Do you value having a diagnosis?
12th March 2013
At Anxiety Support we work with people who have, or don't have, a specific anxiety diagnosis. We figure that no one is going to pretend to be anxious just to access our services. If you think you're anxious, your anxious! This creates for people the opportunity to explore their own well-being and to choose from our services and support that which they can relate to.
For some people a diagnosis is a godsend. The doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist has told me I have XYZ anxiety disorder. Finally, what I've been experiencing for all this time has a shape, a form, a name and I can better understand it and work to overcome its impacts. I have a point to work outwards from.
For others a diagnosis is like being branded, labelled with all the stigma of mental illness and the prospects of discrimination, whatever form that may take. I don't want it, I won't accept it, I don't agree with it.
Of course both people in these examples are right, right for them. There is only a problem if we are forced to accept one way of being or the other. However, the more severe your anxiety the more of a challenge it becomes to receive any effective clinical treatment without being handed a diagnosis. This can lead to people's feeling on top of their anxiety, enormously conflicted, wanting the symptoms relief but not wanting what goes along with it. This 'not wanting' often extends to a resistance to taking anti-depressants for fear of the incidental harm or side effects of taking them. We sometimes see people in the most awful pain but determined not to take pharmaceutical help.
There is no easy answer to the relative value of diagnosis. The type of help we offer at Anxiety Support ranges from information to individual peer support to help with problem solving and planning through to education over an extended period. Sometimes we can help people to achieve a rapid breakthrough, that 'aha' moment when things change for them. On other occasions we are providing a layering of knowledge over a longer period and the aha moment may actually be a gradually growing feeling of empowerment, which begins to supplant those anxious feelings. Or it may take the form of your once again feeling your potential and becoming determined to not let anxiety continue to compromise you.
Whatever approach is taken success depends to a significant degree on a person's ability to be 'present.' Where the pain caused by anxiety's symptoms significantly detracts from that being present many people continue to struggle. Which leads me to my next blog about 'When is it Painful Enough to Seek Help.'
Ian
