Luxia Le

One thing that I think most people are acutely aware of is that mental health matters. Whether you look at it through one lens or another, the conclusions are all the same: without taking care of our mental health, taking care of our physical health is moot.

I have been trying to take care of my mental health for a very long time, to marginal success. I onset my first schizophrenia symptoms and entered the prodromal phase around the age of 11, when I first started puberty. That means now, at almost 30, I’ve been diagnosably schizophrenic for more of my life than I was considered “healthy.”

Being a sick person, especially growing up sick, taught me a lot about how mental health is treated by practitioners and what kind of holes exist in the system.

My first therapist experience was a mind bogglingly terrible experience and it’s kind of a wonder that I managed to get myself back into therapy and succeed after it went down. Basically, I went to this therapist that was close to my school that apparently “all the kids at school go to” (as if that’s not a red flag and conflict of interest).

I get to this first session and I am prepped. I practiced my story, made sure to write down critical details on my notecard, and I was ready. Then, I get inside, I sit down, and I pour my little heart out. I go on for about 15 minutes, just relaying the details of my family’s abuse and the bullying at school and how I felt sick and was hearing voices and losing time.

This woman looks me dead in the eyes after all this and simply says, “Well, you sound miserable.” No advice, no empathy, no sympathy, just “You sound miserable.” I got up and walked out that day. Never went back.

It really showed me how mental health is stigmatized, even by people who are supposedly trained to offer support to mentally ill people. A sick, abused teenager was simply “miserable” without any further context. My struggles and abuse was not relevant to this woman, just that I felt “needlessly miserable” so to speak. I was something wrong to fix not a person with needs not being met.

I hope this can be an eye-opening message to all therapists to do better and don’t further generational abuse in patients.