u/personal_lucifer

For me it was these three things, in order:

1. Finding out how abusive the system can be towards patients and experiencing some of it firsthand. This made me critical of psychiatry as an institution, but not as a science just yet.
2. Sincerely falling in love and reflecting on how one of my diagnostic labels (a PD) was pathologizing and even demonizing my feelings, which was disgusting. This made me start thinking critically about the validity of psychiatric interpretations of human life.
3. Finding out during a random self-therapy session that my "imaginary friend" - who was previously regarded as a symptom of some sort of a schizo spectrum disorder - was actually my alter. (Or best understood as such in the psychiatric framework, anyway.) This was the last straw for me. This realization, combined with how none of the psych specialists I talked to over the years ever even suggested a dissociative angle, discredited the psychiatric diagnostic process so bad in my eyes that I decided that I'm officially done with it.

I've generally rejected the psychiatric interpretation of myself since then. I'm not looking for an official diagnosis for the alter thing either - if anything, I'm allowing myself to have a spiritual interpretation of it now rather than a psychiatric one, and it's pretty nice. Not looking at myself through the psych lens is nice in general. Freeing. I don't remember the last time I felt this organically myself!

Anyway, please tell me your own turning away from psychiatry stories? c: