"You are not a diagnosis. Your pain is so complex. It’s what makes us human. It’s what makes you a good person. It’s what makes you have empathy for others."
Sarah Fay
EFR 655: Surviving Major Medical Misdiagnoses, Destigmatizing Mental Health Disorders, and How Anxiety Keeps Us Alive with Sarah Fa
Sarah Fay is the author of the memoir, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses. Pathological explores the consequences of over-identifying with a psychiatric diagnosis and how doing so can lead to self-stigmatization and self-limitation.
During this episode of Ever Forward, Sarah discusses mental health diagnoses, from what they are to where they come from, how she lived through six of them, and how we can embrace and understand them better as a society.
The stigma that society places on mental illness is well known, but what about the stigma we place on ourselves? Could that actually be more harmful? In Sarah's opinion, yes.
Sarah discusses candidly in this episode how being diagnosed with Anorexia as a child caused her to over identify with the diagnosis and attach her thoughts and feelings to it, which led her to believe that she wouldn't be capable of doing many things in life, such as maintain a long-term relationship or hold down a full-time job. Fortunately, Sarah's perspective on her mental health has evolved to where she doesn't feel this way anymore. Her ability to reframe her diagnoses and honor her experiences has been a result of good mental health practitioners, a supportive family, and her willingness to take charge of learning more about her diagnoses and where mental health diagnoses come from.
Follow Sarah on Instagram @sarahfayauthor
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Follow him on Twitter @chasechewning
Key Highlights
Sarah discusses the experience of receiving her first psychiatric diagnosis at the age of 12 and what led to it.
How Sarah views her diagnoses in hindsight after 25 years in the mental health system.
Sarah discusses how a psychiatrist made her think differently about her diagnosis and how she began to investigate the history and origins of mental health diagnoses.
How Sarah distanced herself from her diagnosis, freeing herself from self-inflicted limitations
Sarah's views on the advantages and disadvantages of receiving a diagnosis, as well as how mental health practitioners can better communicate with patients about their symptoms and treatment options
An evolutionary perspective on anxiety: How our brains keep us alive
In what ways can a diagnosis empower us?
Powerful Quotes
You are not a diagnosis. Your pain is so complex. It’s what makes us human. It’s what makes you a good person. It’s what makes you have empathy for others.
The problem with DSM symptoms is they are actually common emotions, thoughts, and behaviors … things we experience everyday.
The DSM is what we have. It’s incredibly flawed. There are bad apples in psychiatry just like there are bad apples in any profession. It’s a way for us to talk about our psychic and emotional pain, and it’s all we have right now.
The three Ps are very important, and it’s people, place, and purpose.
I respect what I went through, and that’s why I live the way I do, not in fear that something is going to come back or that I live with this mental illness lurking inside me at all times.
Episode resources
Visit Sarah’s website
Get Sarah's book Pathological
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