The "what's your mental disorders quiz" that's polluting the Facebook air has made me angry today. I'm not angry because I have had multiple diagnoses on the mental disorder front. I'm not even angry as a psychology PhD student, that some guy in an office has made some extremely reductionist mistakes : scenarios with answers which generate a result which is frankly inaccurate ("describe your personality in one word"; here's me with my first class psychology BSc and my distinction grade MSc sitting with the conception that personality is multi modal, highly complex and continually debated. The reason I'm angry is that mental disorder is not a joke. It has come to my attention over the past few years that there has been a marked paradigm shift in how mental health disorders have been portrayed in the media. Instead of the mixture of jokes to cover up fear and discomfort , or just plain silence and taboo, people (the public, the newspapers and the BBC ) have started to tentatively talk about mental health and it's disorders. The general public have finally been able to hear it from the people who live it. I often sit with my morning coffee whilst my mum tells me about the latest soul on breakfast television who has bravely disclosed their inner struggles to the world with the hope of raising awareness. I personally feel that such features are working and that there is less stigma. But, whilst people are ridiculing mental disorder we are going to stay as we are. We're reaching a plateau. There's a ceiling, a smoky fog which lingers and covers and blights progress; preventing acceptance, understanding and (on an individual level) recovery.
I'm struggling to understand what is so entertaining about this quiz. Take ad an illustrative example, the question which asks how many times you wash your hands. This is the obvious one ; it's stereotypically pointing at obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) . Did you know that only a relatively small percentage of individuals who meet the clinical threshold for OCD actually present with compulsive hand washing? . After a year of OCD I have never had this problem. I've experienced many others, which have held me down and built walls between who I was and who I wanted to be but never this problem. What about those that do fall victim to compulsive hand washing? I've known men and women whose hands were painfully raw and bleeding. I've even known people who had burned their skin with beech. What's worse is that I've seen the pure pain and frustration in their eyes as their brains house a viscous war between irrational fear and logic. Can you see yet why I'm failing miserably to comprehend why OCD is on any level funny?
Regardless of the inaccuracies which run a vein throughout the entire 'piece' the first offence committed by the 'author' (who needs to learn that apostrophes aren't optional) lies in the initial sentence. "Let's (presumably supposed to be contraction of let us) admit it , all of us are a little bit crazy..." granted, all of us have quirks; we have irrational fears, obsessions,vulnerability . We all have darker places in our minds which can be triggered and which cA use us to experience emotional pain. This is simply because all of us have mental health, in the same way that we all have physical health. In light of this, we are all capable of suffering mental ill health. However, I struggle to believe that any of us are crazy. People who live with mental disorders are most certainly not crazy. I have worked with People with with mental disorders. Some of the individuals whose journeyS and recoveries that I have been price lifted to share have needed merely a little extra help to support them through a difficult time whilst others have been in hospital and been very sick indeed. I have not however, had any experience of working with an individual who could be considered crazy. Vulnerable; undeniably. Inspiring;certainly. Strong, intelligent, dedicated, resilient, complex... I could use all of those adjectives to describe past clients with ease but never, ever crazy.
If you've done this quiz for "light entertainment" or or because you have noting better to do then you should be extremely ashamed of yourself. You clearly have time in your hands. I therefore hope with earnest that you have read this blog post, taken it in, and are vouching to make a slightly more educated decision next time.
