matter which way the s is ? It's an s, right, cos the "pointy" one is a z, no matter which way it's facing ...... and suddenly this child is branded dyslexic !!!! Ummmmmm ...... let's let the child grow a wee bit older, then explain to them that direction and placement does matter in terms of getting the alphabet correct, let them play around with letters and language, and then decide whether they are having difficulty with actual processing ..... maybe there was a reason children weren't being taught to read as young as they are now .....

Maybe they were too busy making mud pies, playing with water and sand, and building castles in the air for their imaginary dragons, and chariots and things .....

Thanks so much for taking the time to understand @Mazarita. There is so much irony with this and there is no clear cut therapy for it. I'm so incredibly grateful to my therapist now, not sure if I'd have come this far without her. She is breaking it down constantly to help make it manageable. Im not sure if I should tell my phams worker tomorrow. When the last phams worker (over a year ago) found out she changed completely on me too and jumped right back.