Attacked in group for different view

@Fredd50 Hi Fredd50 I remember at uni I was in a class where I said something that was attacked by other students in the class. I stand by what I brought up but it is a view that many people would find unpalatable. Sometimes the truth is unpalatable doesn't mean it is not the truth. Love greenpea

I sway more in your direction on Diagnoses. @Fredd50 I dont see it as B&W.

I had found that family members often preferred labels as it gave them an out that they had a sick relative. The amount of times in a nice church group when someone told us about a troublesome family member but he has XYZ and that was the end of it. Somehow I smelled denial. When I was posting a few years ago about Diagnoses and labels on this forum, a few forumites were vocal about liking their lables.

It was alright because there was no attack. Maybe unlike your therapy group the online forum was/is a better medium for open discussion. There was more distance and safety implied by the anonymity and not sitting in the same room together.

However I am saddened you were threatened with violence, and not supported by the facilitator.

Due to my life history, I approached psychiatrists mainly in my young years ... trying to understand it all. My husband, now ex, had a serious diagnosis and a psychology major. In last 20 years I have focussed more on psychology and philosophy as more humanistic fields. Psychiatry is its own particular beast.

Not all bad, but not all good either.

Thanks so much @@MDT the religious analogy is actually very helpful as that's pretty much how I see the labeling/illness ideology issue.

It's very similar to religious issues, including the traumatising aspect for some.

I think the part that gets me is the lack of opportunities. It was hard to get into this course, I had to wait two years for the opportunity. The course itself is potentially really helpful for anyrone who wants to try it's methods and doesn't require any labelling, illnesd ideology or desigmating some people as sensitive or reactive, rather than recognising it's a human thing we can all experience so being inclusive about it. There's actually a lot to indicate this inclusiveness helps while reinforcing the belief certain people are more reactive strengthens that trait through the power of suggestion and reinforcement. We're pretty impressionable, plastic creatures us humans.

I could walk away but that means acknowledging that the governments resources are going to keep being unfairly concentrated in preventing people who are eligible from accessing potentially helpful services unless they subscribe to the illness ideology - which goes against the awareness I was trying to raise to contribute to changing that. It also means I miss out on the opportunity to do the course.

I guess I just have to trade off the possibility of resolving the issue with the risk of it happening again. It really boils down to whether the health service's support structure and the faculfacilitors are mature enough to be able to recognise the problem rather than intstinctively blame everyone's reaction on me - due to that age old human fallacy: "they don't have this problem with anyone else so it must be your fault". Rather than "we need to facilitate change in a way that respects everyone and creates inclusive pathways for the future that don't require everyone to subscribe to the same ideology".

I guess that's a new thing for a health service to deal with. So will just have to see how it goes..🙏

@Fredd50 that is a very frustratung issue i can understand your point of veiw and i feel similarly about a lot of it. i find labels arent really useful to me personally as having one doesnt change who i am or how i feel or my experiences maybe for getting medications if you need or want them but for me i try to focus on which issue i need to deal with rather than having x diagnosis. i also find it very hard to subscribe to psychiatry..... for me personally i think it is not really a fair industry while i DO believe mental health issues and mental illness exist i dont believe psychiatry knows what it is doing. they dont know how their meds work, they dont have any medical tests or evidence to prove their theories, and the industry is worth 10's of billions of dollars to both the doctors involved and the pharmacy companys involved. especially when you actually do research into the medications and their long term effects i just feel like the whole thing is a huge fruad. not to mention the abuse i have suffered at their hands. still it is hard having an unpopular opinion and being ignored or dissmissed by society. i also think it is weird that people are so stuck to the old ways of thinking when change has to happen or there is no progress. anyway i should stop ranting but i hope you feel as though you can express your opionions here. and maybe just try and focus on getting the skills you need from the group maybe if no opionons are involved it might be more practicle.

Thanks @Eden1919 for your response.

It's been really amazing to read the incredible responses on this thread including yours.

Has really helped and given hope in a very difficult time, so I would really like to thank everyone immensely 🙏

I came to the same conclusion as you (indepently). Unfortunately when I went back to focus on skills it ended up going well for the first half. Then we got into everyine ended up going sriuar the group and saying what they found hrlhelp about their labels. I actually thought this was great and it meant we were all accepting each other's view....

