WelcomeWhy I do not trust mental health professionals, licensed or other
"Why are you doing this to me?" (Words captured by a surveillance camera in New York City's Bellevue Hospital. Spoken by a woman doctor, who was being murdered by an intruder)
Lots of people are often busy trying to mess with people's heads. Parents do it. School teachers do it. Preachers, rabbis, Imams, evangelists and other ecclesiastics do it. Mad[ison Avenue] men do it....
Nurture first.
"Treatment"
only as last resort.
But "mental health professionals" are like the difference between gun enthusiasts and military sharp shooters. They don't just do it: they are trained to do it to very high standards of proficiency. The more you know, the more dangerous you can be. And if you are armed with a state license to practice psychology, you can get people committed to psychiatric institutions and have their brains fried with electric current, or get them declared mentally incompetent so that maybe their daddy can make a lot of money off being their [non-fiduciary] "custodian".... "For their your own good" (Alice Miller book title)
When ordinary folks believe in the social customs of their social surround, it's bad. When a mental health professional is an agent of the ambient ideology, they have permits to carry high-power weapons to colonize your mind. Don't let anybody know you have unorthodox thoughts, or they might get you "treated" by one of these licensed mental health professionals, again, "For their your own good" (Alice Miller book title)
Let's consider a specific example. In U.S.A. (not ancient Greek colony Sinope) middle class, there is a social taboo against a person squatting and defecating in public. A person can take two very different attitudes toward another person who might violate this taboo. If the spectatorial person is infected by the taboo, they would be appalled that somebody would even mention the possibility of breaking the taboo, much less actually – horror of horrors! – do it. A person who was not infected by the taboo, on the other hand, would strongly urge the other person to think extremely carefully and not foolishly violate the taboo, not because there is anything wrong with defecating in public, but because some people think it is wrong and would harm you if you do it. The first person is being prig; the second person is thinking self-defense. The first person is part of the problem; the second person perceives there are persons who are problems and you must be guarded against them hurting you.
Now, let's say a person tells another person that while they were on a walk in a wooded area near their house, and they had desparately to go to the toilet or soil themselves miserably, a lay person who was colonized by the taboo would likely think the person did something awful and wish the person had not talked to them about such a verboten thing, how dare they, but it would probably end there with, at worst, a broken friendship. If a mental health professional found out the person had engaged in such "abnormal" behavior, they might have the person committed to a mental hospital as a psychotic, have their mind destroyed with electric shock, to cure the person of their mental illness and make them "normal" so that the person would never have any [unacceptable] thoughts in future. A metabolizing body that has lost its mind (not by going mad but by having been "treated" by the licensed mental health professional). And the licensed mental health professional goes their merry way having collected their hourly rate for their correct performance of the profession the practice of which they have been licensed by the goverment. And the licensed mental health professional sleeps well, satisfied they have helped keep The Free World safe that day. If they were a graduate of a certain university, they would have done it for "God, Country and Yale".
The kind of mental health professional who considers all social customs to be just unreflected social conditioning, can be very helpful in guiding patient to not do things "people" don't like because the "people" may hurt them, which is, objectively, so to speak, not good for them: Think what you want, but say what people want to hear, and put on a happy face for all the many all too many people who will hurt you if you trouble their taboo-infected minds☺. The other kind of mental health professional, as I have argued above, can destroy your life and render you nothing more than a useful human resource for the set of social customs that has infected them, a bit of Shakespeare's Falstaff's "food for powder". And, to repeat, these people get paid well for doing such things, and they are licensed by the state, so they think they are "hot stuff", not creeps who should hide in shame until they turn over a new leaf, as the cliche goes. Nobody gets shamed for being a prig in America, do they?
Sometimes it's hard to tell if a mental health professional might help you or just hurt you more than you already were hurt. And they will play on your "guilty conscience" (which you got thanks to your parents, school teachers and other people who were infected with the semiotic virus), and reinforce you probably already existing doubts about yourself because your parents told you you weren't any good and didn't deserve their selfishless love.... Now what are you doing?" Etcetera and so forth. To try to trap you into letting them f*ck with your head ("If you leave treatment that shows you are trying to avoid acknowledging your problems!"), and, again, of course, to pay them well for doing it; but who pays is not important unless it's out of your own pocket, in which you are lynching yourself.
A good therapist will be your sword and shield against your parents, teachers, government, advertising and all the other vectors of the semiotic virus. You don't have to believe it, just beware that other people may hurt you if you do things that do not flatter them. Act in relation to them them like you drive your car: defensively.
Any therapist who really likes Alice Miller's books or Sandor Ferenczi's or Masud Khan's writings has given prima facie evidence that hey are either OK or really up to something covertly manipulative for pretending to be on your side. Beware orthodox Freudians whose ideology is from 19th century bourgeois Vienna, the home of "the Oedipus complex", which blames the victim.
