Thank you for this thoughtful and honest article. I have had similar experiences.
The piece that I think sums up the essence of the problem is “what can occur in the psychedelic space when practitioners whose own drug use, and persistent adulation by their clients and disciples, leads them to believe they are larger than life. Normal rules of conduct do not apply.” It can happen even without all that much adulation, and the suggestibility that emerges for those seeking help–both because of the drug’s effects and because they (we) are often so longing for relief–is what makes it, in the worst possible way, a perfect match. I have seen it happen numerous times with people who have the highest and most impeccable credentials in other realms and sometimes specifically in the psychedelic realm, which of course adds to the seductiveness, as well as the doubts that come in the wake of these experiences.
I’m also with you on nonetheless recognizes the value of psychedelics when used appropriately and carefully. But the train is moving too fast and without sufficient care.
Thank you again!
Wendell Berry has a lovely essay somewhere about refusing all “isms.”
Goodness. I’m not sure if I made it to intelligent in your scheme, but one can only hope. Indeed, one must!
I think this would require looking at the breadth of his work and at how it has been used. Or at least the specific ways in which his work has helped Moncrief (and others) develop their analyses.
Or at least that’s my view of it. But I think it’s worth considering how virtually all important writers a) get some things wrong, and b) are put to bad uses by people who draw on them. So, for instance, what you say about Marx also applies to Adam Smith and Thoreau–both incredibly insightful and helpful, both wrong about some important things and both put to unfortunate and sometimes truly awful uses. Is it possible the problem does not lie with any of these (human, fallible) writers so much as in the simplistic and short-sighted ways we interpret them?
Thank you for this. So important.
Your comment about “mental illness” reflecting problems in the wider community reminds me of Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who likes to point out that in indigenous communities, if someone is going through mental distress the assumption tends to be, right out of the gate, that it is a symptom or indicator of something being wrong and needing fixing in the community. He also likes to say that psychiatry is the only profession in which the client is always wrong.
On Marx, I keep meaning to look into something and never get around to it. It seems to me that the final contradiction or crisis of capitalism, in his terms, may be that profit increasingly depends precisely on both selling and degrading human consciousness with addictive “devices” and screens. What I can’t recall is if that would be a new contradiction or if it might be covered in the ones he wrote about. But it could be the one that finally pushes capitalist set of contradictions into a new synthesis, especially to the degree that it reinforces the old contradiction/crisis of Marx’s “ecological rift” as it now takes the form of climate change. You add those two contradictions together (or multiply them) and it could be not a utopian synthesis, as Marx hoped and worked for, but, well curtains. Which makes these sorts of new interpretations of Marx all the more helpful–than you again!
P.S. People here might especially appreciate this interview, which speaks to Marx’s (to me) surprisingly domestic home life and his enormous affection for and devotion to–and dependence on–his wife and daughters. There’s a lot of love there. The image that came to me was of him being held and nourished there and then every day donning one of those old diving helmets and suits with the air line attached and diving deeply into the awful satanic hot swampy mucky depths of the capitalist swamp every day, but always tethered to the oxygenic warmth of his family. https://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/
Fiachra, that seems like a pretty reasonable interpretation on first glance, but I believe the actual experience of work with MDMA is different. I’ve looked into it and spoken with people who have gone through the research described here and, if anything, the emphasis tends to be on not discussing things too much but rather on staying with one’s internal feeling and process. People routinely say things like “I had no idea it was possible to be so at ease and unafraid” and “that was like several years of therapy, except it went deeper.” People often find that, during a session, the more they talk and discuss, the less they heal, and vice versa.
Then afterward, I bet that peer discussions would be awfully helpful in sharing the experience and integrating it into regular consciousness.
My thoughts…hope they are of some help,
Daniel
** Mea culpa, I jumped the gun on what I wrote, below, and now realize we’re a lot closer than I thought. Just don’t have time to redo this now, but I thought I’d still post it as I think you’ll see the underlying thinking even though…we’re closer in our views than I thought.
You make a good point, Steve, and I do think there’s some of what you describe at play in the experience I mentioned, but of course we’d have to take a closer look to sort out the two (or more) things involved–i.e. lack of basic capacity or inclination vs. lack of training. (Well, there may also be an excess of prior training involved! Which would somewhat support your point, and in fact I really do share your concern about how training can narrow one’s perspective in unhealthy ways.) But what I can say for sure is that, having a fair amount of confidence in my own capacity and openness to really hear what what people need and to respond helpfully and adapt to that (of course I could be wrong…), I definitely feel that I would need “training” (there’s that tricky word again!), which includes practice, to better know how to apply the framework. And actually, my sense is that for me it may be necessary–although, as you say, definitely not sufficient, and I sure hope no one would go to such a training expecting it to make them into a good counselor. (And I say all that having some discomfort with the IFS crowd, they sometimes seem rather insular and narrow.)
Is not our ability to work with people always to a considerable degree socially constructed and environmentally mediated? i.e., not simply a matter of innate disposition or talent? (In which case I believe it would be genetic.) In light of that, where do we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of learning? Should one be born with the ability? Should it come only from how we grew up and our general/informal life experience? Is it okay if the disposition or talent is cultivated and blossoms during a well-rounded, liberal arts education (i.e., no training, only education)? Are there any sorts of “training” that are acceptable? To take a very different example, what about people who have “training” in and years of practice with compassion meditation, many of whom find they are much more empathic and open to other people’s distress?
Alternatively, instead of making these generalizations from afar (which, honestly, is my understanding of how psychiatrists do things, so it makes me uncomfortable), might it be helpful to stay open not just to our clients variable needs, but also to the variable nature of (the vast realm of) education and training that’s available and judge each according to it’s specific merits?
As for your bet on psychiatrists and IFS training…you might just be right on that one! It may be worth funding, even. Just think, we could make a science of it! There could be re-education camps! 🙂
Y
Yes, so true. I’ve always felt that the mark of someone who actually got an education doing their doctorate, actually learned something, is that they have realized how infinitely ignorant they are.
Steve, see my longer note below, but just to add: I totally hear you on what you would be looking for in a counselor or therapist, and trust absolutely what you have to say about that. But what if someone else is looking for something different? What if I come to this question and feel just as sure that there are some particular concepts and tools that I want my therapist to know how to use and so to have training in? Or maybe to ask it differently, do you see all training as invalid, or just invalid for your own purposes? (Note especially that to be certified in IFS you don’t need a PhD, or even a masters.)
I have to respectfully disagree with Sam and Steve, above. And I say that as someone who’s tried to do IFS work with a therapist not really “trained” in it and also is considering “training” in it myself. Maybe part of the difficulty here has to do with what we mean by “training.” It’s used very loosely in our society these days. Sometimes it’s used wrongly to refer to education. Sometimes, as I think IFS people use it, to refer to learning how to work with a particular framework or theory and set of conceptual tools, but to do it using your own talents and intelligence. And sometimes to refer to something much more limited, like training to perform a set task.
I definitely don’t think the way IFS sees parts and the idea of multiplicity of mind is simply common sense, as Sam suggests–it’s a particular view of the mind and how it works, and in my experience really quite different and even at odds with more unitary theories of the mind or consciousness. It’s of course not entirely new, but there’s a real paradigm shift from many other views, and most traditional views in the therapy world. I also have not found IFS people or the framework to be about “healing” or even more so about “fixing” others in the way Sam suggests. One of the things I like most about it is that it’s profoundly non-pathologizing and affirming of the client’s experience and inner wisdom and really quite adamant (if that’s the right word) that it’s about facilitating clients’ own ability to set their own direction, find their own inner resources, and heal themselves. It’s quite specifically at odds with attachment theory and as a result insists that even the most troubled clients do NOT need to develop deep attachment to their therapists to fill some void from a traumatic childhood, but rather only need to learn to look inward to get in touch with their own Self or inner wisdom, which it insists is…enough. These just are not ideas that most therapists, or even most thoughtful people in our particular, current cultural mllieu would come to in a common-sensical way, because they are contrary to so much that we’ve been taught.
This was all certainly reflected in my experience with a therapist who thought she understood IFS but didn’t–she had not at all grasped that it is not very compatible with, or even at all compatible with, other forms like narrative therapy or CBT. It was frustrating to have to explain the framework to someone who had said she knew how to use it. I wish she had had some training!
Anyway, them’s my two cents. I’m as appalled by much of what passes for training in the world of psychiatry and psychology as anyone, and actually have concerns about the insularity and lack of critical reflection in the IFS world, but it nonetheless seems different to me, and awfully promising. But I’m new to it. If I’ve missed something, of course I’ll be happy to hear how or why.
Thank you!This line alone is very astute and helpful: “You can be sure that a culture is emotionally abusive when it shames people for stating that they’re lonely.”
Maybe there’s something that smacks of insincerity or manipulativeness about my post above, but I sure can’t see it.
Sure people are swayed by what they read or watch. But I like to think they still have some agency in making their own decisions, and, while I haven’t read it yet, my bet, knowing the work of some of the authors, is that this book helps them make an informed decision much better than the popular media you mention. You and I, of course, differ on that–which is why, on my end, I think a free flow of information, i.e. unmuzzled by large and corrupt institutional interests like the Times and the APA, is a good thing. That way, if we decided to pursue this question (not the particular book, the larger question) further, we’d have more to work with, not less. But that’s just me. I know you disagree, but I sure do wish we could have the discussion without trying to get into each others heads, especially when we have so little to go on.
As for whether the authors were trying to capitalize on their credentials, I couldn’t say what their intentions or thought process were. I’m much more interested in looking at the merits of their argument. And, again, I’m glad to have more, not less, access to what they have to say.
I am baffled by numerous comments above saying that we don’t need Lee et al. to tell us how to vote, or that so-called experts should not be in a position to discredit the president. The reason I’m baffled is that it seems profoundly obvious to me that they are not in a position to do such things at all, and I very much doubt that they see themselves in this way. To suggest that they have this sort of ability seems to me to suggest that some people commenting here are, if you’ll forgive me for such a bold statement, lacking a sense of either their own agency or more generally our collective agency as a society. No one can tell us how to vote, and in fact no one can discredit the president. They can only give us their opinions, based on their experience and analysis. Then it’s up to us to decide how we vote or whether we find the president credible.
The selection of a president and whether or not he is discredited are collective decisions in which we all have a part. These authors are offering us their take on the situation. They’ve considered the sort of issues at hand deeply over the course of their carers. As others have suggested, their case should be taken on it’s merit, not on their credentials. Of course. Notice that they did not say in a press release “Trump is nuts, we’re experts and know about this, so remove him from office now!” They wrote a….book. Like, a careful, written argument for people to, you know…read? And judge on it’s merits. This, people, is exactly why we have books. No?
Steve, I think a crucial piece of all this is that it’s not just a regular, everyday job. Rather, the president has responsibility for things like pandemic response and, just to take one other example, a nuclear arsenal that could blow the planet up several times over. He also has the ability to bring about the corruption you mention, and by doing that he has, over time, pretty much made impossible some of the means of removing a president (so, the 25th amendment is pretty much a dead letter at this point). The system was plenty corrupt before, of course, but we really are now approaching a failed state and there’s very good reason to fear for what may happen in the upcoming election. I think there’s a reason why many positions of great sensitivity and consequence require psych evaluations; if people screw up or are simply malign, removing them may happen too late. (Don’t take that as an endoresment of how psych evaluations are done, but of the reasonableness of considering the question of fitness for some positions.)
I take Lee and Gilligan’s work as a reasonable contribution to a necessary public dialogue on all this. I suppose I’m also influenced by having read some of the prior work of a few these people, especially Gilligan and Judith Herman–not by their credentials, but by the fact that they are very thoughtful people who’ve done a lot to move forward our understanding of trauma (Herman) and how it tends to be tied to violence (Gilligan), and their implicit and very eloquent resistance to biological reductionism in their profession. I trust these people and want to hear what they have to say; if the psychiatric establishment and the Times are knee-capping them, I think we’re all the poorer for it.
Ok, them’s my two cents–thanks to everyone for this rich discussion of such an important topic.
Thank you, Robert. My feeling exactly but you said it much better than I could have. It’s really about free speech and the need for robust public discourse about matters of the gravest importance.
Yes. I think they are tightly interconnected, and as I write now I’m uncertain exactly where the line between the two is, or if there is a clear line. I think the bigger thing, which has been really helpful to me, is that the old idea that ideas influence or even determine neuropsychological state (including emotional state) is to some degree exactly backwards. Deb Dana, who’s interpreted Porges’s work for practitioners says it’s not “state follows story” (i.e., ideas and narratives determine how we feel) but rather “story follows state.” At the same time, clearly there are things going in both directions and in complex ways. It’s just that the old idea that if we get our thinking right (e.g., make gratitude lists) then we’ll feel better doesn’t work so well. Make sense?
Sounds about right to me. I would imagine that for some people the relationship runs in exactly the opposite direction, where depression leads to a lack of gratitude, especially if you consider polyvagal theory and the state of the vagal system as a determinant of emotional state. People in a “frozen” dorsal vagal state simply are not able to feel things like compassion and gratitude as much as those in a ventral vagal state. There’s a teriffic talk on youtube by Stephen Porges on polyvagal theory and compassion that explains this.
At the same time, I would also think that meditation practices like meta and tonglen, geared to generate compassion, may go deeper than the trendy making of gratitude lists, and so have the potential to be more helpful. But still, even there the nervous system has to reach a certain level of safety and relaxation for such practices to get traction. So it’s complicated.
JanCarol–yes, I think there’s a lot to what you say. I don’t think it’s really a left-right issue in the usual, superficial sense. I guess I’m not sure where the disagreement is?
Well, I would say someone’s politics have quite a lot to do with it. People who are stuck in and actively promoting authoritarian patriarchy tend to be pretty happy with psychiatry. If experiences like the one described here help people move out of that stance, that’s important. That’s my take on it, or at least a very simple and generalized nutshell; I’d be interested to hear yours.
Beyond that, I guess I never quite understand why people here often get so upset by and critical towards others who are discussing topics that interest them. This may sound snarky but I actually mean it honestly: it often feels to me like people here have internalized psychiatry’s intolerance for alternative views and lively discussion. Why not embrace it instead, or at least let others pursue what interests them and hold off on the criticism, which seems pretty harsh here. Why not treat each other with respect? Oh well, probably a silly question, I know.
Rossa, I’m afraid the idea that there is bickering going on here escapes me. It sure seemed to me like a few of us were discussing an interesting and to some of us disturbing aspect of this guy, while also hoping he will do something helpful with his experience. I always hope that we on this site will make a full break with psychiatry’s insistence on simplistic conformity and value a diversity of views but, alas, I am often disappointed on that count.
p.s. Actually, now that I think of it, the discussion above was directly relevant to what we discuss on this site. Peterson has been a staunch upholder of the same authoritarian, patriarchal social norms which also infuse psychiatry. I think it’s worth knowing that as we follow where all this goes with him. Maybe something like this is enough to make someone like Peterson question his old assumptions, which I think he would have to do to be helpful to anti-psychiatry. Maybe it’s not. I hope so. It’ll be interesting to see.
I agree that he’s not quite right wing in the usual, explicitly political sense. But I do think he’s highly reactionary and patriarchal, and in a very seductive way that attracts a lot of men, especially young men, who are at lose ends…which an awful lot of men are these days. His whole spiel about serotonin and the naturalness or inevitability of competition and hierarchy in human societies really makes you wonder how he ever got an appointment at Harvard; it’s just an insidious piece of patriarchal drivel. It goes something like: lobsters have serotonin and are competitive, territorial loners who live in a strict hierarchy; people have serotonin, therefore people are competitive territorial loners…and etc. There’s more to it than that, but it’s an extraordinary example of cherry picking to support a preconceived conclusion. Anyway, I thought the guy was interesting at first but was appalled the more I looked into him, even though I’m sorry he had to go through this ordeal and hope that maybe he will use his notoreity now to make people aware of the dangers of these drugs.
p.s. He also has a whole rant about how “post-modernist neo-Marxists” have ruined academia and are now out to get the world. How in the hell can you be a post-modern Marxist? It’s a contradiction in terms on the face of it, and basically his way of saying that any departure from the good ol’ days of western modernist-capitalism is bad, bad, bad.
Thank you for this very helpful summary. At a recent Zen retreat there was discussion of the fundamental human fear of losing group attachment…community, tribe. Really an existential threat to one’s being, as we are so fundamentally social. Someone who has taught in many parts of the world said that one of the biggest and most troubling surprises for her has been realizing how much greater this fear is among Americans, just terribly, terribly afraid of and/or suffering from a sense of expulsion from community, or simply not having it at all. And so: lots of depression.
Steve: Yes, of course, these are crucial questions, if different from the one I was responding to. I agree that psychiatry is generally not the place for this work to happen, and think the way they are dealing with ketamine is a prime example. I do know a few psychiatrists who work with psychedelics in very thoughtful ways, totally outside of the medical framework you so rightly criticize–and many of the researchers involved in this work, even if they are MDs or psychiatrists, also tend to be outside of the mainstream–I don’t think many people can hold onto that (nutso) paradigm once they’ve worked with these substances. But surely those psychiatrists are in the small minority.
One of the things I find hopeful is that much of the research on these substances is grounding the psychedelic experience within a series of therapy sessions to help prepare people for the experience and integrate it into daily life afterwards–and focusing on internal family systems, which is both a really good fit for the experiences people tend to have and also moves even further from the authoritarian tendencies of psychiatry and mainstream psychotherapy, putting the client much more fully in the driver’s seat.
