So what do I think that I could add?
Well, lived experience? The experience of the 'service user', as they put it.
For example: getting a diagnosis of one thing and being treated for it and then having that diagnosis changed. You deal with one sort of stigma: I am mad; I have bad genes and a troubled background and I need medication to make me better. I have a disease. Then you are faced with another: I am bad; I have a bad personality due to the trauma I went through and my own particular dysfunctional coping strategies; no medicines will work for me and most therapists will give up on me.
You have feelings that people want you to describe, but you know that emotions are socially constructed concepts which play a communicative role to self and other and yet the feelings that you have don't fit into any category you could begin to describe. You're read a lot, you're a LITERATURE graduate for fuck's sake, a poet and short-story writer. You know a lot of emotion words and have to material and imagination to sense what they would feel like. Resentment versus frustration; guilt versus shame; contentment versus pleasure; acceptance versus neutrality. Really, you can draw in a framework of all these things, but what you feel is not like anything that there is a word for: it is loss and hopelessness and a kind of acceptance and pain and darkness and fear, but with the knowledge that this is nowhere near as bad as it can be. Then it's fire and brimstone and blackness and a frustration so intense you want to destroy the world and yourself but still somehow can't and so there's shame and self-hatred and awareness of being irrational and yet the feeling that THIS IS WHAT I REALLY FEEL!!! It's both no one's fault and evrey-damn-one's fault!
You can't make decisions because you don't trust yourself not to be rationalising the thing you want in favour of the thing that's best for you. But then what IS best for you? And, goddamn it, what do you WANT?
You have enough insight to question yourself - and that seems a good thing, but it's not: because normal people don't question themselves. They rationalise and think they are reasoning. They go with what they want or what they think is right, whichever matters more. And they only know what they think they want, what they think is right and what they value more through intuition. But you don't trust your intuitions so you cannot answer any of these questions.
The world - the doctors and your family and your friends - have told you, not in so many words, that you tend to make really bad decisions (the decisions they wouldn't make and that seem to have turned out badly - ah, yes! It's so EASY in retrospect!) because you are mad or bad. And you believe them because THEY are sane or good. Not like you. And so you ask them. But their answers don't fit you. You know that much. They don't know your life and your mood and your mind like you do. What they say makes it WORSE. They are aliens interfering with your free will and they think they know better but in some ways they do and in other ways they don't, because, when it comes down to it, they are SHIT, just SHIT, at imagining what it's like to be in your shoes. Why would they try? You are mad or bad - and probably sad. they don't want to inhabit the space you inhabit. Not for an hour, not for a minute. But you, you, you have imagined their shoes. You have to keep imagining their shoes because the world expects you to be in those shoes and you try, despite the callouses and the in-grown toe-nails, you try, oh bless you for trying! But what good does it do?
No one knows what it's like to be you.
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