You Are Not My Doctor

Dear You,

You know exactly who you are, as you are reading this letter. It does not matter how much research you claim you have done. Nor does it matter if you took a few psychology classes when you were achieving your Bachelor's Depree so you could be a Peer Counselor for Drugs and Alcohol. You are neither my Behavioral Therapist nor my Neurologist, nor are you my Physician. You have not read the reports from the fMRI sessions to see if my brain is developed inside the norms for Autism (when my doctor wanted to be sure my symptoms were definitely PDD-NOS, and not something more serious), nor have you read any of the case notes from my Psychiatrist. You are not my doctor. Stop trying to un-diagnose me based on your under experienced, uneducated, irrelevant points of view. I know more about my brain, and how it functions, than you ever will because you don't bother to take the time to hear my story.

This is far from a comfortable thing to say to you. At one point I considered you an important player in my field. Unfortunately, now you are becoming a dangerous hindrance to my recovery and to my functionality. So I need you to read this, I need you to hear me out on the claims you made about me. When I told you I was clinically diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, you insisted that I lied so well to my psychiatrist - after a year of cognitive testing, medication attempts, and faltering - that they diagnosed me officially with a serious form of Depression. This did me nothing but harm. In fact, it fell in line as evidence that you have zero education on this disorder in any way shape or form. Insisting that I do not have the symptoms that you - not a doctor of any kind - would expect, proved was concrete evidence.

When you attacked my Autism, again from your point of view (while STILL not being a doctor), you attacked one of my greatest sources of insecurity. I am constantly anxious about going into public because I can only tolerate so much input before I turn into a puddle and start to cry and try to run away. That, by the way, is called Bolting. It's a last-ditch effort to avoid having a painful, terrifying, and embarrassing meltdown around people who will mock me, or call the police, or otherwise humiliate me even further. I would start cussing at you here because the way you treat me warrants it, but this is for my blog - so I won't. I am actively choosing not to regard your input as valid or important in any sense because you have made a case against your own self.

From this point onward, your input will be rejected as faulty, and not medically prompted. I will no longer consider your evaluations of me as valid in any form until you admit that you are not a doctor of any kind, and never will be. In particular - you will never be my doctor, and so you have absolutely no diagnostic validity in my medical care. Get over it. This is how it is going to be from now on.

Peace, Love, and Bulletproof Marshmallows,
Mandey T