Sylvain, I have been watching this topic on MIA for years and, while I have hardly made a systematic study of it, my impression is different from yours. I’ve seen pieces that struck me as pro-psychedelic and others that seemed quite the opposite, and others that were more neutral. I think reader comments tend towards “anti,” but then there are exceptions–although the antis tend to be rather uncompromising and even virulent, I assume for reasons that are obvious, given the experience many of us have had with psychiatric drugs. Personally, my hope is that there will continue to be plenty of room for a range of perspectives and that MIA will resist taking a hard editorial stand, especially in an area where, as you point out, we have so much to learn and can benefit from lively discussion.
I should say that I agree that we need better and longer-term research on psychedelics, just as we do on prescription drugs. (Although much of the work on MDMA and psilocybin of recent years does look at outcomes 6 months out and more, which is a huge improvement on most conventional pharma research, and the results are quite promising.) I think there’s actually a lot of potential with psychedelics, especially because they are so fundamentally different in that they are used rarely and for many people are helpful in understanding the mind and learning to work with difficulties, rather than numbing people out and shutting them down. But I’m also concerned about the current level of enthusiasm and “silver bulletism” that’s afoot and about potential problems, especially when they are not used carefully, as is often the case these days.
So those are my thoughts, I hope of some interest.
Daniel
It’s worth watching the interview. Cooper clearly has something very personal going on here–and is kind of being a jerk–while I’d say that Williamson handles it beautifully.
There are plenty of reasons to be either in favor of or against MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Personally, I believe it has a lot of promise, as a remarkagle drug that is on your system for only a matter of hours–no daily dosing or bathing the nervous system for years in powerful chemicals–promise to shift us actually OUT of the drug-dependent paradigm and practice of psychiatry. It’s just a very different animal that, at it’s best, opens up the internal, self-healing abilities of the psyche in a profound way. It also has some pitfalls, especially when not done carefully, and my feeling is that the power of the experience–again, when it’s not done carefully–has the potential to convince people they are “healed” when actually they are not. So it’s complicated. But the main thing I wanted to say is that the level of misinformation and flat out ignorance in the comments here is staggering. I mean, at least bother to look into it, people, before you trash it. What’s the point of trashing something you haven’t learned about, aside from, what, bolstering your own prejudices and presuppositions and ego? Those of course are precisely the things that psychiatry does; why not chose to be unlike them and actually consider it carefully with an open mind? Also, please note that MAPS is a non-profit organization, and MDMA is not pattentable. This is really not about greed or profit. These people may turn out to be wrong, but they are not part of the pharma-industrial complex, far from it.
Thank you for this, Joshua, it’s so very important. I’ve been encouraged by Nadine Narris now having such an effective bully pulpit for getting this more on the policy table. And the work in Norway sounds wonderful.
One thing that I think is also important is the likelihood that ACE scores actually understate the connection between trauma and later effects, since there are many things from very early in life that people don’t remember or know about, and others that they probably just don’t mention because they’re in that semi-conscious zone we just don’t think or talk about. I think van der Kolk’s work on developmental trauma disorder is crucial here but it seems like that often does not make it into the ACEs discussion.
Julie, Sheesh, what a mess. The ol’ wounder healer shtick gets a little old when they are not even aware of how they carry their wounds and project them on others.
But it’s helpful to me to know you had that experience. I’ve considered writing them a letter and maybe now I will. My experience was a little different in that there was one person who was not just open to the abuse I described but actually wanted to go further, seemed more focused on hunting him down (that was the sense or feel of it anyway, if not literally the case) than actually paying attention to what I had to say. But then there was another, some months later, who “explained” to me that the main problem was that I had been cast out of my tribe and so was just reeling from that and, after I’d given her the whole grim story, referred to my former therapist having “possibly behaved unethically.” In other words, she was casting doubt on what I’d said and trying to replace it with her own version–which takes some serious hutzpah after receiving an initial communication via email.
My experience with therapy has been different, though. I did have a series of sessions who was very helpful–solid, steady, completely validating. Unfortunately, my insurance didn’t cover it so it was very limited. Then I saw someone else for a while who basically didn’t want to hear it–I think a lot of therapists get very disturbed when faced with this stuff and can’t handle it. But mostly I’ve gotten myself out of it, pretty much in isolation–which I do not recommend but can at least say it’s possible.
But yes, I hear you on therapy addiction–absolutely. They can really get in your head and do serious damage. And I hear you on the damage it can cause to your life. I am still digging out of the whole I got in while getting off SSRIs almost a decade ago. I’m getting there, but it’s really hard, and slow. It helps to know there are others out there who get it–thank you, really, and again, so sorry about the string of things you mentioned above. It sounds awful, but you also sound very strong and determined.
Sleep–thank you, that’s good to hear. And I think I sort of know it in the abstract. I just am not in touch with people who get it–really no one in my life gets it or is open to the whole picture–and of course it’s, as you say, less a focus on this site. I actually was in touch with two people from TELL (Therapy Abuse Link Line) but found both of them quite eager to explain my situation to me and in essence it felt like they were stuck on their personal agendas, as people who’ve been harmed also. There’s very little transparancy to the group and it appears to be small and, to my eye, not too well run. I could be wrong, maybe I just got unlucky. But I do wish we had more of a forum for such things.
I keep meaning to write something for MIA about both my drug (SSRI) and therapy experiences–and there’s another related situation, a therapeutic psychedelic group that was a quasi-cult and pretty screwed up, despite having some very “high-level, reputable” people involved in it. Well, I was also in an abusive relationship. I think I basically, after I got off the SSRIs, got stuck in a loop of repeating elements of a traumatic childhood, having very basic confusion regarding who I could or should trust. For years I thought I was on the right track and finally committing fully to seeing it through, but then eventually it turned out my wonderful, wise therapist who’d been advising me on all the other stuff was, in fact, a needy, manipulative sociopath. So I think there may be a pretty interesting story there about how these different aspects get tied together, not just the drugs and psychiatry.
So maybe that’ll happen and can be a way to connect or at least be heard. Thank for reaching out!
Oh, my. Mine does not fit everything you say, but certainly some points exactly. There was a point where he suggested twice a week, then later three times and reduced the rate to make that possible. There were years when those trips to his office were the center of my life. (Yuk!) There were also times when I suggested, say, another six months of therapy and he would very kindly and gently but definitely say, or just wordlessly indicate, no, you will need to be here longer. Because, of course, I was in such great need and he was uniquely able to help. Supposedly, I mean. And the fact is, I really did need help, and I think it’s true that he was the first person I’d encountered to be willing and able to hold the space for some terribly difficult material I needed to work with. What I have found is that at the heart of every cult (and they say therapy can be a cult of two) there is something of real value–that’s what the dark and twisted stuff feeds on.
Thank you, Julie. I actually did go over some of this with another therapist who got it and was helpful, but outside of that you’re almost the only person who really gets it. It’s very similar to the drug withdrawal–there’s no acceptable narrative for it, people don’t or can’t understand, so you become very alone with it. I’m so sorry those things happened to you. I hope things are better these days.
I’ve enjoyed your writing here over the years, by the way! 🙂
Thank you, Julie. I really appreciate your saying that the problem is much bigger than just drugs and psychiatry. I had the rotten luck to be referred to a therapist (psychoanalyst, though that’s not what I went for) when I started the withdrawal process. He was my own support in those years, which were pretty awful, and it was not until years later that I began to realize how maniupulative he had been. I literally ran out of money to pay him with and had to take what I naively thought was a temporary break and he became overtly hostile and then tried to gaslight me, insisting that my “severing” of the relationship was a manifestation of my deep passive-aggressiveness. It was just awful, and I don’t think I’m past it yet–like you, I find myself protective and defensive. And part of the reason I trusted him was because he is definitely not “mainstream” and had a healthy skepticism of diagnoses and drug culture, was actually right about alot of things–there was just this little problem of his being underneath that, at a deeper level, sociopathic–and I now know that he has harmed other people, seems to be a pattern. So you just never know where the danger lies, not always where you might expect and it’s a huge lesson, for me, to never, ever let go of, and to listen closely to, the wise internal voice and never anyone like that get too much influence over you. So it’s a different situation from yours, I think, but the point that it goes way beyond drugs and psychiatrists is important.
Hi Kindred,
I seem to be back. First, I’m sorry I got all huffy like that. Internet debates are a perilous business, especially on days when I’m having internal struggles. Apologies, really.
First, I meant to say earlier (the thought was there!) that I appreciate your driving home for me the awful injustice of the system, how truly horrifying it is. Partly because of my personality and partly because of my situation, the suffering for me tends to be (I think) more subtle and gradual, even though it’s cumulatively pretty darned awful. I sometimes lose sight of how acutely awful it is because of that. Your forthrightness and totally appropriate indignation help remind me. I hope my (supposedly) thoughtful, rational, strategic-analytic schtick is not obnoxious under the circumstances. It’s one of the ways I survive and sometimes manage to make a contribution, but I suspect it can be a bit much sometimes.
Here’s what came clear to me suddenly once I got away from the derned computer and outside and moving. I think anger is a wonderful and important thing. (I’m “sort of” Buddhist, but really do not agree with the whole Buddhist idea of negative emotions. Every single one is good and indispensable, thanks very much.) But in my personal experience, just mine, I have found that when anger is held onto and stoked, things can go badly. I grew up with that, and absorbed it, and it has done me a lot of harm. I’m still trying to get out of it. I think it scares the crap out of me, honestly–both in myself and others. So that’s a very personal piece. I tend to think it’s generally true, but I also know there’s something to be said for using not just anger but rage (and perhaps even hatred?) to make things change–and of course if they are simply there for someone, I don’t mean at all to suggest they should be hidden away, they’re real and should be taken on their own terms and respected as a straight matter of humanity.
Ok. But what I think is really key for me is that I believe our hugely dysfunctional and damaging society runs an awful lot on anger and hatred, and even rage. I think it’s part of why we (as a society) treat “mentally ill” people (i.e., people who are different and especially who have some real spontaneity and even wildness in them) the way we do. I think that side of the human mind is valuable and indispensable (in wildness is the salvation of the world, right?)–I think it scares the crap out of the control mongers because somewhere inside they know they have it and scares them and they hate it in themselves. And I think it’s the same with old people and why they get set aside and shunted into the awful places they go to to die–they are “weak,” and less “together” and not shiny and sleek and “perfect” the way we’re all taught we should be. And same in many cases for kids who are mistreated—I think their vulnerability and innocence is terribly threatening to some people–almost always people who were mistreated themselves.
So I think that’s all a large part of why I find myself distressed by some of the things you said. I guess that, as hard as it is (and it REALLY is hard, for me anyway–if you look closely, you can see it in what I wrote above) I think the answer is love, not hate. I don’t at all mean to suggest we should leave out fighting–that is essential. I think love can be fierce. I think MLK and Gandhi and Malcolm and Mandela and Cornell West have fierce love and know how to fight like nobody’s business. (Notice those are all people of color; I am not. But I have been oppressed and terribly hurt, so hope I am not totally out of my element in seeking solidarity there.) But I just fear that if it comes out of hate or primarily out of anger, we won’t get where we need to go. But that may be because of my own personal issues, I’m not sure. I have lost a great deal of the certainty that I once had. But that’s how it seems to me. I think we need to find a way to be better than the oppressors and the control mongers. And yes, more loving. Fiercely.
That’s my take. I hope it’s not too much. I really thank you, and of course also Jane, for bringing up some important things and even for hitting my buttons. 😉 May we all find peace and may we find a way to keep this wonderful, beautiful world from flying apart.
d
I have to say I am struck by your not responding to the points I raise. How are you not clumping people together in simplistic categories and judging them in much the same way that the system does to people who are “mentally ill”? I understand full well, by the way, that it is not exactly the same thing–it’s the same process and mindset, which I find alarming. I just don’t think it’s helpful to condemn people who we don’t know anything about personally or having made a clear case for why it would be pragmatically useful, especially when they themselves are abused and trying like heck to survive.
And I do find your words insensitive and uncaring, to be honest. Very. Perhaps most especially your comment about “Uncle Tom.” You may be content to pass judgement like that on people who have had the stuffing knocked out of them across multiple generations in almost unimaginebly horrible ways and are knowingly (as I believe “Uncle Toms” have done) trying their damndest not just to survive but to (as was typically the case) keep their children alive also (and keep in mind that virtually all slaves had to “Uncle Tom” it to some degree), but it’s not a place I want to go–or, really, even be around. I will of course read anything else you put up, but it’s time for me to bow out of this conversation. I wish you the best–and I honestly mean that.
p.s. Please don’t mistake my point about sympathy and compassion as a suggestion that they shouldn’t resist and fight an unjust, oppressive system. I just don’t think we get there by condemning people who are scared and oppressed themselves.
Kindred, here is where you and I diverge in a big way. You write “I can’t sympathize with people who shrink from doing what’s right because they might find themselves one of us. Where is the solidarity in that? Where is the humanity in that?”
I don’t always succeed, but I try to sympathize with those people. Why not sympathize with people who are not as strong as you are? Unless perhaps you believe they are making a conscious decision to be bad people and are pleased with that. It seems unlikely to me. And as for solidarity, to me, having compassion for people who are not as strong or who are misguided is a big part of solidarity. If we only have compassion for those who are like us–whether it’s strength, intelligence, whatever–then pretty much by definition I think we’re not moving towards solidarity. But I expect you will see this differently and would be interested to know.
Kindred, I do want to say that I really admire your passion and your willingness to put yourself on the line. We absolutely need more of that these days. I have to sign off of this at least for now, but thank you for engaging the conversation. Wishing you all the best, Dan
Kindred, I certainly get your underlying message; it’s a question of whether it’s the message we need, and also whether the world is really that black and white. (Personally, my feeling is that we need to diverge from the black and white thinking that got us here in the first place.) The trick here is that hypotheticals like “imagine what an organized walkout might look like” is not the same as it actually happening. In order for social movements to be effective, they need to take the collective action problem inherent in such suggestions very seriously. If you look at those who have been successful in such work it sometimes appears as though they are “just” radical, or militant, or uncompromising, or incrementalist, or compromising, or whatever. That is rarely the case–they tend to consider carefully and discuss openly–with an open mind, rather than preconceived notions–what is the best course. Maybe you’re doing that, but I sure can’t see it.
Kindred, I think you may have put your finger on something important with your reference to hurt feelings. That’s really not what I was interested in. I mean, I think that always matters on a personal level, but I was more focused here on the question of what works and what might keep us from doing what works. I think that putting feelings at the forefront here (albeit often without realizing it) is a large part of the problem. My take is that neither the hurt feelings of mental health workers you refer to nor the angry feelings of those (you and me) who’ve been harmed by the system should take precedence over what works. The feelings are terribly important, but they should not rule our analysis. I have to be honest, my sense is that you’re assessment here is colored by your anger. I could be wrong–perhaps there is a clearer analysis that lies behind your position than you’ve laid out, but I can’t see it. That analysis of course would be a much larger and longer conversation, but I do at least want to be clear on this point.
Kindred,
Not sure if this will come up in the right order–we can’t comment on a comment directly, it seems.
As I think about it, to be honest, I was not just trying to see your point of view (though I was that) but also hoping you might consider a question that seems important from my point of view. I often actually am opposed to incrementalism and compromise–I think we’re rather addicted to that in our society in some very bad ways, and am appreciative of anyone (like you) who is willing to be forthright and not hide from necessary conflict.
I think it’s a very hard thing to know when it’s best, for any given individual, to fight all out and when it’s best to compromise or work within the system. I have my doubts about whether we can ever know for certain–there is always faith involved, and of course also very personal dispositions.
But I suppose what I would ask is, do you find any value in the question that I posed–that I often ask myself and feel we might all profitably consider? Do you think it is possible that we sometimes do to others what was done to us, albeit it different or muted form? I know I sometimes do (i.e., judge others in the way I was judged–I do it out of anger, fear, and hurt) and think I see it in others, even as I do not assume I can know for sure–it’s tough enough sometimes what’s happening in my own mind!
So, that’s just to try to make clear what I was after–posing an open question, rather than suggesting I know which is the best path.
Kindred,
This is really tough stuff, I know–and you have my deepest sympathies for what you’ve been through. All I can think of to say that might possibly be useful (though I know it may not be) is that something I try hard to do, though I often fail, is to ask if it is possible that I am unfairly categorizing (diagnosing, pathologizing) people in the same way that others did to me. My feeling is that we need to be really careful judging or condemning others (just as I was judged via “medical” diagnosis) if I don’t know their full story and all the complexity that brings.
BothSides: Thank you for this. I think that until we learn just how fundamentally this problem is systemic and that it does damage to everyone involved we are not going to get out of it. If you can find a way to be of help and create change from the inside, more power to you. 🙂
Thank you for this. I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through this but also, although I’ve had an easier time of it overall, I can relate to a lot that you say. The realization that it comes from trauma is life-changing, isn’t it? I think that most of the “diagnoses” are junk, but Developmental Trauma Disorder, which Besel van der Kolk has been trying hard to get recognized, is probably very commmon, and it shifts it from “something is wrong with me” to “I was hurt, or injured, very badly.” I always thought there was just something inherently wrong with me. I had “all the advantages” and a heck of a lot of gifts and skills, and just could never put it all together sufficiently to have the sort of life I thought I should have, and wanted. Then when I was 51 I found out that my mother had had a psychotic break when I was 4, and gradually came to realize the extreme degree of dysfunction in my family, of which that was the most prominent sign but hardly the only one–as always, it was a symptom, not a cause–and same for my “depression.” The injustice and brutality of the whole thing is just awful–I’m so sorry you got caught up in it and hope your new understanding makes things much better.
Thank you for this, and especially for your (and your therapist’s) suggestion that there can be “another sort of PTSD” in the aftermath. I was “only” on them for fifteen years, and got off seven years ago, but the damage caused to my life, both while being on them and especially during a multi-year withdrawal process, is still with me. I am continuing to climb out of the hole and honestly sometimes wonder if I am even able to take in fully the scope of it all. What makes it especially difficult is that no one else quite gets it, so I mostly have to work it out in my own head–so it is very helpful to hear your story and know I am not alone. You have my deepest sympathies, and solidarity.
