• Uriel238 [all pronouns]English
    10•1 month ago

    Celine’s First Law for psychiatry.

    To be fair, your therapist is not supposed to merely diagnose you and treat your issues, rather (in modern 1990s and twenty-first century models) offer you tools by which you treat yourself, at most catching you when you get caught up in your own trigger-symptom spirals.

    So it’s not a hierarchy of repair-units in which each repair-unit can only repair those on the lower tiers, rather one could make a repair-unit circle-jerk, in which each one repairs the one in front of it while repaired by the one behind it.

    At least this is the ideal case. There is the problem in which therapists are also human, and prone to their own experiences, opinions and flaws:

    ~ About a third of therapists in the US are romantically involved with (e.g. banging) one (at least one) of their patients. I’d be curious about how this looks on the other side, and if there are patients who have a history of successfully wooing their therapists. (Don’t get involved with your patents, by the way. It’s a license-killing offense and often gets socially messy. On the other hand, we’re desperately lonely and horny as a species.)

    ~ As a patient often used as a trainer for interns, I’ve often worked out specific issues that get my therapist excited while being safely away from my own cruxes, so whenever I feel too tired to actually do work, I can rely on seguing the conversation to that issue, and therapy is concluded with my therapist thinking we made fantastic progress. This becomes too easy to do, and I’ll find weeks have gone by in which I’ve been too fatigued to work on real issues.

    ~ Most psycho-therapeutic models are based on the medical model: Someone comes in with a chief complaint, and the doctor diagnoses an illness and prescribes a treatment. But while we might know not to send a miner with black lung back to the mines (provided he has some kind of disability coverage) we don’t have the same mechanism to keep a patient from a toxic home environment or even a toxic work environment. Plenty of my own therapists have only been interested in getting me functional again as a worker (whether as a cleric or technician or whatever), not recognizing the factors that made my work toxic. Some therapists really strongly believe in the capitalist economy model and have actually confronted me that if I’m not interested in returning to work, why should I be in therapy? – It’s these times that I wondered if I could arrange so that they wake up with my severed head on their bed. Probably not.

    I have long hypothesized we are all long out of our minds, but live in a society so dysfunctional that we either don’t notice or can’t admit it. Abuse is intergenerational. We all have been raised without a village, and since the 1970s our parents have been too exhausted from work to parent or think much about civics.

    Across the society, the inpatients are literally running the asylum.