Initial the person just before me started saying that everyone who didn't want the label just wasn't accepting "reality" because the "label" was a fact. She even emphasised it with a mocking tone when saying people who say "I don't want to be labelled".

I tried to point out that wasn't the case but I just started getting attacked by other members of the group saying I was "triggered" and they weren't going to listen to what I was saying because they didn't need to know what "random" things would "trigger" me off. They were both incredibly angry at this point and everyone was heated. The notion that they were "triggered" or that I might be saying something valid despite being "triggered" was not possible. They just were not going to let me finish a sentence. Finally after this got really bad, the facilitators stepped in (which I wish they had done at the very beginning).

It got worse from there. It was completely horrible. It ended with me trying to speak to the facilitators about how they weren't providing dicipline of a safe environment but I really was completely "triggered" (terrified) at this point and couldn't stop myself shouting it at them even while recognising I was shouting.

I went for a walk to calm down and the entire group were huddled out the front by the door in a circle with angry faces I didn't even feel comfortable to walk past so ended up going all the way around the building to go in.

I went into the room and there was one participant who had threatened me with violence the previous week. I said to her that I was sorry for my part in what had just happened (the only fair apology I could make, I can't apologise for their parts). She didn't think this apology was "enough" and told me (in front of the facilitator) that I just had to "sit down and shut up" the facilitator did nothing to tell her this was inappropriate, I tried to and she arched up. Then I tried to discuss this with the facilitator in the meantime the participant went to a draw and started taking out a sharp implement (we were in a room with a kitchenette). Only at this point did the facilitator tell her "no" and to leave the room. She then justified not saying no earlier because she thought the participant would just react .Which she did but that didn't make a reason to put up with her saying "Sit down and shut up" and leave it to me to say something or just be bullied.

In the end the other facilitator came in and said it was fine to have my own experience/point of view but I had to keep it out of the group. Given the group had explicitly been talking about the topic this was basically akin to being told it's ok to be gay, just don't talk about your gay relationship in this room where everyone is explicitly discussing their relationship.

It was horrible. I was terrified the rest of the day.

I raised a complaint with management and they agreed to look for funding to run another group based on Power Threat Meaning Framework and using DBT in this context so that from the beginning being open about different outlooks is part of the program.

I should be really happy but I just cant help feeling really bad that O have to miss out on a group while they get to continue. I know I got triggered and shouted and that's on me, but so did several of them, one even threatening serious violence twice.

If it was really about these issues and handled fairly, fair enough. But it feels like they are denying that it's rely about them being angry that their ideology is only one way of looking at life. That it ultimately isn't good for themselves to be able to successfully enforce this message in the group.

I couldn't help but think it wasn't entirely their fault as this actually is the message that is still being given by so many organisations...

I suppose I'm grateful to my health service for trying to take a progressive stance going forward. I just hope other organisations will follow suit.

The distress and trauma in all its forms that get labelled "mental illness" are very real and observable, but this idea of "mental illness" is conceptual, ideological It isn't factual. It's a construct. The pain and crisis is of course very real.

The message "mental illness is real" being substituted for the intended message "this suffering is not made up, nor is my difficulty recovering from it" is causing a *lot* of trouble. People are hearing "mental illness is only one way of looking at things" to mean "your suffering is not real" and they are getting very threatened and defensive when the message is actually "there are many different ways to look at human suffering and not everyone benefits from this particular paradigm or ideology".

People can't hear this, because they have been "educated" to believe the concepts of "mental illness" and "mental health" are the only ways to look at human suffering - not one way some find helpful and others don't.

I just hope the organisations spreading this message learn to amend it to a more informative and inclusive one soon, because this fusing of fact and framework in people's minds - particularly very vulnerable messed up people- is leading to polarisation and even violence when they encounter a different point of view.

@Fredd50 i totally get where you are coming from. i agree that the whole idea of mental illness needs to be looked at differently. for one thing it is NOT a proven issue like cancer or diabetes it is still currently in the theory stage but there are curently no actual medical tests to prove that a chemical imbalance is causing these issues. as far as we know evidence wise literally anything could be causing these issues. now i am NOT saying peoples struggles arent valid because the struggles are very real very distressing and very debilihtating and some even life threatening. but again we dont know why this happens and i think forcing people to have the one view on the subject when there is so little acutual evidenced based information on its legitimacy is irresponsible. kind of like forcing someone to have a particular religon yes we cant prove that god doesnt exist but we also cant prove that he does. so i think it should be left up to the inidivual if they want to adhear to any particualr belief around the subject. more so i dont think anyone should be forced to have a treatment for something that you cant prove exists. you cant force someone to have chemo therapy when all you did was look at them and say you seem a bit under the weather so i think you have cancer. you have to have proof that it is there before you can give such dangerous treatments. and some psych meds are very dangerous.

i think the group is being unreasonable and that they should be more respectful of other poeples opinions after all an opinion in not a fact so it isnt like in this situation your opinion is going to be damaging to their life. i think though for dbt it often attracts people who have trouble regulating emotions and behaviours because that is what its for. which is fine but i think often these people have been told all their lives that they just want attention form their behaviour and that they are bad people and other horrible things so when they are given a diagnosis it is like saying to them i am valid and my struggle is valid because i have X. when really their struggle is and should be valid regardless of having any lable. but if someone were to say that label no linger exists they may take it as saying you are no longer valid and it could be a sensitive point for them due to bad past experiences and or abuse they have suffered.

thats just my 10c or mabye 50c lol but i hope you can find a way to get what you need from the group without being dismissed and attacked.

@Eden1919 Thanks and very well said.

I would go even further and say that actually this idea of critera-based sorting of peoples distress based on the way it appears to others from the outside and hypothesizing that each differnt 'category' was caused by a discrete 'brain lesion' was in its hypothesis stage in 1980. Since then it has actually been very well disproven.

Various other hypotheses (eg 'chemical imbalances') were never actually formulated in any meaninful sense and were always simplifications or "little white lies" that no 'educated' psychiatrist ever truly believed as the high profile psychiatrist Ronald Pies said.

The fact is that in 40 years no purely physical pathology has been demonstrated. While a great deal of evidence has been amassed to show that social and psychological factors actually shape our brains throughout our lives (neuroplasiticity). And that the latest physical mechanisms that are being searched for (neural circuitry and neural correlates) are actually just the physical analogue of our social and psychological lives. This implies that believing one has an uncurable 'mental illness' that will be there for life will have very real and potentially self-fulfilling consequences for a person's potential to understand or overcome the very real suffering that may have led to them being told such a thing.

But if people want to have a religious belief in something they should be free to. Just that they shouldn't have the right to force it on everyone else.

As for the group I can't go back, my lesson is that I should have known it wasn't safe the first time there was a threat of violence and he facilitators just allowed it.

What is troubling is that none of the people in the group came up with the idea that "mental illness is real" they were told this ideology was 'fact' by trusted sources of information. They were told this information when they were incredibly vulnerable. And nobody told them it was only one of many possible ways to look at their distress. Those people also had vested interests, and got financial gain or government funding from pushing this ideology on the public.

I only hope that the personal interests of those who decide the direction of these organisations aren't more important to them than their genuine concern for others. Because the anguish and confusion that is arising from them continuing to push "mental illness is real" instead of clairifying that suffering is, of course, not made up and we all know when we are suffering, but that 'mental illness' is only one possible ideology. Because it's causing a lot of anguish in vulnerable people to be getting a misguided message. It's also depriving them of being able to choose from different pathways to genuine support and recovery.

