Personal Medicine, Empowering People | By Lael Ewy

When you hear the word “medicine,” you probably think of a bottle full of pills. This is the experience for most of us when we have a physical ailment, and it is often the experience when we have a psychiatric ailment as well. Whatever your views on the “medicalization” of psychiatric diagnoses, pills don’t treat the whole person. And since we’re all different, a whole person approach must be unique to the individual, a “personal” medicine. 

One promoter of personal medicine is Pat Deegan, a mental health consumer and psychologist, who developed a workshop of video presentations and workbook activities called Common Ground to help get mental health consumers in touch with their own personal medicine and to help them personalize their medication experience. 

Nancy Jensen, a Certified Peer Specialist and member of the CPS training team at the Center for Community Support and Research, is both a user of and tireless advocate for the Common Ground curriculum. Nancy came across Common Ground after joining CCSR. “I found myself not wanting to go back to where I was before,” she says, but initially dismissed Common Ground as “just another workbook.” What she discovered was a program for empowering mental health consumers. 

Nancy had been an “aggressive” consumer, one who insisted the provider “had to do it my way.” She says an empowered consumer, on the other hand, allows the provider to have expertise but not to take away the consumer’s control over her own life and medication. Common Ground, Nancy explains, puts forward that there are two experts in the room: the provider and the consumer. 

Key to this is the “power statement,” a statement the consumer uses to express to her provider what she wants out of treatment, what parts of her life she won’t let treatment interfere with. The power statement is formed around personal medicine: the things in life that make one feel good, and feel good about life. For Nancy at that time, that was working and taking care of her cat.      

Another important part of Common Ground that Nancy finds powerful is the idea that emotions are not symptoms. Often, those with psychiatric diagnoses (and sometimes their doctors and loved ones) are so used to seeing what they feel as aspects of illness that they lose sight of the fact that emotions are a natural part of life, genuine reactions to one’s life and the direction it’s going. 

These tools not only help people recover, they help people avoid  the “medication trap,” where the side effects of a medication keep one from pursuing personal medicine, but the lack of medication exacerbates symptoms, also preventing one from pursuing personal medicine. Common Ground advocates "trade-offs” between personal and pill medicine, and the use of power statements to help providers understand the need to help people do those things that make their lives worthwhile. 

Nancy points out that not just pill medication can lead one into the medication trap; therapy can too. She also stresses that the ideas of personal medicine and power statements can be useful for anybody, not just those with psychiatric diagnoses.