Sue Bailey

Last night’s Horizon, titled How mad are you? seems to have stirred up some feeling. If you didn’t see it, think Big Brother only with crazy people… hmm, maybe not.

The premise is this: ten people, five with diagnoses of various mental illnesses, and five allegedly normal, have been ensconced in Hever Castle, along with a panel of three mental health experts. The experts have to tell, by observing the inmates doing a variety of tasks, who has which of their list of mental disorders. Will they label perfectly sane people as mentally ill? Will people with mental illnesses convince the experts that there’s nothing wrong with them? I think we can probably guess that the answer to both of those questions is “yes”.

Many of the complaints I’ve seen about the programme - and most of them were before it was aired - have been along the lines of “how the label is going to damaged this person’s life”: being called bipolar or depressed or socially anxious on national television is, it’s said, far far worse than being thought only eccentric, individual or just plain odd. And what if a normal person gets labelled mad? Back in the closet with you, mentallists!

In the event, the strongest argument against this was the participants themselves. Two were ‘outed’ on last night’s first show: the experts spotted Dan with OCD, who said he ordinarily made no effort to conceal it, washing his hands fifty times a day and refusing to touch other people, and - if not exactly proud of his condition - then he was absolutely not willing to be ashamed of it. Good for him.

Their diagnosis for Yasmin, on the other hand, was wrong. They diagnosed her as not mentally ill, but she is (we haven’t found out yet what her real diagnosis is), and she was delighted to have fooled the experts. She might have a mental illness, but she’s every bit as normal as the rest of us.

Did it trivialise mental health issues? Though the slightly game-show format isn’t the best, I still don’t think so. When the typical mad person in the media is a released-from-hospital-too-soon schizophrenic who’s committed murder or worse, it was very nice to see some people who were a less flamboyant kind of crazy: ordinary, functional people who just happen to have this diagnosis. And it was very, very nice to see that a diagnosis of a mental disorder isn’t some kind of death sentence, but something that might, in fact, have its uses in understanding just what’s going on in that head of yours.

I’m sticking the rest of this post - the “where I’m coming from” part - behind the cut, so that those who want to avoid perhaps TMI about the inside of my head can do so. The second part of Horizon: How mad are you? is on next Tuesday on BBC2, and the first bit can be watched online, at least by those in the UK.

So, this is why I think labels help.

For most of my life, I’ve variously felt: worthless, useless, stupid, totally lethargic to the point where I didn’t get out of bed when the house was being burgled; I’ve been paranoid about every single person I’ve ever met (who all hate me but cover it up so they can laugh behind my back); I’ve started grandiose schemes that I have no hope of ever finishing, generally believed that I am the invincible queen of the world and no one can touch me, I really believe that I could fly, if I chose to; I’ve refused to eat for weeks on end, and then eaten so much I put on two stone in a month; I’ve sat crying on tube platforms because I couldn’t bear to go home and I couldn’t bear to go to work. You get the idea. When cutting got too boring, I used to stub out ciggies on my arms and legs, and pull my own hair out by the roots. I’ve been hospitalised for overdoses three times. I’ve seen every flavour of mental health professional there is, and I have been told by many of them that “I do not have a mental illness”.

(Let me say now: no offence to them. They’re vastly overworked, and very easy to fool if all you want to do is get out of hospital and go home - the urge now seems to be to diagnose people as “fine” if they’re not an immediate danger to themselves, and if you say “will you kill yourself” and the patient says “no”, then that’s proof of non-danger.)

The upshot of this is that, for years, I’ve thought that there is nothing I can do. I’ve believed that feeling how I feel is just how I am - that I have to live with it, because there is nothing I can do about it, the urge to destroy this person I hate so much, it’s just part of my personality.

And then, one day, I typed into Google “why am I so paranoid”, and ended up at a site where people were talking about depression. It was like the road to Damascus. I still have the blog posts I wrote around then, and they are filled with happy:

Well, there’s nothing like figuring out that you’re depressed to make you feel cheerful.

I’m just so excited. I wonder what I’m like when I’m well?

I walked to the shop for a bag of apples. The sun was out. I felt happy. The world is beautiful.

I don’t feel limited, or stigmatised by my label. It’s the thing that makes my disease seperate from me: something I have, not something I am. It’s the thing that makes me not alone: other people have this, and they survive. Most of all because - and this is in the future, for me, but hope is addictive and I never quite give it up - the thing about labels is they come off.

November 12th 2008 @ 20:13 | Category: Madness