How being chronically ill affects your mental health- and how you can begin to understand yourself just a little better.
Being a therapist dealing with multiple chronic illness diagnoses tends to make me feel like a bit of a contradiction. How am I, a healthcare professional, meant to provide wholly competent counseling to others when I have not been taught how to unravel the medical system for myself?
Navigating the healthcare system while not burning oneself out is something I’ve been struggling with throughout the past few months, and especially for clients with chronic illness, I have not found as many resources for legitimate self care other than “meditate, drink a cup of tea, and take a bubble bath” as I would have hoped. A theory that has allowed me to understand chronic illness as a holistic concept tied to mental health is Spoon Theory. Created by Christine Miserandino, spoon theory is a concept that allows chronically ill people to explain their condition and abilities to others in a way that is accessible- thereby making invisible, chronic illnesses more visible. For example, say that you as a chronically ill person start your day with 20 spoons. Showering takes 2, as does getting out of bed and making yourself breakfast. By the time you’ve gotten to dinner, you have one spoon left. By understanding how much energy a specific task takes, you then understand what you’ll be able to do with the spoons you have left. It allows you to understand your body's capabilities while undergoing a diagnosis- even though your diagnosis may be what is used to refer to you, it doesn’t mean your body’s capabilities have changed, just the words used by doctors to describe it.
As mentioned earlier, spoon theory helps create visibility for the chronically ill. It allows people outside the community to understand what people who are chronically ill are going through, and lets them communicate on the “spoonie’s” own terms, letting them dictate how their body is spoken about with others. Chronic illness can be lonely, allowing people to feel isolated and unaligned from those around them. This can make those who are chronically ill feel invisible and misunderstood in the rest of the medical community, around those who are supposed to understand them, and can cause self-doubt and feelings of imposter syndrome. Lack of self-trust and self-understanding sets in, and people begin to doubt very valid symptoms they have been feeling within their own bodies throughout most, if not all of their lives.
So, what can we do? Most importantly, practicing self care is a good way to manage symptoms within your own body and understand how that connects to what and how you’re feeling mentally. Self-care is a word that is thrown around quite a bit in the mental health field, but what does it mean for someone who is chronically ill and cannot understand their own body? For one, it means being able to regulate yourself- whether that is through making yourself the easiest meal possible and acknowledging you are still eating, or being able to understand how many spoons you have left in a day to parse out what you are able to accomplish.
Community and collective healing, too, are essential contributions for self-care and detractors from loneliness for the chronically ill community. Being able to find people who experience the same symptoms that you do can be healing in itself, and having both those around you who both understand you and are willing to accept you for who you are can allow you to feel less lonely. Being able to learn from people who have perhaps had a diagnosis longer than you have could give you tips for self-care on tough days that doctors may not know. Having any support system, even if it is not solely others who are chronically ill, allows you to surround yourself with the people who know you and allow you to be who you are on the good days and more importantly, the bad ones.
Comments