The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
-Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
When I began journaling in 2013, I had no intention of digging through my psychiatrized childhood. In fact, I thoroughly believed I could write around it, like a yellow-taped crime scene. After all…my objective in journaling was simply to bring depth and resonance to my memories for a memoir idea I had.
But after four decades of dedicated forgetting, focused journaling revealed my traumatic childhood memories to be neither as solid nor as accurate as I’d once believed. It wasn’t that any new childhood memories emerged, but rather that the ones that did were rather caricature-like, missing essential details I’d not fully experienced or registered as a kid. Granted, the memories that did come back to life in surprising and sometimes shocking detail were grounded in long-known traumas. But the most devastating discovery I made through journaling wasn’t any specific memory or traumatic event, but the realization that my lifelong confusion and bewilderment surrounding them was the direct result of the unwarranted psychiatric labels and drugs I swallowed alongside years of severe parental abuse.
Completely buried in my formerly repressed memories was the belief I had about the role and “life value” of my childhood psychiatric labels and drugs. This life-altering belief was born at Michigan’s Pontiac State Psychiatric Hospital (PSH) when, in February of 1975, my psychiatrist, Dr. P, removed me from the lithium I came in on, and my parental home soon after. At 16, and throughout my adult life, I came to believe that the psychiatric labels and drugs that had been foist on me for nearly half my childhood had been rendered negligible and no longer relevant by Dr. P’s vehement counter-narrative and by the affirming relationships forged throughout my PSH experience.
I can now understand how I spent 40 years believing that the seven years I’d been psychiatrically labeled and drugged as a kid had been corrected. I mean…what the hell is any 16-year-old kid supposed to think when a state psychiatric hospital takes him off all drugs and repeatedly tells him that he’s a “normal teenager”? When PSH had me taken from my parental home, adamant that my parents were disturbed and dangerous, these formidable allies were confirming my years of lived experience. So when PSH glowingly affirmed my “being normal” to my Marine Corps recruiter, and signed off on my enlistment when I turned 17, I left that chapter of my life and began writing a whole new book.
When I went into the Marine Corps, I’d thoroughly bought into the new psychiatric narrative my PSH psychiatrist and staff had communicated to me during my eight months there. Because my four years in the Marines were, up to that point, the most enjoyable and productive years of my life, my new PSH narrative replaced my childhood psychiatric narrative, well beneath the surface of awareness. As a result, I have lived my adult life believing I have no further reason to identify with that narrative, and no experience to suggest otherwise.
Journaling revealed to me just how profoundly misinformed this belief was. Though I now understand that I needed to believe this myth, journaling uncorked a deluge of archetypal betrayals and unattended developmental traumas that I’d suppressed and relived, at no small cost to the quality of my life.
The more critical moral and ethical issue that troubles me about my childhood psychiatric betrayal is my adult psychotherapists’ complicity in covering it up, and the curious fact that I can’t find a single article or study about the links between childhood trauma alongside this type of professional betrayal, and/or its subsequent impact upon the adult life of the person subjected to it. So…here’s my layman’s contribution to understanding this apparently unexplored dynamic.
Betrayal No. 1: My Diagnosis
In early 1968, when I was nine, my mother told me one morning that I would need to take a pink pill called Ritalin. She explained that my brain wasn’t like the other kids’ by way of being “hyperkinetic,” and that Ritalin would make it normal. The family physician prescribed it. I took Ritalin for two years before my mother explained that I now needed to take a new pill called Mellaril. Sometime later, and over the next three years, I was also introduced to Stelazine and Thorazine, all prescribed by the family physician upon my mother’s appraisal of my behaviors. During these five years, I never so much as spoke to nor met with a psychiatrist or psychologist.
In July of 1973, my mother admitted me to the Michael Reese Institute (MRI). She emerged from the closed-door intake meeting and immediately said, “Oh, Kevin…they know what’s wrong with you, you’re only missing a mineral called lithium.” Here again, beyond perfunctory greetings, I’d never spoken to anyone prior to my mother’s intake meeting. Not only did MRI (Dr. F and Dr. H) diagnosis me with “manic depression” solely on the strength of my mother’s narrative, but they also diagnosed my father (who lived 240 miles away and with whom they’d never spoken) with the same disorder! My then 12-year-old sister was in that closed-door intake meeting and can confirm my assertions and much more. As a result, I took lithium for the next 20 months.
This brings us back to PSH—where I was removed of all psychiatric labels and drugs, as well as legally removed from my parents’ home.
Betrayal No. 2: The Reasons for My Psychiatric Identification and Drugging
Through journaling, I examined the behaviors I presented that might have made anyone think I was “hyperkinetic” and needed Ritalin. Immediately, I recognized my teacher, Sister Diane, as the primary instigator of this idea. She not only complained incessantly about me to my parents, but also slapped my face no less than a dozen times that fourth-grade year, once making me pull my pants down to whip my naked keester in the boys’ bathroom. I understand now that Sister Diane was a profoundly damaged woman, in part through insights gleaned while reading Karen Armstrong’s beautiful memoir, The Spiral Staircase. Yes… I had a great deal of energy, was a bit precocious, prodigiously curious, and a little challenged sitting rigidly at a desk for eight hours a day regurgitating information. But before psychiatric drugs and trauma drove them south, my grades were As and Bs. Correspondingly, my aptitude scores indicated reading and verbal aptitude at a 12th-grade level, with math at a 10th-grade level (I don’t believe these markers are necessarily accurate, only the metric used in 1968).
This brings me to my damaged, working-class parents and their own fear of failure, unwittingly leveraged by my rather rigid and fear-based Catholic school. Given the breadth of material already written on the Ritalin gateway dynamic, the “why” of my psychiatrized childhood isn’t unique. But I strongly believe that if I’d had two different parents, or attended a more progressive school, I never would have seen a single day of psychiatric labels or drugs, save any consideration of needing them.
Betrayal No. 3: The Hidden Violence of Pediatric Psychiatry upon My Traumatic Youth
This is by far the most emotionally damaging and life-impacting betrayal journaling revealed to me. Previously, I believed my psychiatrized childhood and parental abuse were completely separate and unrelated issues. Journaling, however, showed me they were intimately connected, and that the psychiatric labels and drugs actually exacerbated my abuse at multiple levels (this dynamic alone deserves a book!). For starters, how is any labeled and drugged kid supposed to parse, sequester, and differentiate the perceptions of his damaged parents from parental abuse from psychiatric incompetence from psychiatric iatrogenic license and from their own normal behaviors?
Both my parents were profoundly damaged people. My father was an intractably depressed and violent man who exploited me for the emotional support my mother didn’t have to give, only to thrust me into the middle of their sick relationship, and later betray me by allowing and supporting my mother in institutionalizing me. I’m not sure what damaged him more: his Depression-era poverty and alcoholic family violence, or his war trauma? My mother was an unstable and severely depressed alcoholic and drug abuser whose depression turned to nightly rage when she drank. I, the oldest of five, was her scapegoat.
I only mention the above to sufficiently illustrate that my childhood home was a physical and psycho-emotional battleground. What makes this point critically important is that I was the one scapegoated as having psychiatric issues inside my parental home, with my parents’ scapegoating recklessly and obtusely confirmed and enabled outside the home by multiple professionals.
These are critical insights for several reasons. As I noted earlier, I had lived my adult life believing the issues of my psychiatrized childhood had been corrected and negated at PSH. So I unconsciously blinded myself to the connection between all the years I identified with having multiple psychiatric issues, and the mentally and emotionally distorting impacts of the various drugs I took, and the ways I navigated my overwhelmingly toxic and abusive home life. I also failed to see how I carried the debilitating cognitive and emotional impacts from both into all my social relationships while fully believing that I was relating, learning, and competing in the world as a developmentally grounded person.
I didn’t fully begin to appreciate how profoundly important these dynamics were, though, until one particular dynamic came back to life during the 2016 election. Because that election presented so many outrageous statements, lies, contradictions, and historical inconsistencies as facts, I kept tabs on my TV so I could view the circus in real-time rather than rely on my bubble of progressive, online print media for updates.
Soon after I began this routine, I found myself awakening in the middle of the night, bombarded by intrusive thoughts about, for example, the insane hypocrisies of Kellyanne Conway or Corey Lewandowsky. I knew, of course, that I’d been watching first-rate gaslighting. But why the hell was I waking up in the middle of the night angry at their vacuous, forked-tongued conjectures?
I asked this question in my journal soon enough. As is most often the case with journaling, my unconscious offered up answers my analytical mind couldn’t. Because I’d grown up in a home with two parents who were prodigious gaslighters, witnessing Election 2016 gaslighting day after day affected me well below the level of awareness. This is why, I believe, sleep forced it into my consciousness. Though I’d long had an intellectual awareness of my parents’ gaslighting, only through re-experiencing being gaslighted as a conscious adult could I fully feel, understand, and re-process its pernicious impacts on me as a psychiatrically labeled and drugged kid. These included damaging my sense of cognitive and emotional agency and interpersonal stability and trust. Such consequences last a lifetime.
Betrayal No. 4: Lies My Adult Psychotherapist Told Me
In February of 1995, 20 years after leaving PSH, I began my first course of psychotherapy. I only started therapy at the gentle nudging of my emotionally intelligent girlfriend, who understood that my self-conscious perfectionism, hypersensitive defensiveness, trust issues, and emotional aloofness (alexithymia) were masking significant emotional pain from experiences I refused to talk to her or anyone else about.
During my first appointment with Dr. D, I spilled the story of my psychiatrized childhood. Dr. D was the first person to whom I’d ever mentioned word one from that part of my life. I only told him this history because I thought not telling him was a sin of omission which, undisclosed, would leave a conspicuous hole in the therapeutic process.
Dr. D never appeared surprised by the details of my past. He didn’t have a single question about PSH or MRI and, as I vividly remember, made a casual statement that “too many kids have this kind of experience.” After that first appointment, we never again spoke of that part of my life, not once during four years of therapy. Around a year into it, I asked Dr. D what my diagnosis was. Dr. D said, “If I had to give you a diagnosis, I’d say PTSD and depression, but what I really think is that you were FUBAR’d.” He explained that my childhood home was so “psychotic” that I didn’t have the necessary foundation to sufficiently discover who I was and where I belonged in the world.
While I was in therapy, I believed Dr. D’s silence surrounding my childhood confirmed my own belief that it had been thoroughly corrected at PSH, and was thus insignificant. In place of exploring and healing the psycho-social and emotional consequences of my trauma (as addressed in works like Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery), Dr. D’s psychotherapeutic raison d’être was convincing me to quit my mover job and do something more befitting my education and potential.
During those four years with Dr. D, the words dissociation and unconscious never made a single appearance. I now regard Dr. D’s brand of therapy to be little more than applying CBT nostrums to motivate career striving as a means to achieve the emotional and relationship growth I’d sought. In short, therapy with Dr. D did absolutely nothing to help me recognize, feel (rage and grieve), or process the psycho-developmental consequences of my traumatic childhood and psychiatric betrayal. This discrepancy should have been glaringly evident to him – if for no other reason than I never shed a single tear or showed an ounce of anger during our time together.
I now regard Dr. D’s silence on my psychiatric childhood as an inexcusable betrayal, one I suspect is practiced with exponential regularity throughout adult mental healthcare settings. To suggest, as his silence did, that any child can spend seven years identifying with fictitious psychiatric labels while swallowing a cocktail of psychiatric drugs for childhood behaviors that never warranted psychiatric intervention, and do so in an environment as toxic and abusive as mine without being significantly affected, is a level of professional and intellectual dishonesty and moral vacuity I hope never to understand.
It was journaling that finally forced me to acknowledge and feel the layers of anger I’d stuffed down for decades due to my overwhelming fear and shame, emotions I’d safeguarded by repressing memories of trauma. As a result, journaling has affected my cognitive and emotional being in ways I could never have imagined. Though the impact has been thoroughly positive and constructive, it’s also been challenging at times— as I suspect the real work of integrating new awareness into our life and relationships should be. I just wish I could have done this work with a skilled psychotherapist as witness, but this wasn’t remotely possible.
I have no idea what mental health is or isn’t, but I personally believe that it’s never divorced from the reality of ones lived experiences and relationships. Reclaiming the lived reality of my childhood psychiatric betrayal may not be an essential psychotherapeutic process according to the American mental-health-industrial complex, but it’s been a most healing process for me. I will forever be grateful for my having finally witnessed the true story of my childhood psychiatric betrayal.
Kevin you are an enthralling writer.
The piece is so clever because as older Kevin is rootling around for answers to a lifetime of bewilderment, this brings into focus the bewilderment of young Kevin standing in his parent’s home. That way you get the reader to feel as bewildered as young Kevin.
For some reason I thought about a documentary I saw years ago about an African tribe. In one clip all the adult men troop off with pubescent boys to the forest to turn them into men. I shall not say what the boys were asked to do to “become men” but suffice it to say they looked utterly non plussed. I imagine this sort of multifarous tribal oddness has being going on since the dawn of humanity. Adult parents seem ever wont to “initiate” their offspring into their own myths. In modern society no parent will take their kid into a wood and billow jungley herbal smokes at them to “initiate” them, as if “initiating” is a hurried shove into a stronger safer adult way of facing off the dangers of the forest. But modern kids do get “initiated” into imbibing what their adult parents get prescribed by the pharmacist, and experience the same bewildering shove into adulthood that comes from psychiatric potions. I guess the difference between the boys in the African tribe and the kids who are modern counterparts is that those boys were in an actual “tribe” and so they all had eachother as bewildered “initiatees”. You had nobody.
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Thank you for your kind words DW. You said something very important that I think needs to be responded to: “You had nobody”.
That’s not entirely accurate… I didn’t “inside” my parental home to be sure! But I had several adults who came to my aide. defense, and mentorship; teachers, a high school counselor, my basketball coach, friends, friends parents, a social worker, and PSH!, This is a critical distinction because many abused and psychiatrically captured kids “don’t have “anybody”! I had unbelievable support from people outside my parental home. There’s no doubt in my mind that I would have never reached 30 if not for that support. Moreover, I’ve been profoundly blessed by opportunities and people throughout my life from which I escaped the fate of my two brothers, etc. At 63, my heart aches for all the kids abused and psychiatrically captured who aren’t getting the type of advocacy I did as a kid. I wrote this for them (not me).
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Thank you for sharing this history, Kevin. This resonated with me on many levels. The psychotherapist remarking that “too many kids” have this kind of experience and then just bypassing it makes me so angry but also doesn’t surprise me at this point. If you turned this into a memoir or longer piece I would definitely read it.
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Thank you Katel for your kind words/ Funny you should suggest a memoir on this subject… Trying to sufficiently capture the essence of this story in 2600 words was a foolish undertaking. This may be a personal story, but its less about me than it is about the legacy of childhood abuse and psychiatric betrayal, however inadequately written. I only wrote it because I felt that in conveying some of the absurdities and structural ignorance surrounding the legacy of childhood psychiatry along side prodigious abuse, that it might lend something to the larger, if not more substantive discourse. Trying to demonstrate the dynamism of memory rooted in childhood trauma intrinsic to ego and identity formations vis a vis 40 years of adult living in 2600 words was a disservice to the subject matter.
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“I have no idea what mental health is or isn’t, but I personally believe that it’s never divorced from the reality of ones lived experiences and relationships. Reclaiming the lived reality of my childhood psychiatric betrayal may not be an essential psychotherapeutic process according to the American mental-health-industrial complex, but it’s been a most healing process for me. I will forever be grateful for my having finally witnessed the true story of my childhood psychiatric betrayal.”
Kevin, thanks so much for being so candid and sharing an important part of your life.
I love that last paragraph.
If only the observers knew what mental health is. Being observed, judged and labeled will definitely not be “mentally healthy”.
And in that, you saw the betrayal. Perfect conclusion.
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Thanks Sam! Its one thing for an adult to receive a psychiatric diagnosis and entirely another for a child. The child’s identity is more vulnerable and malleable than the adults, save less able to advocate for themselves with adult-like aptitudes and experience. What made me write this story was the documentation on the percentage of abused children-especially in foster care where the abuse narrative often thickens-who receive psychiatric diagnosis and drugs which, not uncommonly, lead to a lifetime of more of both.
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Thank you for sharing your story, Kevin. People really do need to be forewarned that the “mental health” industries are, in reality, a group of child abuse covering up industries. And this is all by DSM design, since no “mental health” worker may ever bill any insurance company for ever helping any child abuse survivor, unless they first misdiagnose them with one – or many – of the billable DSM disorders.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1
And the psychiatric industry really needs to stop lying about who and what their clients are. Given the fact they claim their clients are “dangerous,” when in reality, over 80% of those stigmatized with the DSM disorders are actually innocent child abuse survivors.
.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/
And a lot of psychologists have been covering up child abuse, seemingly, since Freud, or forever.
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo
Betrayal indeed. Let’s hope and pray the “mental health” industry some day garner insight into the fact that covering up child abuse is illegal, and does also function to aid, abet, and empower the child abusers. And all their systemic child abuse covering up crimes have left us all now living in a “pedophile empire.”
https://www.amazon.com/Pedophilia-Empire-Chapter-Introduction-Disorder-ebook/dp/B0773QHGPT
I’m quite certain we should be taking this world in a different direction instead. Thanks, again, for sharing your story, Kevin. What happened to you is just part of an enormous, systemic societal problem.
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” During these five years, I never so much as spoke to nor met with a psychiatrist or psychologist.” WOW!
Hey, Mom, can you say; “Munchausen’s by proxy”?
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Thank you SE for taking the time to read and reply to my story!
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That’s an astute observation Bananas, and one I had to examine while journaling. But there wasn’t room for this topic to be explored in such a short and complex essay. Munchausen’s by proxy is so difficult to recognize (especially in real time) in its usual form, that recognizing and adequately addressing it through the “mental health arena is all but impossible.
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“Munchhausen’s by proxy” to me isn’t something to “diagnose,” it’s just another phenomenon that most likely has multiple causes and multiple effective interventions. Drugs obviously are not one of the effective approaches.
Rather than call it “Munchhausen’s by proxy,” why not just say, “This person likes/needs to believe that his/her children are ill to meet some personal need of their own.”
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Steve, I copy and pasted the definition…”Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) is a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability. Because vulnerable people are the victims, MSBP is a form of child abuse or elder abuse”.
I merely examined the dynamic (while journaling) more out of it’s curious parallel to the above indicated ” “makes up” than arrived and any attribution one way or the other. I really couldn’t care less what “technical” professionally sanctified term does or doesn’t apply to my mother or my experiences of her. More, what I didn’t have space to include in this essay, save that of so much-for example, is that my mother tried to have me legally committed to another psychiatric institution when she got wind (through my sister) that I was going in the Marine Corp. Throughout her life she insisted I was a “manic depressive” and disturbed (from a distance of no closer than 2000 miles, and only through my father).
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That sounds like an AWFUL experience! I ran into quite a few of these situations when I worked with foster youth. The easiest “disease” to attribute to your child is a “psychiatric disorder,” because there is no objective way to prove that the “diagnosis” is right or wrong. It is the “Munchhausen parent’s” paradise!
I hope you have found other adults to validate the bizarreness of this experience. I was not meaning to imply that you were validating the DSM “diagnoses,” I was just expressing my own discomfort with assigning a “disorder” that is in no way validated or validatable, rather than just describing the behavior that is of concern for what it is. You certainly did a fine job of doing the latter!
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There are occasional Munchausen’s By Proxy mom’s in the bird world and animal world. Could just be a nature pressure thing. Not all mom’s are able to be moms.
Steve, I like your measured pondering of this.
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It’s a useless and silly uniformed label to apply to birds as well as humans. Perhaps the bird that survived the pecking order metes out the punishments to it’s young because it believes that is how it’s young can survive the harsh world. We all act out something. Every single one of us.
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Well said Steve.
Labeling never captures what is going on.
(Duplicate comment).
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Kevin
A very powerful and well written blog full of many insights, and more reasons why psychiatry and their entire Disease/Drug Based paradigm needs to be abolished.
I am also saddened that you encountered a therapist who would diagnose you with PTSD and then NEVER ONCE address the very trauma experiences that sent you on this horrific odyssey. Having worked as a therapist for 25 years, I encountered many such people in the field. Many were quite fearful and could not tolerate the discomfort of exploring horrible childhood experiences with another person because they never did the necessary work on themselves around these issues to know how to really help someone else.
Kevin, you did mention that you had several siblings, and that you “escaped the fate of your brothers.” I am curious to know more about their “fate,” and do you have any contact with them? Can they help validate your childhood trauma? I do know that in many such abusive families there are often many types of “splits” where there is actually very strong feelings of resentment, and almost a kind of competition as to who had it worse.
I wish you the best and surely hope you continue to write and increase your activism exposing all forms of psychiatric oppression.
Richard
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Well said Steve.
Labeling never captures what is going on.
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Good comment Richard.
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Richard, thank you for your kind reply. FWIW, I’ve always appreciated and gave close attention to your post over the last several years.
I don’t think most therapist have a clue how to treat or help clients with significant long term multiple traumas in childhood. Hell… I don’t think most mental health professional offer more than superficial technocratic palliatives. If I went into therapy now with the critical consciousness and development I’ve gleaned the last decade-at least when it comes to my childhood, I scare the bejesus out of most every psychotherapist; of this I’m certain.
To answer your two questions. #1 Both my brothers committed suicide in their 40’s, both having never exceeded the 9th and 10th grade, had severe drug and alcohol abuse/addiction, while also being frequent flyers in the criminal justice system; both were profoundly damaged.#2 Yes there were significant splits to be sure! But they did not in anyway revolve around who had it worse. In fact, I happen to think my youngest sister had it the worst. The “splits” were unconscious roles and fragmentations that never saw the light of day beyond my own years of work to understand.
I wish you well Richard.
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So like you I grew up in a really awful home enviorment filled with emotional and psycial abuse. along with that I started out in psycology at the young age of four being dignosed with adhd and all through my childhood there were doctors and therapists. I was first hospitalize in a mental ward at 7. I am like you where as I have never really face that past or been angry or cried over it. What I want so desperately now is to figure out how to kill my past to live more successfully in my present. But the abuse I have suffered at the hands of psychology makes me incredibly gun shy of mainstream mental health because of saying the wrong thing and loosing my rights. But I want is my chance to get my freedom from the pain and hurt that is inside of me.
see it took me until I was over 40 to even realize that the outburst of anger I deal with are probably trauma. but that does not come from doctors but from having to figure it all out on my own because every time I would approach mainstream psychology with my beast right there beside me they would meet the monster and then kick me out. So I was left to figure out what the true nature of my monster on my own and why I was plagued with this horrible uncontrollable anger. Now I give anything to kill the beast inside of me. I would give anything to find friends a new family and find a life where I am ok. Free from
the ideas that I different and broken.
But see that new world is already started by finding a place like this and learning new ways to look at myself instead of through the cold lens of permeant brokenness as psychology has taught me. It is helping me to live again. Also, it is nice to find a world that confirms what I have often thought about psychology for years, and finding sites like this was like somebody giving me permission I didn’t think I had to question the way the current system does things. Because I think still somewhere in my head I had a voice leftover from my past saying I really don’t know what I am talking about because I am not a professional. But I know now that is not true. I starting to learn so much and your article here really is very close to the broken home I grew up in and the way psychology was handled with me.
Also if anyone who reads this can share resources to alternatives for mainstream psychology and places where I can start to share my ideas and join the fight against the beast that is the current mental health system because all I want to do with my life is advocate and fight for real change. It feels like what I was put here to do.
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You knew it. You knew it deep inside even as young as 7 that these strangers had no clue.
It’s rather funny when psychiatry talks about “lack of insight”. The kids they see have way more insight than the adult who is observing. Lack of insight is when people don’t see psychiatry for what it is.
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Sam says, “Lack of insight is when people don’t see psychiatry for what it is.”
Perfectly stated.
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iamcrazyaboutmentalhealth says, “…it is nice to find a world that confirms what I have often thought about psychology for years, and finding sites like this was like somebody giving me permission I didn’t think I had to question the way the current system does things…Because…I had a voice leftover from my past saying I really didn’t know what I am talking about because I am not a professional. But now I know that is not true.”
IT IS SO NOT TRUE!!! And thank you for sharing how “being a professional” DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING —
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iamcrazyaboutmentalhealth says, “But I see a new world that is already started by finding a place like this and learning new ways to look at myself instead of through the cold lens of permanent brokenness as psychology has taught me.”
“through the cold lens of permanent brokenness as psychology has taught me.”
Thank you, iam. THAT SAYS IT ALL!!!
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Removed at request of commenter.
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Kevin,
Thank you for sharing your powerful story and remarkable insights.
I found confiding in “professionals” trained to “diagnose” to be not only insulting, but thankfully an impossible task, as most “therapists” aren’t worth the paper their “degrees” are printed on.
And labeling children is child abuse — FULL STOP —
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They are gaslighters and no matter what one says, it is diagnosable, which of course makes no sense. A bunch of bad people hurting a LOT of the public and given the legal aid to call treason to everyone and anyone they wish.
And the gullible sit by and watch, just as in the days of old. Except a hell of a lot more people get accused of “treason” now, then they ever were.
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