Where a completely predictable disaster happened: The ER discovered that I had a psychiatric history. And that was the end of any further diagnostic work. Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces. A psychiatric patient at a program where Steve once worked went for weeks with a broken back; none of the medical people the patient saw took the man’s pain seriously—he was a mental patient. So once the ER learned I had a mental illness and was on antipsychotic medication, the diagnosis was written in stone: I was “just”
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