Always remember: It's what Gregory Bateson called a "double bind". There's no way you can win once you get sucked past the event horizon of the psychosocial black hole. If you say you are not crazy that proves to them that you are severely mentally ill because they know you are severely mentally ill and one smmptom of a person being severely mentally ill is they think they are not severely mentally and the more they protest they are not severely mentally ill the more evidence you are providing of how severely mentally ill you are ill → except, of course, if you are them and then you know you are perfectly sane so you can broadcast it to the whole world ("I, who am a licensed mental health professional, am mentally normal!").... Your best hope is that they will get distracted to go off and hurt help somebody else, and forget about you for a while. ☠
Who's sick enough to want to be normal?
Who in their right mind would want to be normal? Normal people want to drink Dunkin Donut coffee in styrofoam cups, or may be even Coca-Cola, and mow their lawns, yawn. Normal is subpar, isn't it? And who would want to be healthy (right)? Health is a recipe for being useful to people who just want to [ab]use you. Isn't the trick to be sick in some way that only hurts those who would hurt you, but not also yourself? Any port in a storm → like the young man who escaped "The Draft" by having "Fuck the Army" tattooed on his scalp, which frustrated him being used to the U.S. military to help keep America beautiful. Or the philosophy professor I had at Yale who had one of his physiologically healthy big toes amputated to save himself from the same potential personal disaster.
The goal of psychotherapy should be to free the patient from the early life colonization of his soul by his parents and teaches and maybe also preaches. (Happy the child whose parents nurtured him, parents who neither neglected him nor loved him to death.) To liberate the patient's healthy life-giving "id", insofar as his childrearers did not destroy it. To help him evict their voices from his head (toxic introjects are immortal)?The other kind of therapits, who compound the damage from their patients' past to make them normal in the preset are soul murderers. Stay away from them. They should all do the right thing [kill themselves, or at least give up their licenses to hurt people, and go live as homeless persons under an Interstate highway bridge until they die]. Non carborundum legitimi.
Professional ethics are sometimes unethical
Professional ethics discourages mental health professionals from intervening in patients' lives to rescue them from the social conditions that often give rise to their mental problems. My specific example: Marjorie Schlenoff knew I could not find a suitable female partner. She damned well knew I wanted a good mate, that I was not an one nite stand asshole, and that for whatever reasons I just ould not find a soulmate. I felt that I effectively lived in a "world without women". She even said that to me there were women at my age who would want a man like me, implying she knew at least one.
What did she do about this? Nothing. She just let me rot. Her professional ethics wer to let me rot! Professional ethics, in this case, were highly unethical, or at least a cause for unnecessary suffering. Masud Khan wrote that he solved the problems of patients who could not escape domestic situations that were causing thir problems because the patient did not have the money to get out, by reaching into his wallet to address the problem. Psychoanalysts who are petty bourgeios mental dwarfs I believe found this unethical. Ms. Schlenoff was not as wealthy as Prince Khan, but i was not asking for one cent: just the decency of something like:
"Here's a phone number. The lady is expecting a calls from you. Nothing may come of it, but who knows"
Shame on Marjorie Schlenoff. (Note that I am not here urging the equivalent of "defund the police": I am urging that, as Bertolt Brecht might say, there are exceptions a rule. I was not expecting Ms. Schlenoff to be a Sydney Biddle Barrows.)
Masud Khan
A section about Prince M. Masud R. Khan will be provided here in future. Suffice it to repeat a little story from Linda Hopkins biography of Khan which I am currently reading. The daughter of an uncultured father, whom I am reassured to read masturbated despite her father's disapproval, and finally had a lesbian relationship although apparently she never had sex with a man, Anna Freud, asked Khan if he could handle two child patients from her. Khan replied that if he could manage 25,000 peasants he could treat two children. Petty bourgeois think they are hot stuff and rarely encounter anybody who can put them in their place. Another petty bourgeois analyst thought Khan was lying about being wealthy because, I presume, he [the petty bourgeois] thought nobody could be better than himself [the petty bourgeois], could they? But then sometimes petty bourgeois get all ga-ga about celebrities (like Lady Ga Ga?) because while the latter have a lot more money than they do they have no more "brains," and they would like to have more money and celebrity, too.
I have now finished the book and put together an independent web page here on APtS about Masud Khan. I invite you, my reader, to read it.