I really appreciate the attention to this and agree that caution is warranted, but I’m also concerned about the particular bias you seem to be bringing to this issue. To characterize ketamine as “used by veterinarians” and “a party drug” just is not right and, to my eye, raises major concerns about credibility right out of the gate. It is a common and very effective ER anaesthetic, is also frequently used in hospice care, and has been shown over decades to be reliable and safe for these uses.
Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s work is very good on this. He is Cherokee-Lakota-European and an M.D., certified I think in psychiatry, gerontology, and family medicine. His book “Healing the Mind through the Power of Story” is especially good.
There’s lots to say about his approach, but there are two things I’ve heard him say that I especially like. “In indigenous cultures, we assume that if a person has psychic distress it means something is wrong in the community and that person should be respected and listened to carefully.” (That’s a paraphrase) And (joking): “Psychiatry is the only profession in which the customer is always wrong.” Just a lovely man with a lot to offer.
Kindred, I think you are missing the importance of the different ways in which boys/men and girls/women are socialized. Just because traumatized women don’t usually become physically violent, and even just because most traumatized men don’t either, as Steve says, doesn’t at all mean that Gabor Mate is wrong here. Men are typically socialized to go outward with their feelings, and that anger is about the only intense feeling that is permissible to be displayed. Not all men, but an awful lot. And so some, even a small minority, end up doing awful, violent things. I’m not excusing it, and I don’t think Mate is, either, but I do think he’s absolutely right about the connection he’s describing.
Hey, sorry for being so strident there, I’m afraid I can get my dander up. I really did have many of the same reactions as you–to the interview I heard, anyway. But there were two things that bothered me in what you wrote.
The first is phrases like: “Dear Lauren Slater: I learned, and I hope you learn, too, before it is too late,” and “Dear Lauren Slater, you need to find the answer within yourself. Plain and simple.” That seems pretty condescending to me and I just think we need to meet people where they are. The reason it pushes my buttons, of course, is that I as once told things were plain and simple by the people who got me hooked on antidepressants and it cost me dearly. I just don’t agree with you on the “everyone is different” thing. I know it’s a tricky phrase and can be used to legitimize really bad treatment, but I also think there’s truth in it–even if just in that some people are “different” in that they really aren’t able to get off the drugs. Or at least are convinced of such, and I won’t put myself in the position of judging them on that, as much as I might disagree, and tell them so. But I think it’s terribly important that the conversation always be respectful.
The second things is regarding psychedelics. I spent five years of my life trying to get off of SSRIs and might never have been able to if I had not in the end done some careful, guided work with psychedelics. I have now been clean for six years and honestly feel I owe my life to those substances. And I know several other people who would say the same. I think we need to be careful not to counter psychiatry’s “drugs are always the answer” ideology with a reactionary “drugs are always bad” ideology. I think we need to listen and learn and consider individual people and individual treatments on their own merits.
Thanks for your writing, and for the discussion–really.
I have not read Slater’s book, although I did hear interview with Terri Gross. Based on that, there are a great many things in this review that make sense to me, and also some things that don’t. More important, I am dismayed by the condescension towards a smart and thoughtful woman who doesn’t have all the answers but does have the courage to tell her story and offer her opinions, imperfections, uncertainties, and all. Why is it that so many people writing here can not see the way they mirror the arrogance of conventional psychiatry every time they dismiss the experience of real people and announce to us all that they know the truth and the way that everyone else must follow?
He also wrote a very nice book on ecological Marxism called: “The enemy of nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world?” This is especially worth noting as we celebrate Marx’s 200th birthday. Although it gets into the weeds in places, the book is overall one of the best overall presentations of eco-Marxism, explains very nicely how capitalism so fundamentally feeds off the ruination of nature, just as it does off the exploitation of people, and considers deeply the question of whether “sustainable” capitalism is even at all possible, or whether the growth imperative will always outpace our piecemeal attempts at regulation. Needless to say, it ain’t lookin’ good. I did not know about his work on corporate medicine, though I’m not surprised–the bodies we live in being inseparable from the body we live on. Anyway, a very fine man, he will be missed even as he continues to be with us through his work.
As a victim of antidepressant poisoning (what else can you call it?) I am deeply disturbed, but not entirely surprised. What also comes to mind is that this is one of many symptoms of a profound social disease (or maybe something that should go in the next DSM?). I watched the other night a John Oliver piece (actually a quite good source of news) on nuclear waste and it showed barrels of it being duped off the coast of New Jersey in the 50s. (Some of them came back to the surface, so they strafed them with machine guns from a plane–really, what else was there to do?) So you know, develop a technology, pretend against all common sense that it’s safe, and wait for the shit to hit the fan. And now we have these marvelous smart (dumb) phones, that we already know are making people, especially teen-agers, miserable, but I don’t think we’ve even begun to see the full measure of what our life-of-screens is doing, not least making people even more complacent about all of the above. Let us be very, very angry, and then do something about it.
Thank you, Kelly!
Indeed. What I realized after spending some time reading through those comments is that there is a range of views, but the top “readers picks” are all pro-drug. The one you quote was I think the highest on that list, got the most votes. What that says to me is that there are a TON of people who’ve swallowed the coolaid but perhaps on some level realize it and so get very defensive and “vote” those comments to the top of the list. Still, the article itself is what most people will see, and as Steve says it is progress.
Yes, it is progress, at least. I’m not sure how many people even read the print version any more, but letters to the editor might be worthwhile also. I did notice that among the “NYTimes Picks” in the comments every single one is pro-drug, so it looks like someone low on the totem pole (I always wonder who has to review the comments all day long) is taking a side, whereas I think letters to the ed may get more careful attention.
I just looked through the comments on this in the Times. It is unbelievable. There are so many people writing in, from first-hand experience, saying what wonderful, indispensable drugs they are. While I’m willing to bet a lot of that is because of placebo effect, I do think we need to take people’s personal stories, from both sides of this, seriously. But there is still the endless refrain on chemical imbalance and the diabetes metaphor. You read through it and just want to bang your head against the wall. Or maybe someone else’s! The endless circulation of long-dead pseudo-science propaganda. Well, thank God we live in the modern age of corporate media and miraculous electronic communication, where truth always rises to the top!
There is also a good interview with her on Fresh Air about a week ago.
Thank you, Juliano, this is a very important perspective you offer, and one I agree with, including on the fear of psychedelics. I’m curious, though, why you say that about Jung–he has seemed to me not unalligned with your position, albeit too internally focused and so not attentive enough to the problem of social control.
The only thing I’d add is that men are terribly harmed by patriarchy, also. The pressure to conform just happens earlier than for women (Carol Gilligan’s research suggests at about age 5, as opposed to early teens for girls), and so gets more thoroughly repressed. bell hooks says that “patriarchy has no gender,” which seems very true to me.
Yes, exactly. I think we’re almost giving away the argument by not making that the central point.
Thank you for this very helpful and thorough interview. The only thing I would question is the statement that it may not be possible to design research that would definitively answer the question of antidepressant efficacy. I think it’s very possible that long-term research, following people over the course of years and looking at both positive and negative effects, would show a clear long-term deleterious effect. It’s just so common to find people who benefitted greatly at first, and then reverse tolerance creeps up, and side effects creep up…my bet would be that if you extend the time scale to real-life scenarios, the results might just become pretty clear.
I realize that isn’t too likely to happen, but strategically I think there’s a strong case to be made–a very plausible hypothesis to be put forth–that would strengthen the argument against the drugs. Well, not just strategically, as opening up the debate beyond the narrow confines of current research actually helps to expand people’s understanding. And who knows, maybe more discussion like that could actually open up the possibility of careful research?
Yes, exactly. And yet it passes peer review for publication in the Lancet. What more do we need to know?
Johann Harri interviewed John Ioaniddes (sp?), who I think is about the most important figure in medical research in the last couple of decades for having shown clearly just how bad so much peer-reviewed research is. (2005, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” is the most downloaded article on PLOS medicine.) At the end of the interview in which Ioannides essentially says research on SSRIs is as bad as any body of research out there, Harri asks him how he feels about the whole thing. He says, well, it’s really terribly depressing…but not nearly depressing enough to make me want to ever take one of those drugs!”
Lawrence: Yes, absolutely. I think also it is true at the social level and not just individual–that it is definitely about subconscious desires, but also about systemic and institutional dynamics and structures, which help to perpetuate individual subconscious aggression. So, capitalism is very much about control and domination, baked in at the roots, the basic rules of organization. I am also remembering a very nice, succinct book by Jennifer Reid called “The Colonial Encounter:..something something”, about the English and Micmac encounter in the Atlantic provinces. She describes very nicely how ambiguity was easily accepted by the Micmac, whereas the English could not tolerate it, everything had to be clear, defined, black and white. So, for instance, the Micmac, like many indigenous peoples, could easily fold Christianity into their own relgion, whereas the English could only see anything outside of their own religion, anything introducing uncertainty or paradox, as just plain bad or downright evil, the work of the devil. (Not so different from the idea that there is clearly “sane” and “insane.”) This seems to me a sort of conceptual-emotional violence and makes me pull back a little on what I said before–I think the domination and oppression have also been there internally for a long time. I expect it is a result of both philosophy/culture and childhood trauma (consider European child-reaering practices…).
These are fascinating questions and I thank you for once again spurring my thinking on such things!
Thank you, Lawrence; very thoughtful writing, as always.
The only thing I would question is whether the U.S. was ever as free as we like to think. In certain respects, yes, but there has also been a strong inclination from the start to conquer and control (indigenous peoples, Africans, minorities and outliers of all sorts, and of course nature) and I think part of what’s happened is now that we no longer have such an open field for that, the old, blatant techniques become more subtle and we turn them inwards–within our own society and our own minds. Bruno Latour said that “the repressed returns, and with a vengeance.” I think we’ve repressed and hidden our profound aggression and violence for several hundred years (or a few millenia), the old targets are no longer available, and as the center no longer holds, it goes inward. There is, in the end, a fine and perhaps non-existent line between outward and inward aggression. Maybe? Thoughts?
rasselas, perhaps as people who have suffered terribly from having others control our minds to make us conform–well, perhaps we should not seek to control how others use words that are meaningful to them and how they think. Perhaps we should not do what was done to us, even if it is in more subtle form. Perhaps, like all who have suffered abuse, it is not our fault but nonetheless our responsibility to not perpetuate the cycle by seeking to dominate and control and ridicule others who are in pain. Maybe we should listen, instead?
I see it all the time here, people who have been hurt and are in such pain becoming very angry and impatient with each other and painting us back into the black and white, polarized box of thinking we’re trying so hard to get out of.
As for mental illness, I actually agree with you for the obvious reasons and avoid using the term myself. On the other hand, if I have a stomach virus, which of course indicates nothing inherently wrong with me but simply a hostile foreign invasion, I do feel ill and have a physical illness. While the context is different (which is why I don’t use the term), nonetheless, the painful rubbish our minds have been filled with from trauma and propaganda and drugs is not so different, so who am I to tell someone he does not have a mental illness? I might explain why I think it’s a problem , but in the end I will always be for cognitive liberation, not domination. Even more, first and foremost, I will be for compassion for others who have suffered.
Thank you for posting this! What in the world is “mixed depression” and why would one even think of taking an antipsychotic for it?
It can be terribly hard; took me the better part of five years until I finally found a way out, and even then it was very hard. Have you checked out the Inner Compass Initiative, which includes the Withdrawal Project? I think there is good support there and maybe ideas for how to make it work. I hope you find a way to get off, wishing very best of luck.
Thank you for this, Kelly. Your point that they are “throwing more of the same failed medicine at the very problem created by the failed medicine” is very much in line with similar dynamics in the realm of international development. About once a decade there is a new, “expert”-derived formulation to “develop” the poor of the world, and each time it is essentially an imposition of external force, as you say, and each time it fails, and each time a new and “better” formulation is cooked up. I’m sure there are other areas where this is true–well, industrial agriculture is another example, needing always more fertilizer and pesticides to “solve” the problems caused by their earlier application. This is a hallmark of late modernity. Let us keep our shoulders (lightly!) to the wheel not of force but of unfolding.
Thank you, James, and Johann, for this. It is a remarkably thoughtful and interesting interview and I think Johann’s work can do a great deal to get this perspective and information out to a wider audience. I also want to recommend very highly his earlier book on the war on drugs, “Chasing the Scream.” I always thought it just started with Nixon but, in fact, goes way back to the 20s and has profoundly racist and political roots.
There are many wise people and wonderful writers here at MIA, but Johann is able to take this material to the next level, narratively-speaking, and produce real page-turners that are also deeply humane and wise. For that I am very grateful.
Tireless, we seem to have trouble connecting on some key points of meaning. You’re clearly a person of great passion and conviction; I hope things go well for you.
Besides, who said that “we” “need” drugs? The suggestion here has been uniformly that there is an option that some people may want to chose.
Tireless, it’s pretty clear already that you believe that. I thought one of the things most of us were against on this site was the presumption to know and judge the interior states of those we might deem less aware or enlightened than ourselves. Why not, instead, speak from your own experience and leave the judgemental presumptions to the psychiatrists? Why not be okay with the way others chose to work with their own consciousness? So what if they’re deluded and escapist? Why not just wish them well and hope they wake up to your superior view?
Jan,
This is really helpful, thanks for taking the time and offering the detail. I know one cannot fully describe such things, but I think I get the gist.
It actually sounds very much like what I was hoping for and led to expect with a group I worked with a few years ago. In my case, it went badly. I think I was somewhat desperate for community and got pulled in with the false-promise of that. It was also a group with very prominent and “respectable” people–doctors, lawyers, philanthropists, Ivy League professors, etc., and I’m chagrined to look back and realize I really suspended my own better judgement because of that, despite a longstanding proclivity to discount or even shy away from conventional markers and titles. (Of course, sometimes what we reject is exactly what we crave on a deeper level.)
It was not until nearly a year in that someone who had a lot of careful experience working in other contexts pointed out to me that, in such a deep state, one could essentially be re-traumatized when interactions in that space come with impatience, disrespect, hostility, etc.–and given the gestalt of the whole thing, they tend to be relatively subtle, insidious…slippery. It took me the better part of a year to tease out the ways that had, indeed, happened to me. I have now heard of others who’ve left that community in a very troubled state, although I know many others who would describe in much the way you did your experience.
This brings two thoughts to mind. First is that surely there is a continuum, from the very good and safe group you worked with, to the not-good one I was a part of. The second is that such groups can be very different for different members. I don’t assume it, but wonder if there may have been some in your group who did not have quite as good or safe an experience as you did. I know for my part that I did not give voice to the problems at the time. I was both very invested and trying to make it work, and also there was too much shame involved to even admit it to myself, much less others. What was wrong with me, I wondered, that I could not be a part of this wonderful, supportive, sharing experience that others seemed to be having?
I should say that I am a very big believer in dispersed power–and not just on faith, but on the evidence, in many situations. But I’m still not convinced this is a situation where it’s best, or at least always so. I doubt these things can ever be regular or predictable enough to know for sure, and because it’s had to be kept so under wraps and quiet, I think we all have still a lot to learn.
Jan, your point about it being an event is very important; thank you for so nicely articulating that, and also that it is spiritual work.
I didn’t mean to suggest the setting isn’t important (it is, absolutely), just that the therapeutic relationship isn’t necesSARilly a big problem in terms of power dynamics. I agree that it’s always something to be careful with, and in a sense always problematic. But I would be wary of putting too much confidence in group work. As with a therapist, it depends greatly on the nature of the group. But even in the most supportive of groups it can be a dicey business to rely for support on someone else who also is in a deep state of consciousness exploration. One of the lesser appreciated problems with this work, in the circles where it happens, is that there can be retraumatization when one is in that deep state. In a group that is not carefully set up and, ideally (in my view) supervised, you never quite know who might come along and drop their own shit on you. I think it’s really too much to expect someone in that state to be the primary support.
That’s my take; I’d be interested in you have further thoughts on this.
The way I think of it is that power dynamics will always be an issue and always bear the closest consideration in all relationships, whether a group or a dyad. But in a group it’s dispersed and a lot can be happening out of plain sight. Of course, that can also happen with a dyad! But personally, I would rather have the power relationship clear and up front with one trusted and experienced therapist or healer or even a really good friend (and yes, not a psychiatrist!) who’s sober than dispersed in a group, especially where people are doing their own deep work.
Here is a thought. Trauma begets trauma, abuse begets abuse, disprespect begets disrespect. It is my sense that the wilful ignorance and violence of psychiatric “care” has been internalized by some of those who have been most harmed by it, and further compounded by their suffering. How else to explain the disregard shown by many here for the views and experiences of others that fall outside their own framework of assumptions. How else to explain the unwillingness to even consider alternate views and experiences? Please note that I said “consider.” Not agree with or accept. Simply consider, and perhaps engage in dialogue.
Fire away.
I just want to be sure you want to shackle, restrain, and imprison people who are assisting adults who have sought them out for assistance in exploring their own minds in a way that poses no threat at all to anyone else but that does diverge from your own ideas of what is an acceptable state of mind.
If so, should we not also shackle and imprison the people choosing to have experiences of alternative consciousness? Note that in the early days psychedelics were sometimes referred to as “psychotomimetic” because they can induce temporary states that resemble “psychosis.”
So if we’re going to shackle and imprison people who chose to do that, can you explain how that’s so different from psychiatry?
Are you hoping for a diagnostic manual that can categorize these people? An army of specially trained doctors to “treat” them? Or are you looking more for old-school imprisonment where you just toss them in jail?
MDMA is also totally contraindicated for anyone currently taking prescription psych drugs–someone asked about that below.
