ABSTRACT
When I first encountered the term survivor, I felt hesitant. It seemed to have unsettling similarities to “cure”: a survivor, I thought, implicitly had had a traumatic experience and come out the other side. This doesn’t describe my experience. I make regular use of the psychiatric system, and I consider myself the agent and director of my treatments; for example, I interviewed and discarded psychiatrists until I found one who agrees with my approach to my bodymind.2 However, there is no avoiding the fact that he, not I, wields the power of the prescription pad. In addition, I possess the economic and cultural privilege that permits me to try out and reject various caregivers, a privilege not open to many in the c/s/x group. And finally, like any “patient,” I am subject to my caregivers’ power over information. For example, when my psychiatrist and my therapist conferred and arrived at one of my diagnoses, they chose not to share that diagnosis with me until some months later (their stared reason being that I had been in the midst of a crisis and was not ready to process the information). As it happens, I think they made an appropriate decision, but the fact remains that regardless of what I thought, the outcome would have been the same; I had no say in the matter.