Jacques Lacon
In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticize Lacan's use of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, accusing him of producing statements that are not even wrong.... Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. François Roustang [fr] called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan". (Wikipedia)
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) do not like Jacques Lacan, or, as I prefer to label him: Jacques Lacon, as in: con artist. I think I tried to read something by him once and it made little or no sense to me but I attribute that not to my stupidity but to his being wilfully, perversely obscure, a bit like Mr. Socrates (all really important people have only one name, including: Alcibiades, Moses, Lot, Nefertiti, Allah, Dogbert, Androcles, Venus, Abraham, Yahweh, Baal, Whirlaway, Prince, Madonna [not the ancient virgin mother], Meat Loaf, Zeus, Pandora, Thales, Rasputin, Hamlet, Elvis, Goliath, Citation, Adam, Pluto, Eve, Anonymous, Cain, Sappho, Waldo, Abel, Nessie, Aten, Medusa, Imhotep, Laika, Thor, Lambchop, Job, Secretariat, Odin, Cerebrus, Akhenaten, Circe, Godot, Jonah, Homer [not the Simpson], Nemesis, Creon, Hannibal, Ophelia, Plato, Lazarus, Pythagoras, Polyphemus, Juno, Aristophanes, Ignatz, Salome, Aristotle, Ganymede, Tonto, Icarus, Archimedes, Lassie, Estragon, Æsop, Herodotus, Raffi, Ashurbanipal, Onan, Ismene, Muhammad, Po, Sisyphus, Snoopy, Confucius, Lucifer, Geronimo, Cher, Jeeves, Pelagius, Asta, Attila, etcetera and so forth).
Don't play cutsie word games; just cough it up, asshole! Start making sense! I once heard somebody say in a TED talk (Youtube) that if you cannot explain your dissertation to somebody at a cocktail party in one sentence you probably don't know what you are doing, Mr. Lacan. I think Lacon was a rip off artist who made extra money by cutting patients' sessions short, but there's one born every minute, as the cliché goes. He seems to have thought highly of himself. Was Mr. Lacan the Robert Venturi of psychoanalysis?
Something strange
The first psychiatrist I saw – I forget his name and I stopped seeing him when for one session he kept we waiting over half an hour and I wondered if he was maybe not in the office but his door to the hallway was unlocked for the cleaning people? He could have come out and said he was running very late, and surely his patient knew that, so what's the problem with saying there is an invisible elephant in the room?
Anyway, one session, absolutely from out of nowhere he said to me that the average man's penis was 5 inches long (or some such length). What was the point? I was having problems finding a suitable woman, not getting an erection. And I was a very repressed young person. I think he was jewish. I know what I would say to him now, but now is not then: "What is you reason for saying this? What about being ritually or for no good reason genitally mutilated – you know, circumcised? What' your point, Sir?" His off-the-wall sentence has now for 50 years stayed with me. Maybe it resonates with other things a**holes have said to me, like the IBM manager who told me that he had never seen anybody with such massive skill deficits as me and then proceeded to offer zero help, but with a difference: It does not violate any professional code of conduct for a manager to help an employee remediate his work problems. That psychiatrist was yet another person who was too dense to even realize he was too dense to help a sensitive and gifted person such as myself one of whom he apparently he was not (he was chronologically young however, like me, and he had "paid his dues" and got thru medical school. Good dog!).
Teenage suicide
I read an article in the +2022.04.11 issue of the New Yorker magazine about teenage suicide. Of course I read it with intense suspicion because I do not trust parents, teachers, shrinks or anybody else to be salubrious for me until they have given me solid evidence they will not hurt me even more than I have already been hurt. One instance that particularly infuriated me in the article was an Asian girl who had tried to kill herself (but survived) who said:
"Leading up the attempt, it was always 'If I do this I'm going to hurt so many people,' which was a sucky feeling of 'I have to be responsible for all these people's emotions when I'm hurting so much. Suicide may look selfish to everybody else, but, as the person who is contemplating it, you're battling with the idea of 'I don't want to be selfish, I want to support all these people, but i just can't do it anymore.'"
This is apparently a common thing in Asian American families: the child ot tasked with redeeming the adults' lives. These selfish peevish adults should just grow up and stop whining about their "emotions". Boo, hoo! The kid didn't ask to be born to serve you all. So there is the first thing: everybody has to stop hurting other people, especially emotionally fragile gifted children, Go pick on the varsity lacrosse team macho hunks – better still: their adult coaches! They get themselves beat up every day, so they should be able to take a bit of a licking and keep on ticking: the Timexes of the human species.
There was one thing in the article I thought was good: A girl got put in a mental hospital where there were group meetings where everybody shared their stories. There she heard that other kids had been through the same kind of stuff as her (presumably without the adults who ran the meetings trying to mess with the kids' heads). Previously she had thought she was the only one: remove the problem and every thing will be OK → i.e.: remove yourself and let the people who did it to you will be, if not necessarily fat, always dumb and happy with themselves. But why? They never ask. Fix the problem by proactively fixing the people who cause problems before they get a chance to hurt somebody: parents, teachers, preachers and anybody else whom the shoe fits: Click here to learn about these people.