P.S. As for your preacher’s grandson, I couldn’t agree more!
Hi Feelin, I want to ask a question that could seem argumentative but I’m honestly interested and curious and wondering if there could be unseen common ground. So the question is: If you’ve read this article, and perhaps also my comments in the thread, what accounts for your insistence that a drug is a drug is a drug? Do you assume the research is part of the pharma-industrial complex? Do you assume what I’ve written is untrue or that I’m deluded? Do you assume something else?
I was just looking over Scott’s article again–I came to it late last night after a long drive, and then mostly read the comments today–and am seeing anew the emphasis he put on the idea that this will “transform the face of mental health care.” (I do realize it’s in the title; mea culpa…and mea was pooped, too.) I think he’s right about the potential for paradigm change, but that you (Steve) are also right to emphasize the importance of power and question whether it will happen so easily as Scott suggests.
I really do believe the paradigm is fundamentally different here (and that has been my personal experience), that it’s the difference between essentially anesthitizing people (oh, right: “fixing a chemical imbalance”) and trusting the psyche to reorganize and heal itself and facilitating that. Please stop and really consider that difference, and if it seems mysterious and whacked, look up some of the accounts from people who’ve done this work. IF the initial research results hold up, I do think it opens the possibility of major change, and I’m quite sure the substance itself is paradigmatically different from the drugs in use now.
However! Notice the reliance in the article on Thomas Kuhn, who’s work on scientific revolutions (paradigm change) is, if memory serves, very much under-theorized in terms of power. (It’s been many years, but I think that’s right.) So that’s where I think the uncertainty is, and why the movement represented on this site, and the wider recognition that the modernist-imperialist-capitalist emperor is wearing pretty shabby clothes, is so important.
I suggested before that people who have done work with MDMA and psychedelics can be some of our best allies. But it can work the other way, too. By pushing back against big pharma and psychiatry, we can help make sure there is room for alternative therapies and hopefully a new paradigm. What exactly the paradigm is, I’m not sure, but it’ll probably involve a lot more than MDMA and it’s gonna be an awful lot better that what we’ve got now, that’s for sure! Here’s hoping soon.
Hmm. I have to be tentative, because I really haven’t looked at the system in detail. I need to read Whitaker’s latest book on institutional corruption.
I do hear you on the need for an uprising of sorts and for the confrontation of power. But I’m wary of my own adrenaline with such things and how it’s triggered by our heroic mythology around uprising and revolution. I think what you suggest could work and would be certainly the best thing, but if it doesn’t happen I also think smaller scale change, including the availability of alternative forms of care and healing–as you know, I think this is an important one–can be very important. Sometimes the time is right for revolution. Sometimes it’s right for incremental change. I think a large part of being attentive to power involves carefully gauging what is possible in a given historical moment–and also what might come after major upheaval, as we all know how traditional political revolutions have tended to go.
I see a lot happening on both fronts but don’t know enough about specific leverage points and what it would take to bring the system down. So, personally, I’d start with (snore!) institutional and movement analysis. I realize that may be old hat for you and some others.
But I also don’t think the two forms of action are mutually exclusive, so I would also focus on discerning which incremental changes will support the larger goals and focus on those.
Richard Rockefeller, who was involved with trauma as a board member of Doctors Without Borders, gave a very nice talk on trauma and MDMA therapy at the Carnegie Council a few years ago. At the very end, he spoke to the larger social significance of healing trauma and asked something like “how in the world can we address our most pressing social problems when trauma is so widespread and so many people are suffering from it on a daily basis.” It’s a simple point but I think a very important one. Even beyond acute trauma (I think we’re swimming in more subtle or at least more accepted kinds of trauma that keep us shut up in little boxes of the mind) I think MDMA, and also true psychedelics, have the potential, if used with intention and respect, to help people open to the world and to become less conventional and more loving and more activist. The people I know who have done this work tend to have a very clear understanding of and strong feelings about what’s wrong with psychiatry and prescription psych drugs. I think they can be among your (our) strongest allies in building the movement.
Steve,
Our particular concerns and expectations aside, this may be an interesting test case for the juggernaut you describe. Psych drugs always seem very similar to international development to me in their trajectory. Like “mental illness,” there never was such a thing as “development” until Truman put it on the map, a “solution” to a newly constructed “problem” of “underdevelopment.” Since then, about once a decade, there’s always been a new, shiny, better solution–either technological or institutional or both–and every time, the new solution fails, only to be replaced by another new one, and so on.
There always comes a point, however, when a regime or paradigm falls. Can I ask what you think it would take in this case? Can you imagine any positive role that non-patentable substances can play in that? (I realize you’ve already answered that second question, but pushing a little harder to see if you think there’s any circumstance in which it could happen.) That’s not meant to be argumentative, I’m honestly curious.
Shoot, I thought weak bones was original!
I’m always uncomfortable with absolute certainty in dynamic situations. This seems dynamic to me. I don’t think they can patent it, and I’m much more hopeful than you that people are starting to see through the emperor’s clothes on this and other fronts. And that’s coming from someone who’s academic work was both Marxist and Foucaultian; I totally hear you on power. Keep in mind that this is also related to the true psychedelics (MDMS is a sort-of psychedelic). Those come with their own pros and cons, but I think there is something important afoot outside the realm of patents that has the potential to help break the power relationships you’re concerned about. (Help, I said…only help.)
I don’t assume it! I once heard a prominent physician with ties to big-philanthropy (and who, in my opinion, is stuck in a psychedelic quasi-cult) suggest the hashtag “psychedelics, the cure for poverty!” She was serious. I think she meant that they can help people self-actualize, and I suppose become the go-getters capitalism wants. (Needless to say, capitalism actually needs them to stay poor; gotta have that reserve army of labor.) So it was utter bulllshit. As some Indian guru apparently once said “A fool going in, a fool going out.”
Still, I think it’s dynamic, the world is coming apart at the seams, things are not as predictable as they once were. And people who are suffering need help.
Thank you, Steve, for this helpful clarification. I share your concern about what will happen when this comes to be seen as the new silver bullet. Absolutely. I’m less convinced that this can be used to keep trauma out of the picture. MDMA therapy is all about working with trauma and, for many, making it clear that there is no underlying biochemical problem. Talk to anyone who’s worked with it, read any of the accounts now circulating from the MAPS research, and trauma, along with it’s social causes, is almost always front and center. Can you explain how you see this getting sidelined? What am I missing?
p.s. by “once-health” I also mean normal, not “diseased.”
Steve, to my ear, this is not at all about looking away from root causes, but rather is about recognizing them and asking how injury to a once-healthy system can be healed. That doesn’t at all preclude working also on changing the social context and root causes embedded in it. If a child is being hit and having his bones broken, should we not both address the family and social context AND set those bones so they can heal? That seems to me very different from saying (to perhaps strain the metaphor), oh, my, that child has weak bones! He is diseased. Give him a daily dose of bone strengthener…that has not actually been shown to strengthen bones and has a host of nasty side effects. Just to be extra clear for anyone skimming, I’m not suggesting MDMA works as simply and clearly as setting bones! 😉
Perhaps it has also to do with how this is theorized and described. No doubt big pharma could spin it the way you suggest, but I’m not sure they have enough interest, since it’s not patented or making money for them. No? But either way, I think it’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t get hijacked that way.
In last graph, I meant “doesn’t work at all times for any given individual
Jan, thank you for this thoughtful post. You are moving into a realm of helpful discussion and healthy, constructive skepticism. I have a few thoughts.
As someone who was deeply traumatized by prescription psych drugs, I’m not sure that there is always the problem with power relationship that you describe; I certainly have not felt that way myself, as I’ve found a range of relationships and power dynamics in different psychotherapy contexts, and suspect others have, also. (I do realize there are always questions of power at play, I just haven’t found it to always be a problem.) I also think it has more to do with the actual therapist and the personal relationship than with the decor of the office; there are good, careful people doing this work, and not good, not careful people, and it can make all the difference.
I also do not see nearly as clear a differentiation between power-laden individual relationships and supportive group work as you do. Group work with psychedelics can be really very problematic and needs to be done with just as much care and attention to power dynamics as individual work.
I also think you’re right about the problem of people shutting down, or at least snapping back to base-line, after the experience. It’s just not a silver bullet, doesn’t work for everyone or at any time, and I think there’s a real danger of people not realizing this. One thing that I think is very helpful about the MAPS protocol is the way they embed the experience in traditional therapy. That really helps establish trust and help people go deeper and integrate the experience, and minimize the problem you describe, and I think their research is helping us to understand how best to use the substance.
Thanks again,
Daniel
It’s very late and I’m beat but I feel I really must take a minute and come to the defense of both Scott and the research and emerging field of practice he describes. I have done this work myself, so speak from both that experience, and my prior, truly awful, experience with prescription antidepressants (I lost a decade of my life to those goddamed things, so don’t think I’m not as skeptical as anyone else), and as an enthusiastic reader and supporter of this website. The suggestion others have offered that MDMA marks a continuation or simple reconfiguration of chemically-based psychiatry is, frankly, nuts. I don’t think you guys are actually reading what he wrote, and I know for sure you have not had any direct experience with this work. The suggestion that this is simply a matter of “taking ecstasy” to avoid the hard work of healing is also far off the mark–frankly, it strikes-me as fear-based, reactionary, and unthinking. If you have serious trauma to heal, work with MDMA is anything but easy. It can be, however, life affirming and insight inducing and overall profoundly healing. It doesn’t work for everyone and it is not a silver bullet for anyone, but it can be an enormously helpful way of facilitating the inherent self-healing nature of the psyche. I’m really sorry so many people have been hurt by dependence-inducing and harmful psychiatric drugs (and I am one of them, and remain, five years out, mad as hell about it), but I really, really, REALLY, think we need, unlike the corrupt field of psychiatry, to keep our minds open long enough to discern what actually works to help alleviate suffering, rather than rest on our comfortable knee-jerk reactions. As much as I respect this community and the members that make it up, I see an awful lot of that last here and hope it will change.
I am so terribly sorry about what happened to your daughter, and to you. It seems to me that the old treatment of using leeches to draw out poisons was actually quite humane by comparison. Simply awful, and all because of our pervasive fear of emotional pain. Any poison, apparently, is okay so long as it maintains the illusion that pain and death can be eradicated. My greatest sympathies, and appreciation for writing this.
Yes, I can totally see how it would play out as you describe. And it goes that way in so many fields.
So, in academia, for instance, it’s often the people who focus on grant-writing and commercial applications who do well and stick with it, whereas many who really care about teaching publish less, and do less flashy or commodifiable research, end up as low-paid adjuncts, and eventually give up.
Or, to take another example more germane to this discussion, and very personal for me, my father was the VP of marketing for Smith, Kline, and French (before it was SmithKline Glaxo) and was forced to retire, i.e. fired. Many years later he told me he “wasn’t up to it,” but I at least like to think he actually was too decent a man to get fired up about selling drugs. He might otherwise have ended up the guy in charge of marketing Paxil. Maybe he’d have seen how rotten things were, but more likely, I suspect, he would have been too enmeshed in the whole thing to see it clearly. So, thankfully (!), he was fired.
Anyway, I think this sort of thing happens in many fields. It would be interesting to do interviews with psychiatrists who took different paths with this and try to tease out what caused some to maintain critical thinking and others to hop on board with the drugs.
Thanks again, Lawrence, please keep writing!
Thank you, Lawrence, for another in your series of thoughtful and important articles. I won’t recount the great many things that seem to me right about what you’ve written but rather, in a constructive spirit, point to a few things that might warrant further thought and refinement.
The first is perhaps somewhat rhetorical, but I think at this historical juncture important, namely that there are other state-sponsored religions, in addition to the rather awful one you describe. Capitalism, for instance–and of course that is intimately connected with what you describe here via the pharma-medical-industrial complex. There must be profits…
The other relates to what in social-science jargon is called functionalism. Some years ago, in defending my dissertation, I was rightly challenged for saying that certain things “must happen” within the context of a certain social system, in the sense that there appears to be a certain systemic logic (or “functional requirement” of the system) that almost magically leads consistently to certain outcomes, outcomes that seem to satisfy what the system demands. (This problem was not new to me. I should have known better! But I fell into a functionalist trap, which is a very easy thing to do when you work with a narrative or a system that has great power.)
So, as one example in your case, the DSM “had to be” invented to keep psychiatrists employed. I think there are risks with stating it this way. One is that something appears inevitable when perhaps it was not. Was the DSM the only option, or were there others that were discarded?
The other is that it takes our attention away from specific people, interests, decisions, and uses of power. Was it “necessary” because ALL psychiatrists are manipulative creeps and colluded to make it happen? Or because they are indoctrinated into a system of belief and so are not aware, or not fully aware, of other options or the effects of what they do or simply of their own responsibility? In which case causation is at a higher level, but then it begs the question of whether someone made the decisions to set things up this way (i.e., in our medical-education system) or whether it’s truly at a “system level” and no one actually made a conscious decision to make all this happen. All of this, of course, matters both in terms of who’s responsible for this god-awful mess, and also in terms of what we need to do to get out of it.
So basically, I think it could help to disaggregate, to look more closely at WHY it seemed inevitable and at specifically who did what, when, and why. Otherwise we risk assuming that either all psychiatrists are inherently selfish jerks intentionally harming their patients or that “the system” simply required things to happen this way, and the psychiatrists are just doing what they were trained to do. I think most often it’s somewhere in between those two, such that the system does tend to indoctrinate people and require certain sorts of outcomes, but also that certain people are in positions to make decisions, and to abuse power–and that last, of course, is a key point of leverage if we want to change things.
Another reason I think this is worth considering is that, while I find your account compelling and know others here do also, it has a bit of a ring of conspiracy theory, and that may raise credibility issues for the wider audience you so rightly suggest we are hoping to reach through MIA. I think the more specific we can be, and the more careful about assigning responsibility and blame, the higher the credibility with people outside our circle here.
I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m taking shots at your work, which I really do find important and inspiring–and especially so coming from a physician. Like you and so many others, I am angry as hell about this business and am fully in support of greatly appreciate your work.
I just came across a very nice description of an alternative model of child-rearing–Bernie Sanders describing growing up in Brooklyn and how playing unsupervised is just what people need to become autonomous and savvy–and by implication good citizens. It’s at about minute 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-zgSNCpP5c
Thank you, Lawrence. This seems profoundly and sadly right to me. I think it is part of the larger trend of Focualtian “disciplining” of individuals and society, as opposed to more physical and explicit–and thus resistable–forms of control. I would add also to what you write the effect of “smart” (really dumbing) phones; in addition to what is obvious all around us, I believe there is no solid research showing sharp increases in childhood depression and anxiety within a few years of their introduction. We are, indeed, in truly awful shape, as a society, for dealing with what is coming down the pike.
I’m sure this is true about Norman Kline, but for an indication of just how early the drug companies were pushing substances that would “tranquilize us into oblivion,” as Kline says, see these ads from the 50s from Smith, Kline, and French for Thorazine. Good for, let’s see: arthritis, menopause, “senile agitation,” “hyperactive” children, cancer, bursitis, alcoholism, pain (wouldn’t want any pain…), and, of course psychosis and scizophrenia. My mother was given the stuff for several years as an alternative to being committed. It “became necessary” shortly after her parents told her they would not support her in any way if she left a bad marriage. So, you know, bad marriage + thorazine or mental institution, take your choice. Anyway, I would imagine Kline had things like this in mind when he said that about tranqulizing ourselves into oblivion.
Frank, while the interpretation offered here seems compelling to me I’m very interested in hearing why it may not be right. Could you perhaps offer something a little clearer in your crititique of what you call “rubbish”? You know, you gotta fight fire with water, not more fire. Right?
Yes, I am (despite my post below on the iceberg of trauma, which I think? you may be referring to here) also wary of that inflation. It sometimes seems like trauma is becoming the mot du jour, and overused, and so watered down, and also something a little too convenient to hang our neurotic hats on and evade our responsibility to act and change. Still..
In my own head (from which of course all this springs), you are prompting me to realize I sometimes mean different things with the same word–hence that wariness, but also the post below expanding the definition. So, for instance, when I read the much-lauded book “The Trauma of Everyday Life,” which is basically buddhist psychology about all sorts of everyday suffering that humans are always faced with, it seems to water the meaning of trauma down. Still, I think the subtler things I refer to are also a SORT of trauma, and while more subtle, perhaps even do overwhelm one’s sense of safety and ability to cope on a more subtle, sensitive or even spiritual (?) level that is essential to our well-being? Perhaps we cannot be “fully human” even in that more subtle realm because it inhibits our full sensitivity and creativity and vulnerability? And that, in turn, I am convinced, is making it more possible for us to tolerate and contribute to a system of (bell hooks) white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy that really is generating all sorts of capital-T trauma? I’m not sure, but that’s what’s coming to mind. A continuum of trauma, or trauma and Trauma. But perhaps it’s just stretching the word too far? I would love a lively dialogue on this and perhaps it is deserving of it’s own post. Thanks, Wayne, for your thoughts.
Yup. This sounds a lot like what Gabor Mate says about drug addicts. You spend a little time with them and…duh! It becomes very clear that trauma lies at the heart of it. I’m sure there are genetic problems, birth defects, brain injuries, etc. that cause “mental illness” but they have got to be rare. There is just no way nature or God designed us so that huge portions of people would have inherent defects of this sort. On the other hand, we live in a hugely traumatized society. I refer to it as the iceberg of trauma. There’s the obvious, spoken, explicit trauma; then there’s the repressed major trauma (those two of themselves are huge); but then also consider, on a subtler level, what we’re all embedded in. We live in isolated sterile lifeless little boxes. Maybe a house plant or two, maybe a dog or a cat. If we’re lucky, a loved one or two, with whom we probably have lots of tension because we’re unnaturally isolated in those boxes, which become familial pressure-cookers. Then we go to work and sit these beautiful bodies down in stupid chairs and stare at electronic screens. In order to connect with anyone or get to work we have to hurtle down to road in two-thousand pound steel boxes, squashing frogs and squirrels and mice, more beautiful miraculous bodies, spewing poisons out our tailpipe that literally kill people and are killing the planetary home we live in, and that originate from fossil fuels from half-way around the world secured by the most violent military machine the world has ever seen or gouging through fragile arctic tundra or rainforest and running through pipelines alone which peaceful native inhabitants are beaten and tear gassed for saying, hey, this is not right. So, you know, that would do a number on a person’s psyche. Then of course we’re also told that religion, which Jung referred to as the world’s great psychological healing systems (yes, I know they have their problems; I mean religion very broadly) are simply wrong or delusional by people who are so crude as to have no concept of how metaphor or symbolism work or just how the human heart works and insist that “rational science” and capitalism combined, which, in the way they’ve been combined, are flushing us all down the toilet, are in fact going to make everything just fine. So long as we keep buying stuff and voting in meaningless elections. Yup, that would do it.
Wayne (and others), I thought of this recent thread and especially this question of under-reported trauma while reading an article this morning about Michael Phelps and another olympic swimmer going public about “mental health” troubles that emerged after their competitive years. I dated a woman who had been a world-class tennis player because she had been driven rather brutally into it from the age of 5 by her father. (In this case, there were also military drills at 5 a.m., so it may be an extreme case.) It gave me a real window on how some, perhaps most, hyper-achievers are essentially driven by trauma and develop an incredibly effective sheen of calm control that hides it from view, often including from themselves. Of course they have enormous focus and discipline, and this can, in some cases, come from love of the sport (or other pursuits, including intellectual, business, etc.), but my sense is that it often, maybe usually, also becomes a form of addiction and a way to constantly keep the pain of trauma at bay. In line with our discussion of underreported trauma, I often have the sense that an awful lot of public personalities, and even people we think we know well, are operating at a high level in a way that is in part trauma driven. I’d be interested in anyone’s thoughts on this.
A window beneath the tip of the iceberg. It’s about time. Thank God there are a few academic researchers taking such things seriously.
Congratulations, Yet, on getting off what I call the FPs, or Fucking Pills. I was on fifteen years and it took me a solid five to get off, multiple hellish attempts before I finally pulled it off. How long since you’ve been off? I ask just because it can take a while for the system to equilibrate. Certainly it was six months for me, probably more, and some say it can take years. I hope you feel much better soon!
Yup, I think you’re right. And meanwhile, while I know this will be controversial here, other non-pharma substances that can really help will not be part of the picture. A friend of mine who is a palliative care nurse has, on the side, helped several people transition off of opioids with cannabis, but of course the doctors she works with won’t touch it. Meanwhile, one or a few sessions with psychedelics, coupled with ongoing therapy, can be extremely effective with all sorts of addictions. Someone above mentioned Gabor Mate, who I think is probably our best and most eloquent, and compassionate, person working on addiction. Until recently he led ayahuasca retreats in Mexico and has had remarkable success working with addicts in this way. See also the work of Dmitri Mugianis, a former heroin addict in New York who has helped many, many people with Ibogaine, and now has a clinic in, I think, Costa Rica. But those most effective treatments are on the fringes–precisely because they are not part of the pharma-industrial complex.
Thank you for this thoughtful and honest article. I have had similar experiences.
The piece that I think sums up the essence of the problem is “what can occur in the psychedelic space when practitioners whose own drug use, and persistent adulation by their clients and disciples, leads them to believe they are larger than life. Normal rules of conduct do not apply.” It can happen even without all that much adulation, and the suggestibility that emerges for those seeking help–both because of the drug’s effects and because they (we) are often so longing for relief–is what makes it, in the worst possible way, a perfect match. I have seen it happen numerous times with people who have the highest and most impeccable credentials in other realms and sometimes specifically in the psychedelic realm, which of course adds to the seductiveness, as well as the doubts that come in the wake of these experiences.
I’m also with you on nonetheless recognizes the value of psychedelics when used appropriately and carefully. But the train is moving too fast and without sufficient care.
Thank you again!
Wendell Berry has a lovely essay somewhere about refusing all “isms.”
Goodness. I’m not sure if I made it to intelligent in your scheme, but one can only hope. Indeed, one must!
I think this would require looking at the breadth of his work and at how it has been used. Or at least the specific ways in which his work has helped Moncrief (and others) develop their analyses.
Or at least that’s my view of it. But I think it’s worth considering how virtually all important writers a) get some things wrong, and b) are put to bad uses by people who draw on them. So, for instance, what you say about Marx also applies to Adam Smith and Thoreau–both incredibly insightful and helpful, both wrong about some important things and both put to unfortunate and sometimes truly awful uses. Is it possible the problem does not lie with any of these (human, fallible) writers so much as in the simplistic and short-sighted ways we interpret them?
Thank you for this. So important.
Your comment about “mental illness” reflecting problems in the wider community reminds me of Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who likes to point out that in indigenous communities, if someone is going through mental distress the assumption tends to be, right out of the gate, that it is a symptom or indicator of something being wrong and needing fixing in the community. He also likes to say that psychiatry is the only profession in which the client is always wrong.
On Marx, I keep meaning to look into something and never get around to it. It seems to me that the final contradiction or crisis of capitalism, in his terms, may be that profit increasingly depends precisely on both selling and degrading human consciousness with addictive “devices” and screens. What I can’t recall is if that would be a new contradiction or if it might be covered in the ones he wrote about. But it could be the one that finally pushes capitalist set of contradictions into a new synthesis, especially to the degree that it reinforces the old contradiction/crisis of Marx’s “ecological rift” as it now takes the form of climate change. You add those two contradictions together (or multiply them) and it could be not a utopian synthesis, as Marx hoped and worked for, but, well curtains. Which makes these sorts of new interpretations of Marx all the more helpful–than you again!
P.S. People here might especially appreciate this interview, which speaks to Marx’s (to me) surprisingly domestic home life and his enormous affection for and devotion to–and dependence on–his wife and daughters. There’s a lot of love there. The image that came to me was of him being held and nourished there and then every day donning one of those old diving helmets and suits with the air line attached and diving deeply into the awful satanic hot swampy mucky depths of the capitalist swamp every day, but always tethered to the oxygenic warmth of his family. https://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/
Fiachra, that seems like a pretty reasonable interpretation on first glance, but I believe the actual experience of work with MDMA is different. I’ve looked into it and spoken with people who have gone through the research described here and, if anything, the emphasis tends to be on not discussing things too much but rather on staying with one’s internal feeling and process. People routinely say things like “I had no idea it was possible to be so at ease and unafraid” and “that was like several years of therapy, except it went deeper.” People often find that, during a session, the more they talk and discuss, the less they heal, and vice versa.
Then afterward, I bet that peer discussions would be awfully helpful in sharing the experience and integrating it into regular consciousness.
My thoughts…hope they are of some help,
Daniel
** Mea culpa, I jumped the gun on what I wrote, below, and now realize we’re a lot closer than I thought. Just don’t have time to redo this now, but I thought I’d still post it as I think you’ll see the underlying thinking even though…we’re closer in our views than I thought.
You make a good point, Steve, and I do think there’s some of what you describe at play in the experience I mentioned, but of course we’d have to take a closer look to sort out the two (or more) things involved–i.e. lack of basic capacity or inclination vs. lack of training. (Well, there may also be an excess of prior training involved! Which would somewhat support your point, and in fact I really do share your concern about how training can narrow one’s perspective in unhealthy ways.) But what I can say for sure is that, having a fair amount of confidence in my own capacity and openness to really hear what what people need and to respond helpfully and adapt to that (of course I could be wrong…), I definitely feel that I would need “training” (there’s that tricky word again!), which includes practice, to better know how to apply the framework. And actually, my sense is that for me it may be necessary–although, as you say, definitely not sufficient, and I sure hope no one would go to such a training expecting it to make them into a good counselor. (And I say all that having some discomfort with the IFS crowd, they sometimes seem rather insular and narrow.)
Is not our ability to work with people always to a considerable degree socially constructed and environmentally mediated? i.e., not simply a matter of innate disposition or talent? (In which case I believe it would be genetic.) In light of that, where do we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of learning? Should one be born with the ability? Should it come only from how we grew up and our general/informal life experience? Is it okay if the disposition or talent is cultivated and blossoms during a well-rounded, liberal arts education (i.e., no training, only education)? Are there any sorts of “training” that are acceptable? To take a very different example, what about people who have “training” in and years of practice with compassion meditation, many of whom find they are much more empathic and open to other people’s distress?
Alternatively, instead of making these generalizations from afar (which, honestly, is my understanding of how psychiatrists do things, so it makes me uncomfortable), might it be helpful to stay open not just to our clients variable needs, but also to the variable nature of (the vast realm of) education and training that’s available and judge each according to it’s specific merits?
As for your bet on psychiatrists and IFS training…you might just be right on that one! It may be worth funding, even. Just think, we could make a science of it! There could be re-education camps! 🙂
Y
Yes, so true. I’ve always felt that the mark of someone who actually got an education doing their doctorate, actually learned something, is that they have realized how infinitely ignorant they are.
Steve, see my longer note below, but just to add: I totally hear you on what you would be looking for in a counselor or therapist, and trust absolutely what you have to say about that. But what if someone else is looking for something different? What if I come to this question and feel just as sure that there are some particular concepts and tools that I want my therapist to know how to use and so to have training in? Or maybe to ask it differently, do you see all training as invalid, or just invalid for your own purposes? (Note especially that to be certified in IFS you don’t need a PhD, or even a masters.)
I have to respectfully disagree with Sam and Steve, above. And I say that as someone who’s tried to do IFS work with a therapist not really “trained” in it and also is considering “training” in it myself. Maybe part of the difficulty here has to do with what we mean by “training.” It’s used very loosely in our society these days. Sometimes it’s used wrongly to refer to education. Sometimes, as I think IFS people use it, to refer to learning how to work with a particular framework or theory and set of conceptual tools, but to do it using your own talents and intelligence. And sometimes to refer to something much more limited, like training to perform a set task.
I definitely don’t think the way IFS sees parts and the idea of multiplicity of mind is simply common sense, as Sam suggests–it’s a particular view of the mind and how it works, and in my experience really quite different and even at odds with more unitary theories of the mind or consciousness. It’s of course not entirely new, but there’s a real paradigm shift from many other views, and most traditional views in the therapy world. I also have not found IFS people or the framework to be about “healing” or even more so about “fixing” others in the way Sam suggests. One of the things I like most about it is that it’s profoundly non-pathologizing and affirming of the client’s experience and inner wisdom and really quite adamant (if that’s the right word) that it’s about facilitating clients’ own ability to set their own direction, find their own inner resources, and heal themselves. It’s quite specifically at odds with attachment theory and as a result insists that even the most troubled clients do NOT need to develop deep attachment to their therapists to fill some void from a traumatic childhood, but rather only need to learn to look inward to get in touch with their own Self or inner wisdom, which it insists is…enough. These just are not ideas that most therapists, or even most thoughtful people in our particular, current cultural mllieu would come to in a common-sensical way, because they are contrary to so much that we’ve been taught.
This was all certainly reflected in my experience with a therapist who thought she understood IFS but didn’t–she had not at all grasped that it is not very compatible with, or even at all compatible with, other forms like narrative therapy or CBT. It was frustrating to have to explain the framework to someone who had said she knew how to use it. I wish she had had some training!
Anyway, them’s my two cents. I’m as appalled by much of what passes for training in the world of psychiatry and psychology as anyone, and actually have concerns about the insularity and lack of critical reflection in the IFS world, but it nonetheless seems different to me, and awfully promising. But I’m new to it. If I’ve missed something, of course I’ll be happy to hear how or why.
Thank you!This line alone is very astute and helpful: “You can be sure that a culture is emotionally abusive when it shames people for stating that they’re lonely.”
Maybe there’s something that smacks of insincerity or manipulativeness about my post above, but I sure can’t see it.
Sure people are swayed by what they read or watch. But I like to think they still have some agency in making their own decisions, and, while I haven’t read it yet, my bet, knowing the work of some of the authors, is that this book helps them make an informed decision much better than the popular media you mention. You and I, of course, differ on that–which is why, on my end, I think a free flow of information, i.e. unmuzzled by large and corrupt institutional interests like the Times and the APA, is a good thing. That way, if we decided to pursue this question (not the particular book, the larger question) further, we’d have more to work with, not less. But that’s just me. I know you disagree, but I sure do wish we could have the discussion without trying to get into each others heads, especially when we have so little to go on.
As for whether the authors were trying to capitalize on their credentials, I couldn’t say what their intentions or thought process were. I’m much more interested in looking at the merits of their argument. And, again, I’m glad to have more, not less, access to what they have to say.
I am baffled by numerous comments above saying that we don’t need Lee et al. to tell us how to vote, or that so-called experts should not be in a position to discredit the president. The reason I’m baffled is that it seems profoundly obvious to me that they are not in a position to do such things at all, and I very much doubt that they see themselves in this way. To suggest that they have this sort of ability seems to me to suggest that some people commenting here are, if you’ll forgive me for such a bold statement, lacking a sense of either their own agency or more generally our collective agency as a society. No one can tell us how to vote, and in fact no one can discredit the president. They can only give us their opinions, based on their experience and analysis. Then it’s up to us to decide how we vote or whether we find the president credible.
The selection of a president and whether or not he is discredited are collective decisions in which we all have a part. These authors are offering us their take on the situation. They’ve considered the sort of issues at hand deeply over the course of their carers. As others have suggested, their case should be taken on it’s merit, not on their credentials. Of course. Notice that they did not say in a press release “Trump is nuts, we’re experts and know about this, so remove him from office now!” They wrote a….book. Like, a careful, written argument for people to, you know…read? And judge on it’s merits. This, people, is exactly why we have books. No?
Steve, I think a crucial piece of all this is that it’s not just a regular, everyday job. Rather, the president has responsibility for things like pandemic response and, just to take one other example, a nuclear arsenal that could blow the planet up several times over. He also has the ability to bring about the corruption you mention, and by doing that he has, over time, pretty much made impossible some of the means of removing a president (so, the 25th amendment is pretty much a dead letter at this point). The system was plenty corrupt before, of course, but we really are now approaching a failed state and there’s very good reason to fear for what may happen in the upcoming election. I think there’s a reason why many positions of great sensitivity and consequence require psych evaluations; if people screw up or are simply malign, removing them may happen too late. (Don’t take that as an endoresment of how psych evaluations are done, but of the reasonableness of considering the question of fitness for some positions.)
I take Lee and Gilligan’s work as a reasonable contribution to a necessary public dialogue on all this. I suppose I’m also influenced by having read some of the prior work of a few these people, especially Gilligan and Judith Herman–not by their credentials, but by the fact that they are very thoughtful people who’ve done a lot to move forward our understanding of trauma (Herman) and how it tends to be tied to violence (Gilligan), and their implicit and very eloquent resistance to biological reductionism in their profession. I trust these people and want to hear what they have to say; if the psychiatric establishment and the Times are knee-capping them, I think we’re all the poorer for it.
Ok, them’s my two cents–thanks to everyone for this rich discussion of such an important topic.
Thank you, Robert. My feeling exactly but you said it much better than I could have. It’s really about free speech and the need for robust public discourse about matters of the gravest importance.
Yes. I think they are tightly interconnected, and as I write now I’m uncertain exactly where the line between the two is, or if there is a clear line. I think the bigger thing, which has been really helpful to me, is that the old idea that ideas influence or even determine neuropsychological state (including emotional state) is to some degree exactly backwards. Deb Dana, who’s interpreted Porges’s work for practitioners says it’s not “state follows story” (i.e., ideas and narratives determine how we feel) but rather “story follows state.” At the same time, clearly there are things going in both directions and in complex ways. It’s just that the old idea that if we get our thinking right (e.g., make gratitude lists) then we’ll feel better doesn’t work so well. Make sense?
Here’s the Porges talk on compassion. I’d love to get others’ thoughts on the whole thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYXa_BX2cE8
Sounds about right to me. I would imagine that for some people the relationship runs in exactly the opposite direction, where depression leads to a lack of gratitude, especially if you consider polyvagal theory and the state of the vagal system as a determinant of emotional state. People in a “frozen” dorsal vagal state simply are not able to feel things like compassion and gratitude as much as those in a ventral vagal state. There’s a teriffic talk on youtube by Stephen Porges on polyvagal theory and compassion that explains this.
At the same time, I would also think that meditation practices like meta and tonglen, geared to generate compassion, may go deeper than the trendy making of gratitude lists, and so have the potential to be more helpful. But still, even there the nervous system has to reach a certain level of safety and relaxation for such practices to get traction. So it’s complicated.
JanCarol–yes, I think there’s a lot to what you say. I don’t think it’s really a left-right issue in the usual, superficial sense. I guess I’m not sure where the disagreement is?
Well, I would say someone’s politics have quite a lot to do with it. People who are stuck in and actively promoting authoritarian patriarchy tend to be pretty happy with psychiatry. If experiences like the one described here help people move out of that stance, that’s important. That’s my take on it, or at least a very simple and generalized nutshell; I’d be interested to hear yours.
Beyond that, I guess I never quite understand why people here often get so upset by and critical towards others who are discussing topics that interest them. This may sound snarky but I actually mean it honestly: it often feels to me like people here have internalized psychiatry’s intolerance for alternative views and lively discussion. Why not embrace it instead, or at least let others pursue what interests them and hold off on the criticism, which seems pretty harsh here. Why not treat each other with respect? Oh well, probably a silly question, I know.
Rossa, I’m afraid the idea that there is bickering going on here escapes me. It sure seemed to me like a few of us were discussing an interesting and to some of us disturbing aspect of this guy, while also hoping he will do something helpful with his experience. I always hope that we on this site will make a full break with psychiatry’s insistence on simplistic conformity and value a diversity of views but, alas, I am often disappointed on that count.
p.s. Actually, now that I think of it, the discussion above was directly relevant to what we discuss on this site. Peterson has been a staunch upholder of the same authoritarian, patriarchal social norms which also infuse psychiatry. I think it’s worth knowing that as we follow where all this goes with him. Maybe something like this is enough to make someone like Peterson question his old assumptions, which I think he would have to do to be helpful to anti-psychiatry. Maybe it’s not. I hope so. It’ll be interesting to see.
I agree that he’s not quite right wing in the usual, explicitly political sense. But I do think he’s highly reactionary and patriarchal, and in a very seductive way that attracts a lot of men, especially young men, who are at lose ends…which an awful lot of men are these days. His whole spiel about serotonin and the naturalness or inevitability of competition and hierarchy in human societies really makes you wonder how he ever got an appointment at Harvard; it’s just an insidious piece of patriarchal drivel. It goes something like: lobsters have serotonin and are competitive, territorial loners who live in a strict hierarchy; people have serotonin, therefore people are competitive territorial loners…and etc. There’s more to it than that, but it’s an extraordinary example of cherry picking to support a preconceived conclusion. Anyway, I thought the guy was interesting at first but was appalled the more I looked into him, even though I’m sorry he had to go through this ordeal and hope that maybe he will use his notoreity now to make people aware of the dangers of these drugs.
p.s. He also has a whole rant about how “post-modernist neo-Marxists” have ruined academia and are now out to get the world. How in the hell can you be a post-modern Marxist? It’s a contradiction in terms on the face of it, and basically his way of saying that any departure from the good ol’ days of western modernist-capitalism is bad, bad, bad.
Thank you for this very helpful summary. At a recent Zen retreat there was discussion of the fundamental human fear of losing group attachment…community, tribe. Really an existential threat to one’s being, as we are so fundamentally social. Someone who has taught in many parts of the world said that one of the biggest and most troubling surprises for her has been realizing how much greater this fear is among Americans, just terribly, terribly afraid of and/or suffering from a sense of expulsion from community, or simply not having it at all. And so: lots of depression.
Steve: Yes, of course, these are crucial questions, if different from the one I was responding to. I agree that psychiatry is generally not the place for this work to happen, and think the way they are dealing with ketamine is a prime example. I do know a few psychiatrists who work with psychedelics in very thoughtful ways, totally outside of the medical framework you so rightly criticize–and many of the researchers involved in this work, even if they are MDs or psychiatrists, also tend to be outside of the mainstream–I don’t think many people can hold onto that (nutso) paradigm once they’ve worked with these substances. But surely those psychiatrists are in the small minority.
One of the things I find hopeful is that much of the research on these substances is grounding the psychedelic experience within a series of therapy sessions to help prepare people for the experience and integrate it into daily life afterwards–and focusing on internal family systems, which is both a really good fit for the experiences people tend to have and also moves even further from the authoritarian tendencies of psychiatry and mainstream psychotherapy, putting the client much more fully in the driver’s seat.
Sylvain, I have been watching this topic on MIA for years and, while I have hardly made a systematic study of it, my impression is different from yours. I’ve seen pieces that struck me as pro-psychedelic and others that seemed quite the opposite, and others that were more neutral. I think reader comments tend towards “anti,” but then there are exceptions–although the antis tend to be rather uncompromising and even virulent, I assume for reasons that are obvious, given the experience many of us have had with psychiatric drugs. Personally, my hope is that there will continue to be plenty of room for a range of perspectives and that MIA will resist taking a hard editorial stand, especially in an area where, as you point out, we have so much to learn and can benefit from lively discussion.
I should say that I agree that we need better and longer-term research on psychedelics, just as we do on prescription drugs. (Although much of the work on MDMA and psilocybin of recent years does look at outcomes 6 months out and more, which is a huge improvement on most conventional pharma research, and the results are quite promising.) I think there’s actually a lot of potential with psychedelics, especially because they are so fundamentally different in that they are used rarely and for many people are helpful in understanding the mind and learning to work with difficulties, rather than numbing people out and shutting them down. But I’m also concerned about the current level of enthusiasm and “silver bulletism” that’s afoot and about potential problems, especially when they are not used carefully, as is often the case these days.
So those are my thoughts, I hope of some interest.
Daniel
It’s worth watching the interview. Cooper clearly has something very personal going on here–and is kind of being a jerk–while I’d say that Williamson handles it beautifully.
There are plenty of reasons to be either in favor of or against MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Personally, I believe it has a lot of promise, as a remarkagle drug that is on your system for only a matter of hours–no daily dosing or bathing the nervous system for years in powerful chemicals–promise to shift us actually OUT of the drug-dependent paradigm and practice of psychiatry. It’s just a very different animal that, at it’s best, opens up the internal, self-healing abilities of the psyche in a profound way. It also has some pitfalls, especially when not done carefully, and my feeling is that the power of the experience–again, when it’s not done carefully–has the potential to convince people they are “healed” when actually they are not. So it’s complicated. But the main thing I wanted to say is that the level of misinformation and flat out ignorance in the comments here is staggering. I mean, at least bother to look into it, people, before you trash it. What’s the point of trashing something you haven’t learned about, aside from, what, bolstering your own prejudices and presuppositions and ego? Those of course are precisely the things that psychiatry does; why not chose to be unlike them and actually consider it carefully with an open mind? Also, please note that MAPS is a non-profit organization, and MDMA is not pattentable. This is really not about greed or profit. These people may turn out to be wrong, but they are not part of the pharma-industrial complex, far from it.
Thank you for this, Joshua, it’s so very important. I’ve been encouraged by Nadine Narris now having such an effective bully pulpit for getting this more on the policy table. And the work in Norway sounds wonderful.
One thing that I think is also important is the likelihood that ACE scores actually understate the connection between trauma and later effects, since there are many things from very early in life that people don’t remember or know about, and others that they probably just don’t mention because they’re in that semi-conscious zone we just don’t think or talk about. I think van der Kolk’s work on developmental trauma disorder is crucial here but it seems like that often does not make it into the ACEs discussion.
Julie, Sheesh, what a mess. The ol’ wounder healer shtick gets a little old when they are not even aware of how they carry their wounds and project them on others.
But it’s helpful to me to know you had that experience. I’ve considered writing them a letter and maybe now I will. My experience was a little different in that there was one person who was not just open to the abuse I described but actually wanted to go further, seemed more focused on hunting him down (that was the sense or feel of it anyway, if not literally the case) than actually paying attention to what I had to say. But then there was another, some months later, who “explained” to me that the main problem was that I had been cast out of my tribe and so was just reeling from that and, after I’d given her the whole grim story, referred to my former therapist having “possibly behaved unethically.” In other words, she was casting doubt on what I’d said and trying to replace it with her own version–which takes some serious hutzpah after receiving an initial communication via email.
My experience with therapy has been different, though. I did have a series of sessions who was very helpful–solid, steady, completely validating. Unfortunately, my insurance didn’t cover it so it was very limited. Then I saw someone else for a while who basically didn’t want to hear it–I think a lot of therapists get very disturbed when faced with this stuff and can’t handle it. But mostly I’ve gotten myself out of it, pretty much in isolation–which I do not recommend but can at least say it’s possible.
But yes, I hear you on therapy addiction–absolutely. They can really get in your head and do serious damage. And I hear you on the damage it can cause to your life. I am still digging out of the whole I got in while getting off SSRIs almost a decade ago. I’m getting there, but it’s really hard, and slow. It helps to know there are others out there who get it–thank you, really, and again, so sorry about the string of things you mentioned above. It sounds awful, but you also sound very strong and determined.
Sleep–thank you, that’s good to hear. And I think I sort of know it in the abstract. I just am not in touch with people who get it–really no one in my life gets it or is open to the whole picture–and of course it’s, as you say, less a focus on this site. I actually was in touch with two people from TELL (Therapy Abuse Link Line) but found both of them quite eager to explain my situation to me and in essence it felt like they were stuck on their personal agendas, as people who’ve been harmed also. There’s very little transparancy to the group and it appears to be small and, to my eye, not too well run. I could be wrong, maybe I just got unlucky. But I do wish we had more of a forum for such things.
I keep meaning to write something for MIA about both my drug (SSRI) and therapy experiences–and there’s another related situation, a therapeutic psychedelic group that was a quasi-cult and pretty screwed up, despite having some very “high-level, reputable” people involved in it. Well, I was also in an abusive relationship. I think I basically, after I got off the SSRIs, got stuck in a loop of repeating elements of a traumatic childhood, having very basic confusion regarding who I could or should trust. For years I thought I was on the right track and finally committing fully to seeing it through, but then eventually it turned out my wonderful, wise therapist who’d been advising me on all the other stuff was, in fact, a needy, manipulative sociopath. So I think there may be a pretty interesting story there about how these different aspects get tied together, not just the drugs and psychiatry.
So maybe that’ll happen and can be a way to connect or at least be heard. Thank for reaching out!
Oh, my. Mine does not fit everything you say, but certainly some points exactly. There was a point where he suggested twice a week, then later three times and reduced the rate to make that possible. There were years when those trips to his office were the center of my life. (Yuk!) There were also times when I suggested, say, another six months of therapy and he would very kindly and gently but definitely say, or just wordlessly indicate, no, you will need to be here longer. Because, of course, I was in such great need and he was uniquely able to help. Supposedly, I mean. And the fact is, I really did need help, and I think it’s true that he was the first person I’d encountered to be willing and able to hold the space for some terribly difficult material I needed to work with. What I have found is that at the heart of every cult (and they say therapy can be a cult of two) there is something of real value–that’s what the dark and twisted stuff feeds on.
Thank you, Julie. I actually did go over some of this with another therapist who got it and was helpful, but outside of that you’re almost the only person who really gets it. It’s very similar to the drug withdrawal–there’s no acceptable narrative for it, people don’t or can’t understand, so you become very alone with it. I’m so sorry those things happened to you. I hope things are better these days.
I’ve enjoyed your writing here over the years, by the way! 🙂
Thank you, Julie. I really appreciate your saying that the problem is much bigger than just drugs and psychiatry. I had the rotten luck to be referred to a therapist (psychoanalyst, though that’s not what I went for) when I started the withdrawal process. He was my own support in those years, which were pretty awful, and it was not until years later that I began to realize how maniupulative he had been. I literally ran out of money to pay him with and had to take what I naively thought was a temporary break and he became overtly hostile and then tried to gaslight me, insisting that my “severing” of the relationship was a manifestation of my deep passive-aggressiveness. It was just awful, and I don’t think I’m past it yet–like you, I find myself protective and defensive. And part of the reason I trusted him was because he is definitely not “mainstream” and had a healthy skepticism of diagnoses and drug culture, was actually right about alot of things–there was just this little problem of his being underneath that, at a deeper level, sociopathic–and I now know that he has harmed other people, seems to be a pattern. So you just never know where the danger lies, not always where you might expect and it’s a huge lesson, for me, to never, ever let go of, and to listen closely to, the wise internal voice and never anyone like that get too much influence over you. So it’s a different situation from yours, I think, but the point that it goes way beyond drugs and psychiatrists is important.
Hi Kindred,
I seem to be back. First, I’m sorry I got all huffy like that. Internet debates are a perilous business, especially on days when I’m having internal struggles. Apologies, really.
First, I meant to say earlier (the thought was there!) that I appreciate your driving home for me the awful injustice of the system, how truly horrifying it is. Partly because of my personality and partly because of my situation, the suffering for me tends to be (I think) more subtle and gradual, even though it’s cumulatively pretty darned awful. I sometimes lose sight of how acutely awful it is because of that. Your forthrightness and totally appropriate indignation help remind me. I hope my (supposedly) thoughtful, rational, strategic-analytic schtick is not obnoxious under the circumstances. It’s one of the ways I survive and sometimes manage to make a contribution, but I suspect it can be a bit much sometimes.
Here’s what came clear to me suddenly once I got away from the derned computer and outside and moving. I think anger is a wonderful and important thing. (I’m “sort of” Buddhist, but really do not agree with the whole Buddhist idea of negative emotions. Every single one is good and indispensable, thanks very much.) But in my personal experience, just mine, I have found that when anger is held onto and stoked, things can go badly. I grew up with that, and absorbed it, and it has done me a lot of harm. I’m still trying to get out of it. I think it scares the crap out of me, honestly–both in myself and others. So that’s a very personal piece. I tend to think it’s generally true, but I also know there’s something to be said for using not just anger but rage (and perhaps even hatred?) to make things change–and of course if they are simply there for someone, I don’t mean at all to suggest they should be hidden away, they’re real and should be taken on their own terms and respected as a straight matter of humanity.
Ok. But what I think is really key for me is that I believe our hugely dysfunctional and damaging society runs an awful lot on anger and hatred, and even rage. I think it’s part of why we (as a society) treat “mentally ill” people (i.e., people who are different and especially who have some real spontaneity and even wildness in them) the way we do. I think that side of the human mind is valuable and indispensable (in wildness is the salvation of the world, right?)–I think it scares the crap out of the control mongers because somewhere inside they know they have it and scares them and they hate it in themselves. And I think it’s the same with old people and why they get set aside and shunted into the awful places they go to to die–they are “weak,” and less “together” and not shiny and sleek and “perfect” the way we’re all taught we should be. And same in many cases for kids who are mistreated—I think their vulnerability and innocence is terribly threatening to some people–almost always people who were mistreated themselves.
So I think that’s all a large part of why I find myself distressed by some of the things you said. I guess that, as hard as it is (and it REALLY is hard, for me anyway–if you look closely, you can see it in what I wrote above) I think the answer is love, not hate. I don’t at all mean to suggest we should leave out fighting–that is essential. I think love can be fierce. I think MLK and Gandhi and Malcolm and Mandela and Cornell West have fierce love and know how to fight like nobody’s business. (Notice those are all people of color; I am not. But I have been oppressed and terribly hurt, so hope I am not totally out of my element in seeking solidarity there.) But I just fear that if it comes out of hate or primarily out of anger, we won’t get where we need to go. But that may be because of my own personal issues, I’m not sure. I have lost a great deal of the certainty that I once had. But that’s how it seems to me. I think we need to find a way to be better than the oppressors and the control mongers. And yes, more loving. Fiercely.
That’s my take. I hope it’s not too much. I really thank you, and of course also Jane, for bringing up some important things and even for hitting my buttons. 😉 May we all find peace and may we find a way to keep this wonderful, beautiful world from flying apart.
d
I have to say I am struck by your not responding to the points I raise. How are you not clumping people together in simplistic categories and judging them in much the same way that the system does to people who are “mentally ill”? I understand full well, by the way, that it is not exactly the same thing–it’s the same process and mindset, which I find alarming. I just don’t think it’s helpful to condemn people who we don’t know anything about personally or having made a clear case for why it would be pragmatically useful, especially when they themselves are abused and trying like heck to survive.
And I do find your words insensitive and uncaring, to be honest. Very. Perhaps most especially your comment about “Uncle Tom.” You may be content to pass judgement like that on people who have had the stuffing knocked out of them across multiple generations in almost unimaginebly horrible ways and are knowingly (as I believe “Uncle Toms” have done) trying their damndest not just to survive but to (as was typically the case) keep their children alive also (and keep in mind that virtually all slaves had to “Uncle Tom” it to some degree), but it’s not a place I want to go–or, really, even be around. I will of course read anything else you put up, but it’s time for me to bow out of this conversation. I wish you the best–and I honestly mean that.
p.s. Please don’t mistake my point about sympathy and compassion as a suggestion that they shouldn’t resist and fight an unjust, oppressive system. I just don’t think we get there by condemning people who are scared and oppressed themselves.
Kindred, here is where you and I diverge in a big way. You write “I can’t sympathize with people who shrink from doing what’s right because they might find themselves one of us. Where is the solidarity in that? Where is the humanity in that?”
I don’t always succeed, but I try to sympathize with those people. Why not sympathize with people who are not as strong as you are? Unless perhaps you believe they are making a conscious decision to be bad people and are pleased with that. It seems unlikely to me. And as for solidarity, to me, having compassion for people who are not as strong or who are misguided is a big part of solidarity. If we only have compassion for those who are like us–whether it’s strength, intelligence, whatever–then pretty much by definition I think we’re not moving towards solidarity. But I expect you will see this differently and would be interested to know.
Kindred, I do want to say that I really admire your passion and your willingness to put yourself on the line. We absolutely need more of that these days. I have to sign off of this at least for now, but thank you for engaging the conversation. Wishing you all the best, Dan
Kindred, I certainly get your underlying message; it’s a question of whether it’s the message we need, and also whether the world is really that black and white. (Personally, my feeling is that we need to diverge from the black and white thinking that got us here in the first place.) The trick here is that hypotheticals like “imagine what an organized walkout might look like” is not the same as it actually happening. In order for social movements to be effective, they need to take the collective action problem inherent in such suggestions very seriously. If you look at those who have been successful in such work it sometimes appears as though they are “just” radical, or militant, or uncompromising, or incrementalist, or compromising, or whatever. That is rarely the case–they tend to consider carefully and discuss openly–with an open mind, rather than preconceived notions–what is the best course. Maybe you’re doing that, but I sure can’t see it.
