I am Not Your Diagnosis (Creative Writing)

I have been practicing graphic design with Canva by taking lines from my poems and making laptop or phone backgrounds with them. It has been fun! I posted a few of them on Pinterest and will keep doing that I think since I am enjoying it. https://www.pinterest.com/psychiatrysurvivorvoices/

Below is my latest poem/creative writing that I made a laptop background/wallpaper from.

I am Not Your Diagnosis

By Rachel Ann (November 1, 2025)

I am more than a case number in a file. 

I am more than some papers in your cabinet and numbers in a health portal.

As you sit there drunk off all your unchecked power and overwhelming ego, I can’t help but feel pity for you-for your inability to learn and grow and your inability to see the human being sitting in front of you.

Perhaps you are blinded by the stunning brilliance of your bright white coat, perhaps greed and a thirst for money are what compose your blindfold. 

But either way, this blindfold prevents you from seeing not just the human being sitting before you- but many other things as well. It keeps you from learning, how can you grow and improve if you refuse to admit that you could ever possibly be incorrect in your conclusions.

Have you forgotten that you are human as well? Have you forgotten that your knowledge is not infinite and all encompassing, but rather imperfect, with many gaps and much missing  knowledge?

This is why I feel pity for you. You sit across from me loudly typing into your computer, checking off boxes to assign diagnoses and then medications, asking questions from a list like you are packing an item in a factor line.

And you are under the delusion that you are some superior being because of your knowledge, which you believe to be infinite. How pitiful a state to believe that you are in power, to believe that you are on top, when really you are in a cage of your own blindness and your own ignorance.

So I smile softly to myself. Where I used to feel burning hatred for your kind, now only pity remains. For I know that the truth still remains true whether or not small minds acknowledge it. And what a sad way it is to exist in a state of sameness- never growing, never opening your eyes to the people in front of you, never learning.

Simply doomed to checking off boxes on a list for the entirety of your life. Perhaps this doesn’t bother you since the job of physician pays well enough that you can forget humanity and empathy-if you ever possessed them in the first place. 

Or perhaps working in such a cold uncaring field has slowly snuffed out the fire of humanity that used to burn within you. Perhaps you too were young and bright and full of hope and wonder once.

Perhaps you set off to medical  school with that fiery determination, with that dream of helping people and making a difference, only to find out that the system you would be working in doesn’t care about the people-but the profit.

And perhaps the years made you weary and the fire that once was burnt out and the only way you could cope was by forgetting your humanity.

But whatever the reason, the truth and fact remains. I am a human being, I am more than your diagnosis.

I am not some case for you to file away and dismiss. You cannot erase me with your documents and your words, you cannot fit me into your boxes.

I was once told that the root of all evil is money. I didn’t believe it then, but now I see that it is the truth.

Money takes healthcare and turns it into a transaction, a business, a scramble to profit off of the suffering of people who deserved better.

It creates a system that crushes and stamps out the fire that may have once burned in those tasked with taking care of the sick and the hurting.

But it is not impossible to reignite a fire that has burnt out, if one finds the spark to ignite their heart again.

I am a human, a beautiful spirit of hope burns within me and it cannot be contained or erased with your diagnoses and your sterilized pathological ways.