Witching on the internet I just found out that I have a thing called dermatilomania. It is an obsessive disorder that consists of scratching or pinching parts of the body until it is injured. I pinch the skins of my fingers, along with my nails. Sometimes I pull harder and end up hurting myself little; other times the skinning delight (because it's a joy to do so) seems to cool off for months. Perhaps stress plays a role, or perhaps inactivity (that is, freer fingers to pinch). In any case, it is something that has never bothered me; My mother already did it and I have several friends with the same mania. When you hurt yourself it is annoying (they sting a lot with the hydroalcoholic gel), but that annoyance has never been great enough to want to stop doing it.As for being obsessive, she knew that too. You can't write a novel without having your share of obsession. There are very profitable obsessions.
These labels, in short, have slipped over me without leaving a trace, neither positive nor negative. But, in general, naming produces effects. I mean to be named, to be cataloged, to be put in a drawer. Three years ago I published an article about people with high sensitivity (PAS), a behavior that was defined by the American psychologist Elaine Aron in the nineties. According to her, between 15% and 20% of the world's population is PAS: empathetic and hypersensitive people. Well, many readers were relieved to be able to get into that group: "When I discovered that I was a PAS I felt better, because I always thought that I did not fit in with this world and I thought I was a freak." Aron considers that being PAS is not a disease but a personality characteristic, and this undoubtedly influences the positive effect:better to be known as an honorable PAS than to be labeled hysterical.
So sometimes naming saves. I guess it has to do with how bad you feel. Let's say there is someone who pinches himself and hurts himself so much that it makes it difficult for him to show himself in public; And let's say he feels lonely and a bit of a monster. Perhaps sheltering under the umbrella of dermatilomania and knowing that it happens to almost 2% of the population will be comforting.
But other times naming is a condemnation. I have a friend who was diagnosed with bipolar ten years ago and medicated accordingly. They considered her, and she considered herself, a crazy official. A good psychiatrist recently told him that the diagnosis was wrong, because a single manic episode, and also with external causes, is not enough to catalog you. Now my friend is taking her medicines little by little and she is recovering her life. "I've been bipolar for more than eight years," he says overwhelmingly.
The psychologist David Rosenhan made a famous experiment from 1968 to 1972 (although a recent book questions the reliability of the first part of the research). He and seven other mentally healthy collaborators simulated acoustic hallucinations and were admitted to various psychiatric hospitals in the United States. As soon as they were admitted, they behaved normally and told the doctors that they were fine and that they no longer had hallucinations. All were forced to acknowledge that they suffered from a mental illness and to take antipsychotics as a condition to be discharged (some spent two months in prison). One of the hospitals challenged Rosenhan to send a few pseudopatients for its staff to detect, a challenge that the psychologist accepted. For three months, the hospital treated 193 patients,and identified 41 as possible imposters. But Rosenhan hadn't actually sent anyone. The study concludes: "It is clear that in psychiatric hospitals we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane."
But all this, being without a doubt very serious, is not the worst. The most atrocious thing is not that they label you, but that that label is devastating. This is: I am very concerned that there are other people who, as my friend says, “are being bipolar” wrongly. But I'm even more concerned that being bipolar carries such a stigma. Let it be a destructive jail, a drawer that closes on you as definitively as a grave.
