Years of needless medication, self-doubt

Joe,

You made some very impressive points in your essay "What the 'Left Behind' Series Really Means". I suspect that there is a basic human need for "miracle, mystery and authority" because it seems that as soon as a person gets a different kind of education -- that is, goes to a university and assuming they become secular humanized -- chances are overwhelming that they'll unquestioningly refer the puzzles and mysteries of their lives to various types of shrinks, who will almost always assure them that their behavior is involuntary and due to a mental illness, AS LONG AS they assign their insurance claims.

I find it absolutely amazing that the threshold definition of most DSM illnesses (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is that somebody complains about their behavior; and yet very few people question why this should be regarded as a biological issue, and not a social one -- or how that makes the "patient" a subject, instead of a human. Few people realize that defendants stand a much better chance of preserving their independence than a psych patient.

The mental illness I like most is "personality disorder not otherwise specified". You can always stick that one on anybody. Remember, the thing to do is, be the first one to accuse the other of mental problems, but you have to be subtle. Just ease into the position of being able to say, "I told you so", while you gently pursue a course that would piss off the Pope. If you doubt that it works, take a morning off to sit in family court.

John

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John,

Oh how well I know what you mean! About 20 years ago, following a nasty divorce, I felt like I was going off the deep end. So I went to a psychologist friend I trusted deeply and started therapy. Not long into therapy the psychologist told me I was bipolar, and explained to me what was then a kind of new diagnosis. He also told me that I fluctuated between depression (which sure as hell rang true, and "unreasonable joy." I'm thinking all the time: "Where is this unreasonable joy? Maybe he's talking about how crazy I'd get when I got drunk." So he prescribed lithium.

A month later I told him, "Hell, I just slug around like a set of glazed eyeballs dragging 180 pounds of meat. There must be some better way than this." So he prescribed Welbutrin. Every day I thought to myself, holy hell, I'd better take this stuff or god only knows what I might do. I took it for over a year. Well, to make a long story short, the dear friend, Dr. John Farley, was found hanging by the neck from a tree in his backyard with his beeper going on forever. I was a newspaper man at the time and I wrote a column about his tragic death, and I kept on taking my little pink pills. Shortly afterward, a relative of doctor told me that THE DOCTOR was bipolar.

"Whaaaaaaaat?"

So I got another therapist, who told me, after a shitload of expensive tests, "You are nowhere near bipolar."

"Well," he says, "bipolarity was a trend and was bit over diagnosed for a while."

I quit taking the Welbutrin, and damned if I didn't start to feel a lot better. But just to be sure, I changed therapists and started over. "No, you are not bipolar," was the second therapist's verdict.

And so for years I had this entirely wrong idea of who I was, a bipolar person who was always at the edge of some dangerous episode, and who needed these expensive pills and sessions to function.

Then about five years ago, the well known UCLA professor of psychiatry Rod Gorney told me that I was one of the sanest people he had ever met.

"Can I have that in writing?" I said. "I'm gonna frame that motherfucker and hang it in my living room."

All those years of needless medication and self-doubt! I would be the first one to say that simply having someone to talk with in confidence about deep problems is important. But it will be a cold day in hell before I ever look again to the psychological establishment for a solution to personal problems. They have too much authority and in more recent times are too quick to equate the brain as a sack of chemicals, like a jar of piss whose emotional pH, acidity and color can be adjusted by adding the right chemicals. The fact that so many of them make a hundred bucks or so from the drug companies when they start a patient on a drug does not exactly instill my confidence in them either.

Anyway, from that viewpoint, I now see around me all sorts of perfectly legal abuse of civil rights going on in the name of diagnosis by persons authorized by the empire to judge the condition of worthiness of men's lives, and dictate not only their fate, but their very innermost self-image.

Meanwhile, I continue to suffer happily with my "personality disorder not otherwise specified." I can tell you this: They are never again gonna get the chance to specify it either!

In art and labor,

Joe