You Are Not A Diagnosis - Serenity Wellness - E97 (1/4)

This is not supposed to be some fad.
You are not a diagnosis.
You have more abilities than you might realize.

Give a listen, learn some information, and take charge of your health.
You might feel some sort of way while listening.
I’m happy to hear what you have to say in the comments below.

Transcript

Hi there,

Did you know that mental health diagnoses are subjective?

For example,

You could go to three different therapists and come out of those sessions with three different diagnoses.

Or you can go to three different psychiatrists and come out of those sessions with three different diagnoses and three different medication plans.

If you don't know the difference real quick,

A counselor,

Therapist,

Psychologist is going to be spending maybe 45,

50,

Up to maybe 60 minutes with you every week or every other week and talking through things,

Looking at maybe emotion regulation,

Family systems,

Areas that you're feeling stuck in,

Patterns,

Or maybe even destructive choices that you're making.

And then give you potentially some skills and tools to work through that.

It depends honestly on the type of therapy that you get into.

Talk about that at the end here,

But just know that that's kind of the session gist.

If you're seeing one of those individuals where a psychiatrist is going to go through like a symptom checklist type of thing with you,

You're gonna maybe meet with you the first session for,

If you're lucky,

A half an hour.

Some very rarely will meet with you for 45 minutes,

Maybe even up to an hour.

It's just like not the typical situation there.

And then follow-up sessions are often going to be about 10 minutes,

Maybe 15.

And those sessions are every month or every other month.

And sometimes it's extended out to every six months.

And those are often just,

How's your medication doing?

And I'm gonna talk a little bit about all of that here.

I wanna talk with you about what a mental health diagnosis is,

What it is not,

Some real key things to roll out,

And then some areas of potential consideration of how to move through this a bit differently.

I'm gonna cover a good bit of information here.

And I know that what I am going to cover,

Because I know who I am,

And I've been a therapist for 25 years,

And so I've had these conversations multiple times with professionals in the field,

And I am,

I'm not one who really goes towards the norm.

And I know that some of what I'm gonna say is gonna feel real sandpapery to some people.

So please just listen to all of it.

And then I am open and would love to hear your thoughts below.

So let's get into this.

Welcome to episode 97,

You are not a diagnosis.

My name is Nicole White.

I am a licensed counselor,

And I've been working in the mental health field for over 25 years in multiple settings,

All of which have included this idea of a diagnosis.

Let's first start by talking a bit about what a mental health diagnosis is and actual benefits of having a diagnosis.

And I'm gonna first be talking about,

If you're going to go to a counselor,

Therapist,

A psychologist,

They're gonna be talking with you about some things you're working through.

They might do,

So I do like a symptom inventory checklist for a first session to really get an idea of things.

And then we do an intake session.

So we're gonna be gathering information,

Getting to know you,

Who you are,

How we might best support you in what you're working through.

When we do that,

It's going to indicate a diagnosis for you.

And that can be really helpful in some ways,

And then not so helpful in some others,

Which I'm gonna explain in just a moment.

But the ways that the mental health diagnosis can be helpful,

It's going to help guide,

Kind of give a broader bird's eye view of what's going on for the person.

And that might guide us towards certain treatment modalities,

So certain skills,

Tools,

Or ways that we can work with the client to help them in self-discovery.

A common thing that people misconceptualize about therapy is that as a therapist,

I'm gonna tell you what to do.

People who have worked with me in any capacity,

Individual classes,

I have a lot of hats that I wear,

But anyone who has worked with me in any capacity knows that I will not tell you what to do.

It's not the role of a therapist to do that.

We're here to help you figure out how you can help you.

Because it's in you,

It's there,

And sometimes it's covered,

And in cobwebs,

And hiding behind dark corners.

So we're kind of like a guide to help you see and open up some things of awareness to bring the full perspective and the puzzle pieces together for you.

A diagnosis can help with that.

It can help us give us the bird's eye view,

Some of the symptoms,

Some of the areas that someone is working through,

And some things that we might have in our toolbox as therapists that we could pass on to the client.

This allows us to notice and recognize areas of deficiency and plans towards more of a healthy living style.

And in the collection of this information,

That's how we go about developing the treatment plan.

But it also helps the client see this.

They can become more aware of the process and through time notice where they were when they first came into therapy and where they are through the process as they work through some areas.

