Diagnosed as Delusional

I want to take a few minutes to unpack certain aspects of what it was like to get Disbelieved and Section Twelve'd that day, because I think a large part of it was that I'm a little different to begin with. I have ASD, ADHD, OCD, GAD, and some sort of mood-disorder issues that are up for debate (some say seasonal depression; some say Bipolar I; some just say Unspecified Mood Disorder). But, taking all that into account, I do think I was at an especially high risk of a bad outcome at the hospital because of said differences, even given what I was telling them (which, yeah, I knew damn well sounded nuts at first-pass). 

Really, the whole process of getting labeled delusional was astonishing to me, even if I knew it was a huge risk when I walked in there. Frankly, it's still completely wild, conceptually, to think about how it apparently happens: the process simply doesn't hold up, logically. Delusionality is, more or less, the persistent adherence to a false belief, despite being confronted with strong counterevidence. And yet...nobody ever did anything to actually determine if the belief in question was false in the first place. They all just asserted that it was. And further, nobody ever even attempted to present me with counterevidence to my belief, which I was prepared to accept in the form of being told that someone had actually asked, and that the shows had denied it. The story I was telling (the story I am relating now) was nothing paranormal or impossible. It was internally consistent, and it was empirically grounded in what I remembered having said, done, verbally agreed to, and enacted in the very recent past. The story contained, from the beginning, a relatively trivial mechanism for confirmation or disconfirmation, which would have taken all of...what...ten minutes of someone's time to send a couple of emails or DMs? And yet nobody at the first hospital could spare those minutes. Nor at the second hospital, where I was locked up for a week and a half, surrounded by 24-hour staff, who were often not busy. Nor at the third hospital, where I spent weeks in a partial hospitalization program. Nor at my second round of that same program a year later. Nor at any time, with any provider, at any practice since then, including a bunch of people I've reached out to or met with online to make that specific request.

Similarly, nobody in the whole process ever took any steps to evaluate whether I was capable of coming up with or arranging such ideas and plans as those which I reported having generated (including this investigation). I really did come up with some wild ideas during that producer-meeting (as my book details). But, in my medical records, all the providers just definitively assert that I'm being grandiose, without any evidence that I was actually wrong about having had some good ideas. Nor does anyone ever even substantively attempt to assess my familiarity with or conversance in the subjects or disciplines in question, before labeling me grandiose. What was grandiose about saying I'd come up with an idea that I really had come up with? Or that I'd said a thing or spoken to someone, when I really had done it? And even if my memories had been flawed, the ideas were clearly within my actual default intellectual capacities, had anyone asked me to expound on the topics or analyze the ideas or their implementations. And yet...grandiosity became another symptom on the checklist toward Sectioning. 

Further, since I'm on the subject of truth: my medical records are just chock full of biased, loaded, and straight-up inaccurate characterizations of my thought processes and beliefs (e.g. "thought-insertion" is mentioned, which is completely false). Biased distortions even manifest for specific events in my then-recent past, to which no doctor was a witness, and which they describe in ways that directly contradict how I would have recounted things to them. For just one example: the doctors radically misrepresent an incident wherein CBS wrongly called the cops on me, and the doctors then use that misrepresentation as part of the justification for holding me on Section 12. One doctor writes that "police have needed to be called multiple times due to his behavioral dysregulation." That is simply not what I think happened, nor what I would have told them. There had only been a single recent police interaction. And I was, at that time, one hundred percent certain that it had been an unjustified call, and a violation of my rights by CBS, and further, that I had been found by the police to be completely harmless. The bodycam footage that I just recently received (in late May of this year) now supports my persistent recollection of the evaluative portions of that conversation: that I was coherent, self-aware, purposeful, interruptible, sometimes funny, doing nothing at all illegal, and so obviously non-threatening that the police cheerfully sent me on my way after a few minutes, with directions toward NBC, so that I could try my luck with another studio. So...how did that police interaction (which actually turned out great, and which was, in reality, an instance of my conducting myself phenomenally successfully with law-enforcement) somehow end up becoming multiple incidents, constituting a pattern, which was then used to explicitly exemplify my alleged dangerous dysregulation, as justification for Sectioning me, all under the signature of someone who didn't even witness the incident, and whose description of it directly contradicted my own statements and the historical reality [as now backed up by video]? 

But, apparently, once people decide that you're delusional, every single thing that you say is judged to be equally crazy and unreliable. And you can never recover. Especially if you're on a few spectra and communicate or emote a little differently to begin with. My records from my arrival at the third hospital describe me as having "difficulty with reality-testing around what could have led police to be called." That is a comment, written by a doctor who wasn't there, accepting at face-value the (in my opinion) materially-inaccurate description previously written down by another doctor, who also wasn't there, rather than listening to the patient in front of her (whom she has already preemptively dismissed as delusional), in order to characterize that patient's insistence on his own memories of the events [which were later supported in certain key ways by video evidence] as further proof of his dysregulation, delusionality, and unreliability as a narrator of his own story. 

