Oh, the amusing people involved in the mental health field...

*TRIGGER*

I remember seeing my first psychiatrist when I was 12 years old. Obviously, I was quite young and children are rarely diagnosed with severe mental illness at that age. But I think it was really my psychiatrist who had more problems than myself. So here I am, suicidal, cutting myself, my mom desperately bringing me in so as to avoid an inpatient hospital stay. My first visit I was diagnosed as Bipolar simply based on the fact that I was cutting. I returned the next week and the first question the psychaitrist asked was, of course, "have you hurt yourself?" "No," I replied. She proceeded to do a skin check anyway, and what do you know, I was actually telling the truth. She looks at my mom in disbelief. "She does not have Bipolar," she says. "The fact that she stopped cutting and has impulse control shows that she is doing this for attention." Yes, obviously, it was all for attention... It most certainly wasn't due to the fact that I felt so terrible when my mom found me cutting, and the sadness and harm I caused her, that I stopped for a very brief amount of time. No, nothing like that at all... That was when I flushed my Prozac down the toilet and decided I would just pretend that never happened... Didn't work out so well.

Oh, I also L-O-V-E when people say something like, "teenagers are always moody" or "everyone is bipolar." Um, actually, NO, not everyone is "bipolar." Everyone coughs but people don't say "everyone has double pneumonia," do they?