03/17/2014
By Chaya Grossberg
What is informed consent? Informed consent obviously means if you are being given drugs you should know the common and potential adverse affects, drug interactions, risk of dependency and addiction, and counter-indications with other substances, health conditions or health concerns. This is the baseline of informed consent (which many people don’t receive) but there is an incredible amount more that is included in what you deserve to know about any drug you are prescribed or medical system you are advised to subscribe to. Informed consent includes adequate, transparent knowledge of the following things:
Informed consent is the largest history book and encyclopedia you’ve ever seen and informed consent lies in the rising and falling of your own breath-it lies within you.
Informed consent is knowing what is on your food, water and air and why. Who profits?
Informed consent is the voice within you, quiet or loud, the feeling you get of trust or distrust about a person, place or decision.
Informed consent doesn’t always have to be explained-sometimes it’s something you just know.
Informed consent is knowing which questions to ask; it’s withdrawing from mainstream media and pop culture enough to develop your own prescience. Once you develop that, informed consent become secondary to your inner wise self who is so much larger than a diagnostic medical system.
No one is going to give you complete informed consent. The best a doctor can do is give you the information they have, encourage you to do your own research, admit that their system has holes and encourage you to follow your own feelings, intuitions and to make your own decision. Of course our decisions are biased and affected by the water we’re swimming in, but no one will spoon feed you complete informed consent. When we are healing ourselves, we are also healing the cultural narrative, the history, biology and medicine of many years and many other people. Being one person who finds what informed consent means for you and commits to it is a powerful force and source of healing for all beings. Healing is never isolated, never isolated in a person, a relationship, a time period, a system of medicine, a pill bottle or a doctors office.
Healing is big. It’s about everything. It’s as big as that history book and encyclopedia about informed consent and maybe a bit bigger. Don’t let psychiatry make you small, projecting its insecurities and inadequacies onto you. Of course a form of medicine that is so limited will tell you you are so limited too. It’s a lie. You aren’t. Your voice and truth and fight for informed consent is huge and getting larger everyday. There’s no turning back now.
Healing with informed consent is a state of expansion. It’s all seeing, all knowing, all wise. It’s light years larger than the DSM. It’s you.