What are we doing? 

How often are we treating people like this? How many people like me just never get the benefit of video vindication, or can't articulate their own stories and perspectives effectively for themselves, or can't afford the personal risks of publicly discussing their experiences? How often does this happen to people who didn't volunteer? How many thousands of people get diagnosed as delusional every year? How many of them have weird stories that really are true? What's an acceptable failure-rate on that kind of system? 

This is before we even get into my allegations of human rights violations, which the third hospital documents in my intake notes (without taking down any details or pursuing any follow-up). (I have a lot of thoughts on that subject.) Honestly...I kind of hope that it was just the doctors dismissing me as delusional, or just being terrible at their jobs in that regard. Because the other most obvious explanation would seem to be that they didn't want to risk causing trouble for their partner institution within their hospital network, at which I was claiming to have just witnessed human rights violations. But that's an unworthy and unkind thought to entertain. (And again, I'm not looking for ammo for a lawsuit here, nor am I presently alleging malpractice in my own personal regard. I'm just looking for truth at this point.)

Sorry. I'm off on a tangent now. As usual, a lot of this comes out nonlinearly (and if you scope my book, you'll become intimately familiar with that). [Speaking of the book; it still needs revision, and it's not perfectly accurate; it was the best I could do in the mental state I was in at the time, and I've made a lot of progress toward reconstructing the events more accurately. Hence, the upcoming revisions I mentioned earlier. For instance: I initially jigsawed everything I said at CBS into a reconstructed vague approximation of the conversation with the cops, but in reality I must have said a lot of what I remember to Security or to another CBS staffer, before the cops were even called. The bodycam footage is super useful for sorting the details out. I might still one day have to sue CBS for a dollar to get their tapes/records of the earlier interactions in discovery, but that's a matter for another time.]

Anyway, back to where we started this portion: the decision to Section me. To be clear: I was all over the damn place emotionally when I was in the emergency room (as I explain in detail in my book). But I was also abundantly explicit with the doctors that I was safe, and that I was not a danger to myself or anyone else (repeated statements which the medical records acknowledge), and nobody documented any actual observed dangerous behavior. I described myself as something like a complete emotional clusterfuck, but I remember pairing it with an assertion of safety. And making such assertions repeatedly, almost obsessively. Now, is it still possible that Sectioning me was the right call, ultimately? Maybe so. But then...why do the doctors feel the need to (again, in my opinion) materially misrepresent my beliefs, my state of mind, my capacities, and my recent history of behavior, in order to reach the justification-level required for holding me? And why does someone sign their name to a statement saying that they've checked and verified that all the above information is true and accurate...when nobody did any such thing?

I don't know. Maybe I really am wrong about my whole story, top-to-bottom. Maybe I really am delusional. But nothing about the process of getting diagnosed and treated as such seems to lend any credence, at all, to that conclusion. And once that diagnosis was made, it seems to have then preemptively invalidated essentially anything else I had to say, whenever the providers found my statements inconvenient to believe or to deal with. Any display of emotion in disagreement with the doctors was taken as yet further evidence of Chip's craziness. So...if I really am delusional, then I'd argue that the diagnosis got it right by coincidence, and not by logic and careful consideration of the evidence. And I feel confident also in asserting that (right or wrong) that diagnosis was then improperly and prejudicially applied toward further evaluations and interactions with me, in a way that caused lasting psychological damage. (Though, to reiterate, I am not seeking a lawsuit here.)

The core questions are, again: how often does this happen to people? And what really happened to me? 

Anyway. Now? Two-and-a-half years later, I still can't get a single mental health provider to do anything at all to check my story. And one of the saddest things that it looks like I'm going to have to report in my book is the apparent reality of an entire profession's--no, an entire field's--collective comfort with a studious indifference to the underlying truth of what their charges are actually telling them, even in the miraculously convenient situation in which the truth is definitively checkable, in ten minutes. Nobody has ever been willing to so much as pick up a phone, or send an email, or drop someone a DM on socials. To see if maybe, just maybe, I'm actually right about this whole thing. 

Or, hell, even just to be able to tell me that the shows denied everything, so that there would be at least some evidence for me to consider, as I struggle every day to radically accept the truth that I really am delusional after all. 

Sorry. That came out a little bitter. 

Admittedly, I'm beyond frustrated, but I'm not actually angry at any particular person for declining to check, because nobody should feel pressured to do anything they're legitimately not comfortable with here. And, quite obviously: it's nobody's job. 

That seems like it needs to change. 

A lot needs to change.