So it can be very helpful.

It gives the client even an understanding of what's going on with them.

And in the collection of that information,

We are also able to see what are the life factors that are happening here?

What are the things going on that are contributing to the emotional overload that this individual is experiencing?

Bringing in a full picture.

I mentioned just a moment ago about deficiency.

That deficiency in mental health can fall into numerous categories.

I think we're all pretty aware of some systematic failures that are going on in terms of deficiency.

When you look at mental health treatment and the availability and some of the struggles,

Life,

Real struggles,

Stress,

Overwhelm,

How am I gonna have food on the table?

Do I even have a home to live in?

Well,

When those things are happening,

How do we think as a human that someone's mental health is going to be doing?

Yes,

There's resilience,

Psychological flexibility,

All that stuff that is helpful,

But they're going to have mental health symptoms going on.

I wanna share a quick clip here with you as a reminder from,

It was an episode a while back,

Your Mental Health Matters.

Remember about these statistics here for just a second.

Give a listen.

There's some statistics with you.

Just be prepared.

These aren't pleasant.

There was a study done by Boston University School of Public Health,

And they were looking at depression rates from 2019 through 2021 to look at percentage of increase.

And what they found was the depression rates in 2019 for adults in America was 8.

5%.

In 2020,

It was 27.

8%.

In 2021,

It was 32.

8% of adults in America having depression.

That is one in three adults.

American Psychological Association had an article where they were talking about anxiety.

It was the director of the National Institute of Mental Health,

And they found it went from 8.

6% in 2019 to 37.

2% in 2021.

The National Center for Health Statistics,

Drug overdoses increased by 31% in 2020.

Opiates,

Overdoses increased by 35%.

Psychostimulants,

That's the stuff,

The medications that are being prescribed,

Like Adderall and Ritalin.

Psychostimulant overdoses increased by 50%.

Over the past four years,

It has increased fourfold.

Over 60% of our youth report major depression symptoms.

In some places,

It's as low as 12% of them that get help.

Our adults,

Less than 50% of them get help for their mental and emotional distress.

It's a lot of people walking around without tapping into support to help that might be able to really help them.

I wanna share a little bit about some work statistics.

I was a speaker at the Project Management Institute,

The Keystone Division yesterday,

And I was talking with them.

The presentation was on inner stillness for mental health,

But I was sharing some statistics with them because they are all leaders of different businesses,

The participants of this event.

So I was sharing with them some workplace statistics related to depression and anxiety,

And I thought I would share those with you as well,

Because again,

The more we know,

The more we can see how we might really wanna try to work on this a little bit.

The American Psychological Association showed that 43% of workers do not believe that their bosses care or understand about life balance.

We might call it work-life balance.

I just kind of prefer to call it life balance because this is our life,

Right?

And are we balancing it or are we not?

And work is a piece of it,

But so are a lot of other things.

But 43% think their employers don't care.

At the same time,

Work stress is one of the top three stressors in individuals' lives.

Pretty high number up there on the scale of what's stressing people out.

And remember just a little bit ago,

What I said happens all here in the body when we're all maxed out and stressed.

The Center for Workplace and Mental Health reported that 120,

000 people die a year due to workplace stress,

And that it also costs $190 billion a year in healthcare.

Just ironic to me even further,

Because over 11% of individuals,

Adults who need mental and emotional help do not have any insurance.

And a very large percentage of individuals who have insurance,

Their insurance plops on an astronomical deductible,

Or it doesn't even cover mental health.

But here we are,

$190 billion in healthcare costs related to mental and emotional distress.

What are we missing?

When you hear that,

When you notice that,

I posted that episode a little bit after the whole 2020 situation went down to crumble the world type of thing.

This is when these numbers started going up.

So if we look at the broad increase in what I showed you there and what I talked about,

What is our answer to just medicate all these people?

Like,

Oh,

Look how much depression you have.

Look how much anxiety you have now.

Look at these out of control numbers that we see everywhere.

And the recognition that mental health medication is not always the answer for mental health distress.

There are some significant rollouts that you wanna look at,

And creating a systematic plan to address some of the things that you might notice when I talk about these areas of rollout,

Because it might be more than you've realized.

Before I get to that,

Though,

I wanna cover what a diagnosis is not.