Kindred, I think you may have put your finger on something important with your reference to hurt feelings. That’s really not what I was interested in. I mean, I think that always matters on a personal level, but I was more focused here on the question of what works and what might keep us from doing what works. I think that putting feelings at the forefront here (albeit often without realizing it) is a large part of the problem. My take is that neither the hurt feelings of mental health workers you refer to nor the angry feelings of those (you and me) who’ve been harmed by the system should take precedence over what works. The feelings are terribly important, but they should not rule our analysis. I have to be honest, my sense is that you’re assessment here is colored by your anger. I could be wrong–perhaps there is a clearer analysis that lies behind your position than you’ve laid out, but I can’t see it. That analysis of course would be a much larger and longer conversation, but I do at least want to be clear on this point.
Kindred,
Not sure if this will come up in the right order–we can’t comment on a comment directly, it seems.
As I think about it, to be honest, I was not just trying to see your point of view (though I was that) but also hoping you might consider a question that seems important from my point of view. I often actually am opposed to incrementalism and compromise–I think we’re rather addicted to that in our society in some very bad ways, and am appreciative of anyone (like you) who is willing to be forthright and not hide from necessary conflict.
I think it’s a very hard thing to know when it’s best, for any given individual, to fight all out and when it’s best to compromise or work within the system. I have my doubts about whether we can ever know for certain–there is always faith involved, and of course also very personal dispositions.
But I suppose what I would ask is, do you find any value in the question that I posed–that I often ask myself and feel we might all profitably consider? Do you think it is possible that we sometimes do to others what was done to us, albeit it different or muted form? I know I sometimes do (i.e., judge others in the way I was judged–I do it out of anger, fear, and hurt) and think I see it in others, even as I do not assume I can know for sure–it’s tough enough sometimes what’s happening in my own mind!
So, that’s just to try to make clear what I was after–posing an open question, rather than suggesting I know which is the best path.
Kindred,
This is really tough stuff, I know–and you have my deepest sympathies for what you’ve been through. All I can think of to say that might possibly be useful (though I know it may not be) is that something I try hard to do, though I often fail, is to ask if it is possible that I am unfairly categorizing (diagnosing, pathologizing) people in the same way that others did to me. My feeling is that we need to be really careful judging or condemning others (just as I was judged via “medical” diagnosis) if I don’t know their full story and all the complexity that brings.
BothSides: Thank you for this. I think that until we learn just how fundamentally this problem is systemic and that it does damage to everyone involved we are not going to get out of it. If you can find a way to be of help and create change from the inside, more power to you. 🙂
Thank you for this. I’m so sorry you’ve had to go through this but also, although I’ve had an easier time of it overall, I can relate to a lot that you say. The realization that it comes from trauma is life-changing, isn’t it? I think that most of the “diagnoses” are junk, but Developmental Trauma Disorder, which Besel van der Kolk has been trying hard to get recognized, is probably very commmon, and it shifts it from “something is wrong with me” to “I was hurt, or injured, very badly.” I always thought there was just something inherently wrong with me. I had “all the advantages” and a heck of a lot of gifts and skills, and just could never put it all together sufficiently to have the sort of life I thought I should have, and wanted. Then when I was 51 I found out that my mother had had a psychotic break when I was 4, and gradually came to realize the extreme degree of dysfunction in my family, of which that was the most prominent sign but hardly the only one–as always, it was a symptom, not a cause–and same for my “depression.” The injustice and brutality of the whole thing is just awful–I’m so sorry you got caught up in it and hope your new understanding makes things much better.
Thank you for this, and especially for your (and your therapist’s) suggestion that there can be “another sort of PTSD” in the aftermath. I was “only” on them for fifteen years, and got off seven years ago, but the damage caused to my life, both while being on them and especially during a multi-year withdrawal process, is still with me. I am continuing to climb out of the hole and honestly sometimes wonder if I am even able to take in fully the scope of it all. What makes it especially difficult is that no one else quite gets it, so I mostly have to work it out in my own head–so it is very helpful to hear your story and know I am not alone. You have my deepest sympathies, and solidarity.
I really appreciate the attention to this and agree that caution is warranted, but I’m also concerned about the particular bias you seem to be bringing to this issue. To characterize ketamine as “used by veterinarians” and “a party drug” just is not right and, to my eye, raises major concerns about credibility right out of the gate. It is a common and very effective ER anaesthetic, is also frequently used in hospice care, and has been shown over decades to be reliable and safe for these uses.
Lewis Mehl-Madrona’s work is very good on this. He is Cherokee-Lakota-European and an M.D., certified I think in psychiatry, gerontology, and family medicine. His book “Healing the Mind through the Power of Story” is especially good.
There’s lots to say about his approach, but there are two things I’ve heard him say that I especially like. “In indigenous cultures, we assume that if a person has psychic distress it means something is wrong in the community and that person should be respected and listened to carefully.” (That’s a paraphrase) And (joking): “Psychiatry is the only profession in which the customer is always wrong.” Just a lovely man with a lot to offer.
Kindred, I think you are missing the importance of the different ways in which boys/men and girls/women are socialized. Just because traumatized women don’t usually become physically violent, and even just because most traumatized men don’t either, as Steve says, doesn’t at all mean that Gabor Mate is wrong here. Men are typically socialized to go outward with their feelings, and that anger is about the only intense feeling that is permissible to be displayed. Not all men, but an awful lot. And so some, even a small minority, end up doing awful, violent things. I’m not excusing it, and I don’t think Mate is, either, but I do think he’s absolutely right about the connection he’s describing.
Hey, sorry for being so strident there, I’m afraid I can get my dander up. I really did have many of the same reactions as you–to the interview I heard, anyway. But there were two things that bothered me in what you wrote.
The first is phrases like: “Dear Lauren Slater: I learned, and I hope you learn, too, before it is too late,” and “Dear Lauren Slater, you need to find the answer within yourself. Plain and simple.” That seems pretty condescending to me and I just think we need to meet people where they are. The reason it pushes my buttons, of course, is that I as once told things were plain and simple by the people who got me hooked on antidepressants and it cost me dearly. I just don’t agree with you on the “everyone is different” thing. I know it’s a tricky phrase and can be used to legitimize really bad treatment, but I also think there’s truth in it–even if just in that some people are “different” in that they really aren’t able to get off the drugs. Or at least are convinced of such, and I won’t put myself in the position of judging them on that, as much as I might disagree, and tell them so. But I think it’s terribly important that the conversation always be respectful.
The second things is regarding psychedelics. I spent five years of my life trying to get off of SSRIs and might never have been able to if I had not in the end done some careful, guided work with psychedelics. I have now been clean for six years and honestly feel I owe my life to those substances. And I know several other people who would say the same. I think we need to be careful not to counter psychiatry’s “drugs are always the answer” ideology with a reactionary “drugs are always bad” ideology. I think we need to listen and learn and consider individual people and individual treatments on their own merits.
Thanks for your writing, and for the discussion–really.
I have not read Slater’s book, although I did hear interview with Terri Gross. Based on that, there are a great many things in this review that make sense to me, and also some things that don’t. More important, I am dismayed by the condescension towards a smart and thoughtful woman who doesn’t have all the answers but does have the courage to tell her story and offer her opinions, imperfections, uncertainties, and all. Why is it that so many people writing here can not see the way they mirror the arrogance of conventional psychiatry every time they dismiss the experience of real people and announce to us all that they know the truth and the way that everyone else must follow?
He also wrote a very nice book on ecological Marxism called: “The enemy of nature: The end of capitalism or the end of the world?” This is especially worth noting as we celebrate Marx’s 200th birthday. Although it gets into the weeds in places, the book is overall one of the best overall presentations of eco-Marxism, explains very nicely how capitalism so fundamentally feeds off the ruination of nature, just as it does off the exploitation of people, and considers deeply the question of whether “sustainable” capitalism is even at all possible, or whether the growth imperative will always outpace our piecemeal attempts at regulation. Needless to say, it ain’t lookin’ good. I did not know about his work on corporate medicine, though I’m not surprised–the bodies we live in being inseparable from the body we live on. Anyway, a very fine man, he will be missed even as he continues to be with us through his work.
As a victim of antidepressant poisoning (what else can you call it?) I am deeply disturbed, but not entirely surprised. What also comes to mind is that this is one of many symptoms of a profound social disease (or maybe something that should go in the next DSM?). I watched the other night a John Oliver piece (actually a quite good source of news) on nuclear waste and it showed barrels of it being duped off the coast of New Jersey in the 50s. (Some of them came back to the surface, so they strafed them with machine guns from a plane–really, what else was there to do?) So you know, develop a technology, pretend against all common sense that it’s safe, and wait for the shit to hit the fan. And now we have these marvelous smart (dumb) phones, that we already know are making people, especially teen-agers, miserable, but I don’t think we’ve even begun to see the full measure of what our life-of-screens is doing, not least making people even more complacent about all of the above. Let us be very, very angry, and then do something about it.
Thank you, Kelly!
Indeed. What I realized after spending some time reading through those comments is that there is a range of views, but the top “readers picks” are all pro-drug. The one you quote was I think the highest on that list, got the most votes. What that says to me is that there are a TON of people who’ve swallowed the coolaid but perhaps on some level realize it and so get very defensive and “vote” those comments to the top of the list. Still, the article itself is what most people will see, and as Steve says it is progress.
Yes, it is progress, at least. I’m not sure how many people even read the print version any more, but letters to the editor might be worthwhile also. I did notice that among the “NYTimes Picks” in the comments every single one is pro-drug, so it looks like someone low on the totem pole (I always wonder who has to review the comments all day long) is taking a side, whereas I think letters to the ed may get more careful attention.
I just looked through the comments on this in the Times. It is unbelievable. There are so many people writing in, from first-hand experience, saying what wonderful, indispensable drugs they are. While I’m willing to bet a lot of that is because of placebo effect, I do think we need to take people’s personal stories, from both sides of this, seriously. But there is still the endless refrain on chemical imbalance and the diabetes metaphor. You read through it and just want to bang your head against the wall. Or maybe someone else’s! The endless circulation of long-dead pseudo-science propaganda. Well, thank God we live in the modern age of corporate media and miraculous electronic communication, where truth always rises to the top!
There is also a good interview with her on Fresh Air about a week ago.
Thank you, Juliano, this is a very important perspective you offer, and one I agree with, including on the fear of psychedelics. I’m curious, though, why you say that about Jung–he has seemed to me not unalligned with your position, albeit too internally focused and so not attentive enough to the problem of social control.
The only thing I’d add is that men are terribly harmed by patriarchy, also. The pressure to conform just happens earlier than for women (Carol Gilligan’s research suggests at about age 5, as opposed to early teens for girls), and so gets more thoroughly repressed. bell hooks says that “patriarchy has no gender,” which seems very true to me.
Yes, exactly. I think we’re almost giving away the argument by not making that the central point.
Thank you for this very helpful and thorough interview. The only thing I would question is the statement that it may not be possible to design research that would definitively answer the question of antidepressant efficacy. I think it’s very possible that long-term research, following people over the course of years and looking at both positive and negative effects, would show a clear long-term deleterious effect. It’s just so common to find people who benefitted greatly at first, and then reverse tolerance creeps up, and side effects creep up…my bet would be that if you extend the time scale to real-life scenarios, the results might just become pretty clear.
I realize that isn’t too likely to happen, but strategically I think there’s a strong case to be made–a very plausible hypothesis to be put forth–that would strengthen the argument against the drugs. Well, not just strategically, as opening up the debate beyond the narrow confines of current research actually helps to expand people’s understanding. And who knows, maybe more discussion like that could actually open up the possibility of careful research?
Yes, exactly. And yet it passes peer review for publication in the Lancet. What more do we need to know?
Johann Harri interviewed John Ioaniddes (sp?), who I think is about the most important figure in medical research in the last couple of decades for having shown clearly just how bad so much peer-reviewed research is. (2005, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” is the most downloaded article on PLOS medicine.) At the end of the interview in which Ioannides essentially says research on SSRIs is as bad as any body of research out there, Harri asks him how he feels about the whole thing. He says, well, it’s really terribly depressing…but not nearly depressing enough to make me want to ever take one of those drugs!”
Lawrence: Yes, absolutely. I think also it is true at the social level and not just individual–that it is definitely about subconscious desires, but also about systemic and institutional dynamics and structures, which help to perpetuate individual subconscious aggression. So, capitalism is very much about control and domination, baked in at the roots, the basic rules of organization. I am also remembering a very nice, succinct book by Jennifer Reid called “The Colonial Encounter:..something something”, about the English and Micmac encounter in the Atlantic provinces. She describes very nicely how ambiguity was easily accepted by the Micmac, whereas the English could not tolerate it, everything had to be clear, defined, black and white. So, for instance, the Micmac, like many indigenous peoples, could easily fold Christianity into their own relgion, whereas the English could only see anything outside of their own religion, anything introducing uncertainty or paradox, as just plain bad or downright evil, the work of the devil. (Not so different from the idea that there is clearly “sane” and “insane.”) This seems to me a sort of conceptual-emotional violence and makes me pull back a little on what I said before–I think the domination and oppression have also been there internally for a long time. I expect it is a result of both philosophy/culture and childhood trauma (consider European child-reaering practices…).
These are fascinating questions and I thank you for once again spurring my thinking on such things!
Thank you, Lawrence; very thoughtful writing, as always.
The only thing I would question is whether the U.S. was ever as free as we like to think. In certain respects, yes, but there has also been a strong inclination from the start to conquer and control (indigenous peoples, Africans, minorities and outliers of all sorts, and of course nature) and I think part of what’s happened is now that we no longer have such an open field for that, the old, blatant techniques become more subtle and we turn them inwards–within our own society and our own minds. Bruno Latour said that “the repressed returns, and with a vengeance.” I think we’ve repressed and hidden our profound aggression and violence for several hundred years (or a few millenia), the old targets are no longer available, and as the center no longer holds, it goes inward. There is, in the end, a fine and perhaps non-existent line between outward and inward aggression. Maybe? Thoughts?
rasselas, perhaps as people who have suffered terribly from having others control our minds to make us conform–well, perhaps we should not seek to control how others use words that are meaningful to them and how they think. Perhaps we should not do what was done to us, even if it is in more subtle form. Perhaps, like all who have suffered abuse, it is not our fault but nonetheless our responsibility to not perpetuate the cycle by seeking to dominate and control and ridicule others who are in pain. Maybe we should listen, instead?
I see it all the time here, people who have been hurt and are in such pain becoming very angry and impatient with each other and painting us back into the black and white, polarized box of thinking we’re trying so hard to get out of.
As for mental illness, I actually agree with you for the obvious reasons and avoid using the term myself. On the other hand, if I have a stomach virus, which of course indicates nothing inherently wrong with me but simply a hostile foreign invasion, I do feel ill and have a physical illness. While the context is different (which is why I don’t use the term), nonetheless, the painful rubbish our minds have been filled with from trauma and propaganda and drugs is not so different, so who am I to tell someone he does not have a mental illness? I might explain why I think it’s a problem , but in the end I will always be for cognitive liberation, not domination. Even more, first and foremost, I will be for compassion for others who have suffered.
Thank you for posting this! What in the world is “mixed depression” and why would one even think of taking an antipsychotic for it?
It can be terribly hard; took me the better part of five years until I finally found a way out, and even then it was very hard. Have you checked out the Inner Compass Initiative, which includes the Withdrawal Project? I think there is good support there and maybe ideas for how to make it work. I hope you find a way to get off, wishing very best of luck.
Thank you for this, Kelly. Your point that they are “throwing more of the same failed medicine at the very problem created by the failed medicine” is very much in line with similar dynamics in the realm of international development. About once a decade there is a new, “expert”-derived formulation to “develop” the poor of the world, and each time it is essentially an imposition of external force, as you say, and each time it fails, and each time a new and “better” formulation is cooked up. I’m sure there are other areas where this is true–well, industrial agriculture is another example, needing always more fertilizer and pesticides to “solve” the problems caused by their earlier application. This is a hallmark of late modernity. Let us keep our shoulders (lightly!) to the wheel not of force but of unfolding.
Thank you, James, and Johann, for this. It is a remarkably thoughtful and interesting interview and I think Johann’s work can do a great deal to get this perspective and information out to a wider audience. I also want to recommend very highly his earlier book on the war on drugs, “Chasing the Scream.” I always thought it just started with Nixon but, in fact, goes way back to the 20s and has profoundly racist and political roots.
There are many wise people and wonderful writers here at MIA, but Johann is able to take this material to the next level, narratively-speaking, and produce real page-turners that are also deeply humane and wise. For that I am very grateful.
Tireless, we seem to have trouble connecting on some key points of meaning. You’re clearly a person of great passion and conviction; I hope things go well for you.
Besides, who said that “we” “need” drugs? The suggestion here has been uniformly that there is an option that some people may want to chose.
Tireless, it’s pretty clear already that you believe that. I thought one of the things most of us were against on this site was the presumption to know and judge the interior states of those we might deem less aware or enlightened than ourselves. Why not, instead, speak from your own experience and leave the judgemental presumptions to the psychiatrists? Why not be okay with the way others chose to work with their own consciousness? So what if they’re deluded and escapist? Why not just wish them well and hope they wake up to your superior view?
Jan,
This is really helpful, thanks for taking the time and offering the detail. I know one cannot fully describe such things, but I think I get the gist.
It actually sounds very much like what I was hoping for and led to expect with a group I worked with a few years ago. In my case, it went badly. I think I was somewhat desperate for community and got pulled in with the false-promise of that. It was also a group with very prominent and “respectable” people–doctors, lawyers, philanthropists, Ivy League professors, etc., and I’m chagrined to look back and realize I really suspended my own better judgement because of that, despite a longstanding proclivity to discount or even shy away from conventional markers and titles. (Of course, sometimes what we reject is exactly what we crave on a deeper level.)
It was not until nearly a year in that someone who had a lot of careful experience working in other contexts pointed out to me that, in such a deep state, one could essentially be re-traumatized when interactions in that space come with impatience, disrespect, hostility, etc.–and given the gestalt of the whole thing, they tend to be relatively subtle, insidious…slippery. It took me the better part of a year to tease out the ways that had, indeed, happened to me. I have now heard of others who’ve left that community in a very troubled state, although I know many others who would describe in much the way you did your experience.