@Fredd50 yes i aslo have concerns of the motivations of certain "big players" in the industry there is a lot of money at stake in the mental illness view point. i mean consider psychiatrists if they cant perpetuate the idea that mental illness exists (regardless of them actually having proof or not) then they are out of the job. no more money no more power and all that they worked to build falls appart. actually the push of drugs to treat "mental illness" came around the same time that psychologist became a thing. psychiatry was being threatened because now people were starting to beileve that you could fix problems by working through them and talking about them and when psychologists came about here were people who could take away a part of psychiatrys job and steal their clients they would have lost everything but if you can make someone believe they are sick and need a medicine that only a psychiatrist can give you then you can survive and keep your clients now the two diciplines work together and both proffit from the same clients. yet with all there wisdom NONE of them claim to actually be able to "fix" the clients problems. they say they can treat them but this treatment never seems to resolve the major issues in a persons life. giving someone an anti depressant wont give them friends or make them have a less abusive family. or fix any of their einviromental circumstances. even psychology cant do much to help sure they can help you find a few distraction teqniques and tell you to try and look at things through a more positive lense but it still doesnt fix the environment someone finds themselves in. it wont get them a decent job it wont get them a house. and what distrubs me more is that if you can keep people thinking they are sick essentially you have a forever source of income as a psych or pharmacuticle company. most other doctors fix their clients (with the exception of some terminal conditions) if you break your arm there is an expectation the doctor will fix it and you will get better and stop seeing them. there is no expectation that mentally ill people will be able to stop seeing their doctors because essentially they will never get better. but the doctor who fixes a broken bone or give a transplant they have to find a new customer they have to wait for the next person to become sick for their income to continue where as psychs never have to wait for anything because they just keep racking up clients. it is a permanent and sure source of income. also what distrubs me is that the medications where never made with the intention of curing mental illness they were originally made to treat malaria and after finding out they had sedative sideffects they were then going to be used for surgery but after they realised they could sedate their "raving psych patient" they did and said it was a wonder drug and it cured them when actually it had done no such thing. there is a lot more on this argument but i will stop there. anyway i have done more than enough research into this whole topic and my conclusion was it has always and will always be about the money and power the people suffering are not what the focus is about when it comes to why descions are being made.

@Eden1919

Your last post was incredibly relieving to read, thanks so much. It's a big antidote and hope to not feel so alone with this.

Sadly, my own research and experience has left me with very similar troubling conclusions.

There is another human element too, that acknowledging how we are always learning, that everyone's experience is difference and that the best genuine progress for a lot of people is made by understanding those very states of being that the "mental illness" ideology had taught it's practitioners need to be pushed away requires a very radical shift in attitude in those professionals who genuinely want to help, not just enjoy the status and get money and recognition from their work. It involves putting their egos aside and learning from their clients, instead of presenting the idea that they know everything. It requires them to learn how to understand states of mind they have no training in understanding and have been taught to suppress with drugs instead of resolving.

These things are very real problems for the professionals, they have been trained to see the world a particular way their whole lives, it has shaped their brains. Overcoming the obstacle of the distortion it has created is every bit as real and difficult as understanding and overcoming the impacts of an abusive family or environment that constantly undermines a growing child's sense of self and can lead to extreme states where unresolved emotions, hurts, abuses that have been continuously denied might exert themselves on the consciousness as flashbacks, as symbolic metaphors in worldview or as actual visions or internalised voices.

We are all, in one way or another, products to of a complex relationship with the physical, social, relational, and psychological environment we developed in. As we change, we change the world. As the world changes it changes us.

Those professionals that act purely on greed, those who are fuelled by identity and status, those who genuinely want to help and every other possible permutation and combination have worldviews and thinking, feeling, behaviour payterpa that are a product of the same mechanisms as their clients. Just with different inputs.

I find that hopeful. For humanity in general. That the more we talk about these things the better our chances of shaping a world that's better for everyone - by recognising the power of narrative to shape things for the better.

I don't understand the idea of putting career, status, power above everything, or of blindly following the tradition of the status quo. But I think the bio-psycho-social causes of these things are every bit as relevant and important to understand for our shared future as anything that gets called "mental illness".

I'd love to live in a world of genuinely rational, caring and independently thinking folks who could discuss different ways of looking at things without the distortions of perceived political or economic threats that were not being aacknowledged.I guess learning how such a world might be accomplished is a big part of our times, when more and more people are becoming emboldened to question the status quo on many fronts and are learning how incredibly powerful humans are when they work together.

I just hope we can start to go in that direction, rather than towards polarisation, domination, anger, competition, exploitation and all those not so great aspects of our potential nature. I also hope (indeed I often pray) that we can learn to have the courage to see things as they really are when that often requires realising that each new thing we think we know for certain becomes very different the more we learn about our infinitely complex world.

Humans have such incredible potential, yet we know that every civilization we have ever made has ultimately collapsed (or been invaded) due to greed, fear, panic, anger, self-interest, inequality, exploitation of each other and our environments. I hope we make it this time. 🙏