And this is the area that I know,

Well,

There's a couple areas here,

But I know I'm not in the norm here in the mental health field of what I'm gonna be sharing with you.

I understand it in terms of,

As I mentioned,

There's like a lot of different types of therapy.

Appreciate and respect that my perspective is coming from my areas of specialty in therapy.

And if you go to my website,

I'll put a link below that you could see kind of what those areas are.

It might look like I have a lot of certifications and training elements there.

And I do.

At the same time,

They all blend and merge together.

So I'm a dialectical behavior therapist that looks at four different umbrellas of life and gives a lot of skill training and understanding,

And the dialectics of them determine how we're engaging with self and others.

But that also ties into living as a Buddhist kind of lifestyle,

Buddhism not being religion,

Being a form of how we move and live through life.

Well,

Dialectical behavior therapy is basically Buddhism,

Understanding of how we move through life turned into therapy.

And then I'm also a clinical hypnotist.

And so that looks at tying in what I know about epigenetics and linguistic training into the clinical practice so that I can use linguistics in the understanding of helping my clients.

And then I'm a psychedelic integration psychotherapist,

And that looks at using non-ordinary states of consciousness to help with mental health.

And lastly,

An integrative mental health medicine provider is the other pocket here in mental health because it looks at the full spectrum of the person.

It brings in some of those uses of non-ordinary states of consciousness.

It looks at our connection with spirituality and self,

But the huge thing too is looking at food as medicine.

When I talked about that deficiency back a bit ago,

Food is medicine.

One more time,

Guys.

Food is medicine.

Know what's going in your body because as you're gonna hear,

It all ties together.

And that's why I have all of those mental health areas,

But I also am an energy therapist.

I'm a Reiki master.

I study metaphysics.

I'm a yoga teacher because it's all connected.

It's all integrated and combined.

And if we can start to understand the full nature of our being,

You are going to be shocked at how much you can actually start to heal yourself.

It's not information that is really shared a whole lot with us,

Right?

You can work on healing yourself.

What does that even mean?

I mean,

That's gonna take you away from a whole pocket of money flow that comes into people's revenue stream there.

But let me get back on track here.

What a mental health diagnosis is not.

There is the emotional reasoning where we will have an emotion and then we kind of put that lens,

Put the glasses on,

Put the hat on,

And we're looking through life through that emotion.

I have anxiety turns into I am anxiety.

And everything kind of we funnel through a hypervigilant type of fragmented sense of being.

Or I have depressive symptoms turns into I am depression.

And again,

All lenses start to look through that avenue.

Well,

The emotional reasoning part is recognizing you are not a diagnosis.

A diagnosis is a bird's eye view,

A guide,

A indicator of what might be helpful for you to understand about self,

To move more into creating the life that you desire and deserve.

It is also not something to be used as a weapon against yourself or someone else.

I will often hear through all of these years,

The two big ones are when someone is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder,

In which I have a whole pocket about those things.

But then a family member will use it against them.

So if they have any emotion,

If they're trying to express anything,

Even a thought or opinion,

And maybe they have emotion with it when they're trying to talk about it because they're human,

Well,

They will get this diagnosis thrown against them.

Well,

That's just your bipolar,

Or you're just borderline.

And totally discount the person.

It's very similar where,

I mean,

There's a ton of research on this.

So this stuff that I'm talking about is not just like,

Here's my opinion.

I can go through,

Like,

There's this article,

There's this article,

But I'm trying to condense all this.

There are mounds of articles,

Research,

Stories.

You probably have one of your own or someone in your family or a friend that you know of who went through it,

Where women are discounted when they meet with a doctor to talk about medical concerns.

They're told they're just psychosomatic,

Or they're anxious,

Or they have depression,

Or they're just this,

That,

Or the other.

And then medical problems end up unfolding right along with what the woman who knows her body,

Who knows what she's experiencing,

Has tried to express.

Well,

It's the same thing.

It's just tweaking it a different way.

Third,

It is also not a permanent branding.

Like,

You have some kind of branding on your forehead now of this diagnosis.

Emotions are not permanent.

They're impermanent.

We often weren't taught about emotions and how to regulate emotion.

It doesn't mean we have to forever live our life all fragmented,

Scattered,

And feeling out of control with our body and emotions.

If you remember,

I have talked numerous times about how people tap out of their body and think they're going to emotionally regulate.

When the training is there with body and mind,

You can do it.

