Pat Deegan who I've mentioned on this site before speaks in this video of her experience of being diagnosed with schizophrenia and recovering. She also talks about what all of us who have been labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis experience---the loss of identity as it's handed over to us being our disease.
Thirty Years Later: Still Cured of Paranoid Schizophrenia
Intensive Psychotherapy can be transformative. It was for Lois and it has been for others. How does it transform? By talking about and working through the patient’s own metaphor, concretized into hallucinations and delusions. My fingers typing are the result of brain reactions and chemicals. When a person is beset by his own thought productions and doesn’t recognize that they come from within, it is a small step to become either terrified or enraged or dissociated; or some combination of each. All of these reactions have a chemical substrate.
Courage and recovery
When I talk about my recovery, people sometimes tell me I must have a lot of courage. However, if I am honest, I would have to say I never felt particularly courageous during my recovery. Mostly I felt determined, afraid and uncertain. I felt determined to get well, afraid I couldn’t do it and uncertain about how to get the life I wanted for myself. I was not a courageous hero. I was scared and vulnerable, but I continued (on most days) to put one foot in front of the other on the long walk of my recovery.