10 Jul 2018, 10:35 am
10 Jul 2018, 10:46 am
Trogluddite wrote:
Glad to see you're still posting and fighting the good fight, skibum, and that you are still able to see the funny side despite what you've been going through. 
I think your general point about services trying to squish us into "one size fits all" interventions is spot on. In my experience, it doesn't just apply to crisis hotlines, but often also to medical staff, social services, counsellors, school educational interventions and many more. I was diagnosed well into middle age, and while my coping strategies aren't perfect and I still strive to improve them, I have learned an awful lot in those decades about the workings of my mind; through introspection, empirically by trial and error, and through communities like this one. I'm open-minded about suggestions, but they should be just that; suggestions, not rigidly enforced pathways designed originally for people with different psychology to mine or anyone else's.
To most of my doctors, I have been deemed an ungrateful and awkward patient when I suggest that anti-depressants don't work for me, or that I need mental rest or diversions to hyper-focus on, not emotionally intense counselling, when I am burned out. Likewise with counsellors who seemed determined to fit certain traits into models of psychological trauma when I knew them to be neurologically innate (alexithymia and sensory processing in particular.) The attitude of social services has been much like you said in the OP. My lack of intellectual impairment means that I'm allowed to access very little, and what I can access is always the same; push, push, push to restore the more neuro-typical behaviour which has previously been seen when my masking was working, at just the time when that is the very thing which made me crash and burn in the first place. As soon as my basic social functions seem to be working again (masking is back on line), I am deemed to need no help at all - so nothing preventative is ever in place to avoid endlessly repeating the cycle.
Regardless of what the crisis line worker was taught, the organisation that they work for should, at the very least, have something more robust in place for callers who don't respond favourably besides simply cutting off a call. No individual volunteer can hope to help every single caller, nor will a generic assessment (i.e. designed for typical psychology) of suicide risk be accurate for all callers, and it is folly or hubris not to recognise this.
Thank you. I think your general point about services trying to squish us into "one size fits all" interventions is spot on. In my experience, it doesn't just apply to crisis hotlines, but often also to medical staff, social services, counsellors, school educational interventions and many more. I was diagnosed well into middle age, and while my coping strategies aren't perfect and I still strive to improve them, I have learned an awful lot in those decades about the workings of my mind; through introspection, empirically by trial and error, and through communities like this one. I'm open-minded about suggestions, but they should be just that; suggestions, not rigidly enforced pathways designed originally for people with different psychology to mine or anyone else's.
To most of my doctors, I have been deemed an ungrateful and awkward patient when I suggest that anti-depressants don't work for me, or that I need mental rest or diversions to hyper-focus on, not emotionally intense counselling, when I am burned out. Likewise with counsellors who seemed determined to fit certain traits into models of psychological trauma when I knew them to be neurologically innate (alexithymia and sensory processing in particular.) The attitude of social services has been much like you said in the OP. My lack of intellectual impairment means that I'm allowed to access very little, and what I can access is always the same; push, push, push to restore the more neuro-typical behaviour which has previously been seen when my masking was working, at just the time when that is the very thing which made me crash and burn in the first place. As soon as my basic social functions seem to be working again (masking is back on line), I am deemed to need no help at all - so nothing preventative is ever in place to avoid endlessly repeating the cycle.
Regardless of what the crisis line worker was taught, the organisation that they work for should, at the very least, have something more robust in place for callers who don't respond favourably besides simply cutting off a call. No individual volunteer can hope to help every single caller, nor will a generic assessment (i.e. designed for typical psychology) of suicide risk be accurate for all callers, and it is folly or hubris not to recognise this.
I completely relate to everything you said. As a person diagnosed at the age of 47, I have developed coping mechanisms that are instinctive and very very complex and that actually work for the intensity levels of things that I deal with all the time as a much more severely Autistic than anyone realizes due to my outward appearance. All I need is for people like doctors and crisis workers and other people to realize that as a 51 year old person, I actually do know myself pretty well and the things that I ask of them to help me cope are not difficult things that they can't do. They are just things that they refuse to do because I don't fit into any of their predetermined boxes like you mentioned. I am sorry if people think I am ungrateful for the coping mechanisms they want me to have but those methods will never work for me and they need to try to understand that. It is infinitesimally frustrating to have to deal with this all the time and from almost everyone. Just the sheer fatigue and constant wearing down of having to deal with this issue for decades is enough to make someone become suicidal.
And if you are in crisis, you should not have to coddle the people who are supposed to be there to help you and just understand how they are just not equipped to help you even though that is their only reason for being there at that job. It should not be the responsibility of the person who is in the crisis moment to have to accommodate the system that is supposed to help her. I often tell my psychologist, "It is not my job to coddle you. " I like him because he wants to learn and is willing to learn about me and my Autism and he really does a lot of stuff for me that my inadequate social worker is supposed to do. But I challenge him all the time to stop using his little boxes and to stop trying to stuff people into them when they don't fit.