In the land of the blind
In the land of the blind there are the usual assortmentof mental health workers, typo: professionals. They see all sorts of patiants, or at least they hear them. A few patients have either lost or never had the sense of taste (the gastronointestinal not the esthetic kind). These mental health professionals are often able to help these individuals, for whom they [the mental health processionals] feel immense sympathy, because they can imagine losing their own sense of taste (again, gastrointestinal, not esthetic). Imagining they lack what they have is not threatening to them because these patients are missing something they themselves possess and are not in danger of the patients taking away from them or otherwise being deprived of. Having your sense of taste (again, gastrointstinal not esthetic) is very good and valuable, and the mental health professional wil try to help the deprived person adjust to their disability..
But then sometimes a one eyed person comes into their office. Because these mental health professionals are congenitally blind and cannot see anything (opthamologically, and also possibily metaphorically?), they cannot imagine what the patient's problems are like, so they do their best and imagine the patient is like themselvs only with soething that needs to be fixed. What the patients are missing they cannot imagine but it must be something, and they conclude it's that incomprehensible thing that normal people do not have (Note these words: I did not use the word "lack", just "do not have", like a patient may not have a cancer tumor but the mental health professional does not say the patient lacks cancer). So they proceed to cure the patient by removing the patient's abnormality (like removing a cancer tumor to make a cancer patient healthy): They surgically remove the patients eye. That the patient is not made fully happy and satisfied as a result of this operation is a puzzle for them, because they have removed the most obvious source of the patient's problem, and now the patient is, physiologically, at least, just like themselves and they are entirely happy and satisfied with themselves. Thus would a normal mental health professional treat (double meaning word?) a mentally retarded person and a genius.
The normal mental health provfessional could, of course, do something different. He (she, other or whatever else) could straightforwardly acknowledge that they could not help the patient with his problems which lie beyond their experiential dimensionality. The mental health professional could try to see (i.e.: guess) if there was anything in his normal world the mental health professional lives in that seeemed to be causing the gifted patient trouble or discomfort or maybe even the gifted person could not see what the blind see (what is that?), i.e.: maybe the gifted person thought there was something defective about normal people like the mental health professional. The normal mental health professional could try to guess how he and people like him might be creating difficulties in living for the man who can see, and try to shield the one-eyed man from them. Such a mental health professional al might not succeed in making the gifted person's life be a happy one, but at least they would not blind him. They could also try to help the one-eyed man to imagine what it would be like to be blind, and since at least from our perspective outside the therapy situation, it seems the normal person is missing something, this might help the one-eyed man to have empathy for normal people like the mental health professional has empathy for mentally retarded persons.
To help a person one does not necssarily need to undertsand them. Just like you can feed and pet a cat and clean the cat's litter box and see the cat likes this and it seems helpful to the cat, even if you have no idea what the cat's experience of living is.
Such a mental health professional would be acting on something he can understand, the principle supposedly first enunciated by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (not to be confueds with Hypocrites): "First do not harm". How might he go about this? For one possibility, he could try to act on the old IBM directive for field engineers fixing the old room-size mainframe computers: If you are having trouble trying to fit two parts you have taken apart back together again, you are doing something wrong: Don't try to force it! You can consult with your peers or ask for help from a more highly silled person up the expertise chain. Maybe the normal mental health professional would be able to find a colleague who had an eye, and pass the patient over to him?
Such a mental health professional could try to cope with his own feelings that he might be lacking something the patient may have which is good and valuable, if he thinks about his life situation. Life is not fair. Otherwise he should just keep his patient roster filled only with people who have no eyes. I have not here directly mentioned some licensed mental health professionals I have personally encountered who were and if not yet dead remain proactive threats to any gifted person, such as myself, who has the misfortune to enter their office, although their problem surely stems from them being normal without understanding what that means when treating or just interacting with someone better than they are; I need not provide personal cases here. Linda Hopkins' book "False Self: the life of Masud Khan" has very good, i.e.: disgusting examples of normal psychoanalysts who destroyed highly gifted Masud Kahn because they resented him being bigger than they were. Khan also made the grave mistake of offending these people without having tenure, so that, so to speak, he did not have a license to protect himself against such people, unlike, say, in a somewhat different disciplinary field, Marshall McLuhan.).
Fix the environment not the victim
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Bradford McCormick | New York
I once had a psychiatrist who was a straight shooter. He said that anti-depressents don't help if you life circumstances are objectively depresing (which mine were).
Some people say that just becaue an ideal is no attainable we should not discard the ideal but aspire toward it. the psychoanalyst Masud Khan was enormousy wealthy. He would sometimes address his patients' problems with his checkbook.
Fix the environment not the victim, albeit war casualties need treatment for their wounds even after they have been rescued from the battlefield.