It might be highways in your brain that you've never used before.

It doesn't mean the highways aren't there.

You just have to continue to find the resources and the tools and this whole system itself to figure out where the depletion areas are.

Neuroplasticity is real,

Period.

One other thing I want to cover here before I get into the things you want to be looking at to roll out when it comes to mental health,

Symptoms,

And distress,

Is that mental health diagnoses are not supposed to be a fad.

It is so extreme at this point that I really am considering starting a TikTok.

I'm not at all interested in doing,

To be perfectly honest with you,

But what is going on over there is just a bit out of control here with the over fad of mental health diagnoses.

This isn't something new.

It's just taken off because of social media.

When I was in grad school,

Man,

I don't know when I graduated from grad school right off the top of my head.

I'm going to say 2004,

2005,

I think,

But I don't really know.

I'm just saying that this has been going on,

This fad of mental health for quite some time,

And this is an example.

So when I was in grad school,

I,

In one of my classes,

We had to,

We were in a group,

And then we had to give a final presentation,

And basically we had to choose a situation,

Symptom,

And then come up with kind of treatment and an understanding of what was going on with that situation.

So in my group,

Myself and one of the other group members,

We both worked at this inpatient place for some time,

And we both worked on the adolescent unit for some time,

And we were both quite aware,

Through working in this field,

At that time,

There was this fad of people turning to self-injurious behaviors to fit in with their peers.

It was happening at the local high school here.

I don't want to get too specific.

They would wear a certain piece of jewelry to be included in the group of this fad of self-injury,

Self-injury like cutting themselves.

And so in this grad class,

We did our final project on self-injurious behaviors,

Some treatment plans and modalities around it,

And what would bring someone to dysregulate in that way.

Well,

Part of our presentation,

We talked about the fad element also as one potential.

We also shared other potentials that would bring someone to use a type of behavior,

But in it,

We did cover the fad.

It was an absolute fact that was happening.

Like it was clear as day it was happening.

I worked in the high school with the counselors here,

And we had a team of 10 counselors in our high school,

And I was an intern there as a counselor.

We knew from working on the adolescent unit at this hospital,

I worked there for six years.

This was a real situation.

And then we got our final grade,

And we got an F.

The professor failed us on our final.

And then when we had a meeting to figure out like what,

Because we knew what we were talking about.

Some people just go to grad school right after undergrad,

Which is also fine,

But we worked in the field for years,

Myself and this other person.

And then I think even another member on our team had also been working in the field for some time.

And when we met then with a professor to say an F,

Like how did you come up with this grade?

Her only standing was that we were wrong,

That the only reason anyone would ever do that is that they had gone through severe and intense trauma as a child.

And that is not correct.

It's not correct.

That professor later got fired,

Not because of this,

I'm sure.

It's a thing.

It's a thing,

And it's a thing now.

Big fad again going on that has escalated because of social media where people are just like,

Oh,

I've got this,

That,

And the other,

All these mental health diagnoses,

And that's not the case.

It's like,

Oh,

I got ADHD because I can't sit still and I can't concentrate.

Not looking at what's going on there that you can't sit still and you can't concentrate,

And then they just feel hopeless,

Helpless.

It's a brain disorder.

It's not in the way that maybe they are linking into and thinking as some kind of branding on their forehead.

And patterns and symptoms that are going on do not indicate that you have a certain diagnosis.

Once I finished recording,

I realized it's best for me to break this up into four different episodes.

It was a lot of information,

And I think breaking it down is gonna make it way easier for everyone to digest.

If you're finding this information helpful,

Please consider liking and subscribing as it helps me help you.

In the meantime,

You might wanna head back to episode 65,

Cellular Imprinting.

I'll also put a few links below to some other episodes you might wanna check out while you're waiting for the next one in this series.

Thanks so much,

And I look forward to sharing more information with you real soon.

Reviews

Hi Nicole. Happy to see this will be a series of 4.
In my family and extended family I’ve observed people don’t understand mental health or seek help. Maybe a part of it is they don’t know where to go to get help or they don’t want to be medicated. I get that. I try to never miss an opportunity to tell anyone what I do on the daily to support my mental health. Hopefully it will encourage others to seek help or include some of the things I do into their daily lives as well. I want to be able to help them help themselves!!
Thank you for all you do !
Have a great life! 💜