“Our children are always doing the best they can to stay connected to their BIGness — in a world that expects them to be small.” – Scott Noelle

Being a writer has helped me to mend my relationship with the written word. As a little girl and a young woman, words were used by powerful people to hurt me and to make me feel small and damaged. Now, I am using language to heal those wounds.

I am the daughter of two people who were diagnosed with severe mental illnesses in their late teens. They were labeled as “schizophrenic,” “bipolar,” and “paranoid.” At the age of seven, I myself was diagnosed with depression. “Given her family background,” said my psychiatrist to a family member when she thought I wasn’t listening, “she has a greater than fifty percent chance of developing a major mental illness.” I was listening.

I made it to adulthood having collected the following diagnoses: major depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and perhaps a few more that I am forgetting. The mental suffering that gets labeled as “mental illness” was difficult enough for me and my parents; but what was much worse was the limited and negative way in which we came to view ourselves—through the lens of diagnosis, illness, and patienthood.

I will never let anyone label my Sami.

Now I am aware that there are some people, kids included, who claim that a label or diagnosis of mental illness comes as a huge relief to them. I really do understand that. For these folks, the diagnosis means that there is actually a name for their particular set of experiences; they are not alone. I completely sympathize with that. But do we really need psychiatric labels to know that we are not alone? We are all human. We all struggle with difficult emotions. Life is at times, challenging for everyone. The difference is merely in degree. Yet, once we get a label, it can compound our problems, causing us to view ourselves as perpetual patients. We begin to live medicalized lives, circumscribed by our experience of having been diagnosed.

Nortin Hadler, author of The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health Care System, writes: “When the person with the problem interprets symptoms as a medical disease, an illness for which medical treatment can or should be sought, that is medicalization.” Hadler warns against the medicalization of all human experience. We have come to view everything through the lens of illness, and in so doing, have lost faith in our “inherent sense of invincibility,” according to Hadler.

It was only through re-capturing my “inherent sense of invincibility” that I was able to get well. Though it was nearly a decade and a half ago, I remember that day as if it was yesterday. I had just turned eighteen, and was sitting on the living room couch in the decrepit group home in which I lived, wondering what would become of my adult life. I was terrified of becoming a perpetual mental patient like my parents, living out some kind of sad self-fulfilling prophecy, doomed to richochet between hospitals and supervised living situations, choking on my broken dreams.

I was still young enough to have some fight in me: so I declared that day: I reject what the psychiatrists have said about me. I will no longer be a mental patient. I refuse to share my parents’ fate.

In a nutshell, I decided to get well.

I took my power back.

I severed all contact with the mental health system, chucked my antidepressants out the window (CAUTION: going off meds cold turkey like I did is NOT recommended — in most cases it is best to go off slowly with professional assistance), and went to college. Within a short time I was well: not completely free of what might be called “symptoms,” but able to cope reasonably well with the challenges life threw my way. My coping mechanisms have not always been brilliant—in the past, they have included cigarettes, pot, and large amounts of Ben and Jerry’s. (They also have included more positive things such as activism, meditation, yoga, service to others, and creativity.) The difference is that I am not a patient today. I mercifully escaped that fate. I am a human being, wonderfully perfect in my imperfection, learning how to survive and thrive in the world.

Sami is not yet twenty months old, but I can already tell that he is a very active and extremely curious child. Is he “ADHD” material? I wonder. Right now I am wary of sending my son to a traditional school. I don’t think I am being paranoid. As we know, it is so often the school that is the vehicle for the diagnosis of children deemed to be “different;” children who do not thrive in the traditional classroom setting often get labeled with ADHD. More and more often, well-meaning teachers are “diagnosing” students, and in some states, parents can actually lose custody of their children for not appropriately medicating them.

I have no doubt that teachers and parents think they are doing right by children in medicalizing their problems. But I think there is another way. If a child is struggling at school, her struggle occurs in the context of her entire life. I believe in looking at children holistically. We can look at what is going on for them at home. We can look at their nutrition and level of physical activity. We can look at potential allergies—food or environmental–which can mimic the “symptoms” of ADHD. We can look at childrens’ learning styles.

Perhaps most radically, we can ask the child what she thinks she needs to feel better. Does she need more time outdoors? Does she need less homework and more unstructured time? As parents and educators, we can encourage children to maintain their power and “innate sense of invincibility,” rather than teaching them to see themselves and their experiences through the lens of a diagnosis, which serves to set them apart from others. (Or perhaps, these distinctions between the “mentally ill” and “well” kids are disappearing, as more and more kids are diagnosed with these kinds of mental illness or behavioral disorders.)

I think, more likely than not, that I will choose to homeschool Sami, or send him to a free school. I don’t think I can take the risk of him being labeled or pathologized in any way. If my son is having challenges with his emotions, I will be the first person to do what I can to help alleviate his suffering. But it will not involve giving him a psychiatric or other label. I want my son to be free to define himself according to his own experiences. I will do everything I can to create environments where he comes to view himself and his life experiences as positive. I will teach my son that even “negative” experiences are actually positive, because they help us to define what we don’t want, and more importantly, what we do want. We don’t need to be afraid of these experiences, because they help us to dream and to give birth to new possibilities.

I want to give my son the gift of language and ideas that open up new vistas and horizons for him. I want him to see language in its highest form: as a way to connect with ourselves and others, as a way to heal, as a way to make sense of and to embrace the world. It is my mission in life to nurture his innate sense of his own invincibility, and mine.