the Psychological Badness Scale (Repost)

[lb_lee]

(This is an excised chunk of How to Make A Pocket Crisis Guide because I continually need to reference this and it's a useful tool all on its own.)

People often don't realize they're bats! When your radar is broken, you have to come up with a scale to measure how bad things are, and it has to be simple enough that you can understand it even when blitzed out of your gourd. A daunting task, yes, but these folks' work might give you a good start:

* Alice Rich's Comparative Pain Scale
* the American Chronic Pain Association's Quality of Life Scale
* Allie Brosch's Pain Scale

Here's mine, if you're curious:



You can communicate this scale in text, colors, drawings, emoticons--8D :D :) :| :( D: D8--whatever gets the message across. I use the 1-10 scale for most daily use, red-yellow-green scale when moderately impaired, and the Five Questions when I'm full-on Bruce Wayne's Basement:



Try to think of what the most salient characteristics are of your crisis state. If you can come up with a simple litmus test that even catastrophically crazy you can get through, you're golden. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you: one of my instant "shit's bad" warnings is an inability to think questions. Maybe yours is your mouth tasting like an overspent electrical socket, or inability to stop crying. Whatever it is, it's good to know.

(Sadly, building a litmus test that simple often only comes after a few times getting thrown off the rodeo brain-bronco. Live and learn, hopefully?)