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My Physicalmental Illness

2021-08-10 · letter vlog · John · 3:56 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Health (also: Personal life, Philosophy & meaning) · mode: Personal essay · tags: heavy topic

Using his labyrinthitis, treated with psychotropic drugs and brain-retraining therapy much like his OCD, John argues that the line between mental and physical illness is a limited category, that mental illness is stigmatized partly because it is poorly understood, and that other people's pain is as real as our own.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — John's labyrinthitis three and a half years ago, and his question: is it mental or physical?

  • ★★★ Three and a half years ago (November 2017) John was diagnosed with labyrinthitis, a viral inflammation of the inner ear: he went from a slight head cold to incapacitating vertigo, fell over, vomited and was rushed to hospital. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ After years of treatment for labyrinthitis, John has started to wonder whether the disease is mental or physical. — 00:00:00

00:00:27 — How we stigmatize mental illness: relief at a physical cause for his vertigo; OCD and poorly understood illnesses

  • ★★★ John says we profoundly stigmatize mental illness. — 00:00:27 · mental disorder
  • ★★ In hospital his vertigo was first thought possibly psychosomatic, caused by his chronic anxiety; when an ostensibly physiological cause was found he was a little relieved, as everyone, himself included, began treating the illness as really real. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Mental illness is also really real and often has a physiological cause: the brains of many people with OCD, John included, look different in fMRI scans, though the differences are not yet well understood. — 00:00:48 · mental disorder
  • ★★ Illnesses that are poorly understood or lack effective treatments tend to be heavily stigmatized, such as endometriosis, irritable bowel syndrome, many pain disorders and leprosy. — 00:00:58

00:01:17 — Footnote: categories are useful but limited (is a hot dog a sandwich?)

  • ★★★ In a footnote John says mental illness is just a category, with uses and limitations; remembering that categories are often useful but almost always limited seems one of life's big challenges right now. — 00:01:17 · mental disorder
  • ★★ The silly discourse over whether a hot dog is a sandwich hides something important: we want categories to be strict and inviolable when they are messy and constructed. — 00:01:27 · social construction
  • ★★ Labyrinthitis is not a psychological illness, or so John is told; he went home from hospital with two medications, the central nervous depressant meclizine and the anti-anxiety drug diazepam, which also lessens vertigo. (hedged) — 00:01:47

00:01:50 — Psychotropic medications and balance therapy that rewires the brain, like his OCD therapy: mental or physical? Yes

  • ★★ Both drugs were psychotropic, changing how John experienced consciousness, and both are sometimes prescribed as psychiatric medications, but not in his case, because his illness was not considered psychiatric. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ With lasting vestibular problems after the virus was gone, John was sent to a balance institute to retrain his brain; when the therapist said they were rewiring his brain, he realized it was just like his other therapy. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ In regular therapy John teaches his brain to respond differently to unreliable anxious thoughts, in balance therapy to unreliable inner-ear information; OCD and labyrinthitis treatments differ, but the idea, medication and therapy, is similar. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ Asked whether his illness is mental or physical, John answers: yes, it is. (playful) — 00:03:01

00:03:05 — Elaine Scarry on pain and doubt; minds are made of body; other people's pain is as real as our own

  • ★★ John keeps returning to Elaine Scarry's observation in The Body in Pain that to have great pain is to have certainty, and to hear another has pain is to have doubt. — 00:03:10
  • ★★★ John thinks that doubt compounds the suffering of people in pain, and more so when we imagine pain is less real because it involves the mind or cannot be seen. — 00:03:22
  • ★★★ The mind-body dichotomy is as insufficient as the category of sandwiches: our minds are made of body, our bodies think, and whether mental or physical, other people's pain is as real as our own. — 00:03:34

In the description and comments

  • ★★ In the description John says stigma is complicated: illness is stigmatized partly by how well we understand and treat it, by who it mostly affects, and by which bodily systems it affects, with real impacts on health care. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: categorization · labyrinthitis · mental disorder · pain · social stigma

Also: People: Elaine Scarry

Works: The Body in Pain

Concepts: anxiety disorder · diazepam · endometriosis · functional magnetic resonance imaging · irritable bowel syndrome · leprosy · meclizine · mind-body dualism · obsessive-compulsive disorder · psychotherapy · social construction · Vertigo

Only in the description or credits: Rosianna Halse Rojas

Also centred on categorization: Planets Don't Exist · My 'Injury'

Also centred on labyrinthitis: The Anthropocene Reviewed, Animated · My Next Book · On Balance

Also centred on pain: PUNISHMENT OF PAIN AND SCIENCE! · On Pain · Pain · Tuberculosis and Hank's Shingles

Also centred on social stigma: 'end the stigma' · TAKE IT UP A NOTCH · Talking Tuberculosis, GeneXpert, J&J, and more with MY HEROES · Why Can't I Take My Meds? · I've Been Pooping All Wrong

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