This brings two thoughts to mind. First is that surely there is a continuum, from the very good and safe group you worked with, to the not-good one I was a part of. The second is that such groups can be very different for different members. I don’t assume it, but wonder if there may have been some in your group who did not have quite as good or safe an experience as you did. I know for my part that I did not give voice to the problems at the time. I was both very invested and trying to make it work, and also there was too much shame involved to even admit it to myself, much less others. What was wrong with me, I wondered, that I could not be a part of this wonderful, supportive, sharing experience that others seemed to be having?
I should say that I am a very big believer in dispersed power–and not just on faith, but on the evidence, in many situations. But I’m still not convinced this is a situation where it’s best, or at least always so. I doubt these things can ever be regular or predictable enough to know for sure, and because it’s had to be kept so under wraps and quiet, I think we all have still a lot to learn.
Jan, your point about it being an event is very important; thank you for so nicely articulating that, and also that it is spiritual work.
I didn’t mean to suggest the setting isn’t important (it is, absolutely), just that the therapeutic relationship isn’t necesSARilly a big problem in terms of power dynamics. I agree that it’s always something to be careful with, and in a sense always problematic. But I would be wary of putting too much confidence in group work. As with a therapist, it depends greatly on the nature of the group. But even in the most supportive of groups it can be a dicey business to rely for support on someone else who also is in a deep state of consciousness exploration. One of the lesser appreciated problems with this work, in the circles where it happens, is that there can be retraumatization when one is in that deep state. In a group that is not carefully set up and, ideally (in my view) supervised, you never quite know who might come along and drop their own shit on you. I think it’s really too much to expect someone in that state to be the primary support.
That’s my take; I’d be interested in you have further thoughts on this.
The way I think of it is that power dynamics will always be an issue and always bear the closest consideration in all relationships, whether a group or a dyad. But in a group it’s dispersed and a lot can be happening out of plain sight. Of course, that can also happen with a dyad! But personally, I would rather have the power relationship clear and up front with one trusted and experienced therapist or healer or even a really good friend (and yes, not a psychiatrist!) who’s sober than dispersed in a group, especially where people are doing their own deep work.
Here is a thought. Trauma begets trauma, abuse begets abuse, disprespect begets disrespect. It is my sense that the wilful ignorance and violence of psychiatric “care” has been internalized by some of those who have been most harmed by it, and further compounded by their suffering. How else to explain the disregard shown by many here for the views and experiences of others that fall outside their own framework of assumptions. How else to explain the unwillingness to even consider alternate views and experiences? Please note that I said “consider.” Not agree with or accept. Simply consider, and perhaps engage in dialogue.
Fire away.
I just want to be sure you want to shackle, restrain, and imprison people who are assisting adults who have sought them out for assistance in exploring their own minds in a way that poses no threat at all to anyone else but that does diverge from your own ideas of what is an acceptable state of mind.
If so, should we not also shackle and imprison the people choosing to have experiences of alternative consciousness? Note that in the early days psychedelics were sometimes referred to as “psychotomimetic” because they can induce temporary states that resemble “psychosis.”
So if we’re going to shackle and imprison people who chose to do that, can you explain how that’s so different from psychiatry?
Are you hoping for a diagnostic manual that can categorize these people? An army of specially trained doctors to “treat” them? Or are you looking more for old-school imprisonment where you just toss them in jail?
MDMA is also totally contraindicated for anyone currently taking prescription psych drugs–someone asked about that below.
P.S. As for your preacher’s grandson, I couldn’t agree more!
Hi Feelin, I want to ask a question that could seem argumentative but I’m honestly interested and curious and wondering if there could be unseen common ground. So the question is: If you’ve read this article, and perhaps also my comments in the thread, what accounts for your insistence that a drug is a drug is a drug? Do you assume the research is part of the pharma-industrial complex? Do you assume what I’ve written is untrue or that I’m deluded? Do you assume something else?
I was just looking over Scott’s article again–I came to it late last night after a long drive, and then mostly read the comments today–and am seeing anew the emphasis he put on the idea that this will “transform the face of mental health care.” (I do realize it’s in the title; mea culpa…and mea was pooped, too.) I think he’s right about the potential for paradigm change, but that you (Steve) are also right to emphasize the importance of power and question whether it will happen so easily as Scott suggests.
I really do believe the paradigm is fundamentally different here (and that has been my personal experience), that it’s the difference between essentially anesthitizing people (oh, right: “fixing a chemical imbalance”) and trusting the psyche to reorganize and heal itself and facilitating that. Please stop and really consider that difference, and if it seems mysterious and whacked, look up some of the accounts from people who’ve done this work. IF the initial research results hold up, I do think it opens the possibility of major change, and I’m quite sure the substance itself is paradigmatically different from the drugs in use now.
However! Notice the reliance in the article on Thomas Kuhn, who’s work on scientific revolutions (paradigm change) is, if memory serves, very much under-theorized in terms of power. (It’s been many years, but I think that’s right.) So that’s where I think the uncertainty is, and why the movement represented on this site, and the wider recognition that the modernist-imperialist-capitalist emperor is wearing pretty shabby clothes, is so important.
I suggested before that people who have done work with MDMA and psychedelics can be some of our best allies. But it can work the other way, too. By pushing back against big pharma and psychiatry, we can help make sure there is room for alternative therapies and hopefully a new paradigm. What exactly the paradigm is, I’m not sure, but it’ll probably involve a lot more than MDMA and it’s gonna be an awful lot better that what we’ve got now, that’s for sure! Here’s hoping soon.
Hmm. I have to be tentative, because I really haven’t looked at the system in detail. I need to read Whitaker’s latest book on institutional corruption.
I do hear you on the need for an uprising of sorts and for the confrontation of power. But I’m wary of my own adrenaline with such things and how it’s triggered by our heroic mythology around uprising and revolution. I think what you suggest could work and would be certainly the best thing, but if it doesn’t happen I also think smaller scale change, including the availability of alternative forms of care and healing–as you know, I think this is an important one–can be very important. Sometimes the time is right for revolution. Sometimes it’s right for incremental change. I think a large part of being attentive to power involves carefully gauging what is possible in a given historical moment–and also what might come after major upheaval, as we all know how traditional political revolutions have tended to go.
I see a lot happening on both fronts but don’t know enough about specific leverage points and what it would take to bring the system down. So, personally, I’d start with (snore!) institutional and movement analysis. I realize that may be old hat for you and some others.
But I also don’t think the two forms of action are mutually exclusive, so I would also focus on discerning which incremental changes will support the larger goals and focus on those.
Richard Rockefeller, who was involved with trauma as a board member of Doctors Without Borders, gave a very nice talk on trauma and MDMA therapy at the Carnegie Council a few years ago. At the very end, he spoke to the larger social significance of healing trauma and asked something like “how in the world can we address our most pressing social problems when trauma is so widespread and so many people are suffering from it on a daily basis.” It’s a simple point but I think a very important one. Even beyond acute trauma (I think we’re swimming in more subtle or at least more accepted kinds of trauma that keep us shut up in little boxes of the mind) I think MDMA, and also true psychedelics, have the potential, if used with intention and respect, to help people open to the world and to become less conventional and more loving and more activist. The people I know who have done this work tend to have a very clear understanding of and strong feelings about what’s wrong with psychiatry and prescription psych drugs. I think they can be among your (our) strongest allies in building the movement.
Steve,
Our particular concerns and expectations aside, this may be an interesting test case for the juggernaut you describe. Psych drugs always seem very similar to international development to me in their trajectory. Like “mental illness,” there never was such a thing as “development” until Truman put it on the map, a “solution” to a newly constructed “problem” of “underdevelopment.” Since then, about once a decade, there’s always been a new, shiny, better solution–either technological or institutional or both–and every time, the new solution fails, only to be replaced by another new one, and so on.
There always comes a point, however, when a regime or paradigm falls. Can I ask what you think it would take in this case? Can you imagine any positive role that non-patentable substances can play in that? (I realize you’ve already answered that second question, but pushing a little harder to see if you think there’s any circumstance in which it could happen.) That’s not meant to be argumentative, I’m honestly curious.
Shoot, I thought weak bones was original!
I’m always uncomfortable with absolute certainty in dynamic situations. This seems dynamic to me. I don’t think they can patent it, and I’m much more hopeful than you that people are starting to see through the emperor’s clothes on this and other fronts. And that’s coming from someone who’s academic work was both Marxist and Foucaultian; I totally hear you on power. Keep in mind that this is also related to the true psychedelics (MDMS is a sort-of psychedelic). Those come with their own pros and cons, but I think there is something important afoot outside the realm of patents that has the potential to help break the power relationships you’re concerned about. (Help, I said…only help.)
I don’t assume it! I once heard a prominent physician with ties to big-philanthropy (and who, in my opinion, is stuck in a psychedelic quasi-cult) suggest the hashtag “psychedelics, the cure for poverty!” She was serious. I think she meant that they can help people self-actualize, and I suppose become the go-getters capitalism wants. (Needless to say, capitalism actually needs them to stay poor; gotta have that reserve army of labor.) So it was utter bulllshit. As some Indian guru apparently once said “A fool going in, a fool going out.”
Still, I think it’s dynamic, the world is coming apart at the seams, things are not as predictable as they once were. And people who are suffering need help.
Thank you, Steve, for this helpful clarification. I share your concern about what will happen when this comes to be seen as the new silver bullet. Absolutely. I’m less convinced that this can be used to keep trauma out of the picture. MDMA therapy is all about working with trauma and, for many, making it clear that there is no underlying biochemical problem. Talk to anyone who’s worked with it, read any of the accounts now circulating from the MAPS research, and trauma, along with it’s social causes, is almost always front and center. Can you explain how you see this getting sidelined? What am I missing?
p.s. by “once-health” I also mean normal, not “diseased.”
Steve, to my ear, this is not at all about looking away from root causes, but rather is about recognizing them and asking how injury to a once-healthy system can be healed. That doesn’t at all preclude working also on changing the social context and root causes embedded in it. If a child is being hit and having his bones broken, should we not both address the family and social context AND set those bones so they can heal? That seems to me very different from saying (to perhaps strain the metaphor), oh, my, that child has weak bones! He is diseased. Give him a daily dose of bone strengthener…that has not actually been shown to strengthen bones and has a host of nasty side effects. Just to be extra clear for anyone skimming, I’m not suggesting MDMA works as simply and clearly as setting bones! 😉
Perhaps it has also to do with how this is theorized and described. No doubt big pharma could spin it the way you suggest, but I’m not sure they have enough interest, since it’s not patented or making money for them. No? But either way, I think it’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t get hijacked that way.
In last graph, I meant “doesn’t work at all times for any given individual
Jan, thank you for this thoughtful post. You are moving into a realm of helpful discussion and healthy, constructive skepticism. I have a few thoughts.
As someone who was deeply traumatized by prescription psych drugs, I’m not sure that there is always the problem with power relationship that you describe; I certainly have not felt that way myself, as I’ve found a range of relationships and power dynamics in different psychotherapy contexts, and suspect others have, also. (I do realize there are always questions of power at play, I just haven’t found it to always be a problem.) I also think it has more to do with the actual therapist and the personal relationship than with the decor of the office; there are good, careful people doing this work, and not good, not careful people, and it can make all the difference.
I also do not see nearly as clear a differentiation between power-laden individual relationships and supportive group work as you do. Group work with psychedelics can be really very problematic and needs to be done with just as much care and attention to power dynamics as individual work.
I also think you’re right about the problem of people shutting down, or at least snapping back to base-line, after the experience. It’s just not a silver bullet, doesn’t work for everyone or at any time, and I think there’s a real danger of people not realizing this. One thing that I think is very helpful about the MAPS protocol is the way they embed the experience in traditional therapy. That really helps establish trust and help people go deeper and integrate the experience, and minimize the problem you describe, and I think their research is helping us to understand how best to use the substance.
Thanks again,
Daniel
It’s very late and I’m beat but I feel I really must take a minute and come to the defense of both Scott and the research and emerging field of practice he describes. I have done this work myself, so speak from both that experience, and my prior, truly awful, experience with prescription antidepressants (I lost a decade of my life to those goddamed things, so don’t think I’m not as skeptical as anyone else), and as an enthusiastic reader and supporter of this website. The suggestion others have offered that MDMA marks a continuation or simple reconfiguration of chemically-based psychiatry is, frankly, nuts. I don’t think you guys are actually reading what he wrote, and I know for sure you have not had any direct experience with this work. The suggestion that this is simply a matter of “taking ecstasy” to avoid the hard work of healing is also far off the mark–frankly, it strikes-me as fear-based, reactionary, and unthinking. If you have serious trauma to heal, work with MDMA is anything but easy. It can be, however, life affirming and insight inducing and overall profoundly healing. It doesn’t work for everyone and it is not a silver bullet for anyone, but it can be an enormously helpful way of facilitating the inherent self-healing nature of the psyche. I’m really sorry so many people have been hurt by dependence-inducing and harmful psychiatric drugs (and I am one of them, and remain, five years out, mad as hell about it), but I really, really, REALLY, think we need, unlike the corrupt field of psychiatry, to keep our minds open long enough to discern what actually works to help alleviate suffering, rather than rest on our comfortable knee-jerk reactions. As much as I respect this community and the members that make it up, I see an awful lot of that last here and hope it will change.
I am so terribly sorry about what happened to your daughter, and to you. It seems to me that the old treatment of using leeches to draw out poisons was actually quite humane by comparison. Simply awful, and all because of our pervasive fear of emotional pain. Any poison, apparently, is okay so long as it maintains the illusion that pain and death can be eradicated. My greatest sympathies, and appreciation for writing this.
Yes, I can totally see how it would play out as you describe. And it goes that way in so many fields.
So, in academia, for instance, it’s often the people who focus on grant-writing and commercial applications who do well and stick with it, whereas many who really care about teaching publish less, and do less flashy or commodifiable research, end up as low-paid adjuncts, and eventually give up.
Or, to take another example more germane to this discussion, and very personal for me, my father was the VP of marketing for Smith, Kline, and French (before it was SmithKline Glaxo) and was forced to retire, i.e. fired. Many years later he told me he “wasn’t up to it,” but I at least like to think he actually was too decent a man to get fired up about selling drugs. He might otherwise have ended up the guy in charge of marketing Paxil. Maybe he’d have seen how rotten things were, but more likely, I suspect, he would have been too enmeshed in the whole thing to see it clearly. So, thankfully (!), he was fired.
Anyway, I think this sort of thing happens in many fields. It would be interesting to do interviews with psychiatrists who took different paths with this and try to tease out what caused some to maintain critical thinking and others to hop on board with the drugs.
Thanks again, Lawrence, please keep writing!
Thank you, Lawrence, for another in your series of thoughtful and important articles. I won’t recount the great many things that seem to me right about what you’ve written but rather, in a constructive spirit, point to a few things that might warrant further thought and refinement.
The first is perhaps somewhat rhetorical, but I think at this historical juncture important, namely that there are other state-sponsored religions, in addition to the rather awful one you describe. Capitalism, for instance–and of course that is intimately connected with what you describe here via the pharma-medical-industrial complex. There must be profits…
The other relates to what in social-science jargon is called functionalism. Some years ago, in defending my dissertation, I was rightly challenged for saying that certain things “must happen” within the context of a certain social system, in the sense that there appears to be a certain systemic logic (or “functional requirement” of the system) that almost magically leads consistently to certain outcomes, outcomes that seem to satisfy what the system demands. (This problem was not new to me. I should have known better! But I fell into a functionalist trap, which is a very easy thing to do when you work with a narrative or a system that has great power.)
So, as one example in your case, the DSM “had to be” invented to keep psychiatrists employed. I think there are risks with stating it this way. One is that something appears inevitable when perhaps it was not. Was the DSM the only option, or were there others that were discarded?
The other is that it takes our attention away from specific people, interests, decisions, and uses of power. Was it “necessary” because ALL psychiatrists are manipulative creeps and colluded to make it happen? Or because they are indoctrinated into a system of belief and so are not aware, or not fully aware, of other options or the effects of what they do or simply of their own responsibility? In which case causation is at a higher level, but then it begs the question of whether someone made the decisions to set things up this way (i.e., in our medical-education system) or whether it’s truly at a “system level” and no one actually made a conscious decision to make all this happen. All of this, of course, matters both in terms of who’s responsible for this god-awful mess, and also in terms of what we need to do to get out of it.
So basically, I think it could help to disaggregate, to look more closely at WHY it seemed inevitable and at specifically who did what, when, and why. Otherwise we risk assuming that either all psychiatrists are inherently selfish jerks intentionally harming their patients or that “the system” simply required things to happen this way, and the psychiatrists are just doing what they were trained to do. I think most often it’s somewhere in between those two, such that the system does tend to indoctrinate people and require certain sorts of outcomes, but also that certain people are in positions to make decisions, and to abuse power–and that last, of course, is a key point of leverage if we want to change things.
Another reason I think this is worth considering is that, while I find your account compelling and know others here do also, it has a bit of a ring of conspiracy theory, and that may raise credibility issues for the wider audience you so rightly suggest we are hoping to reach through MIA. I think the more specific we can be, and the more careful about assigning responsibility and blame, the higher the credibility with people outside our circle here.
I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m taking shots at your work, which I really do find important and inspiring–and especially so coming from a physician. Like you and so many others, I am angry as hell about this business and am fully in support of greatly appreciate your work.
I just came across a very nice description of an alternative model of child-rearing–Bernie Sanders describing growing up in Brooklyn and how playing unsupervised is just what people need to become autonomous and savvy–and by implication good citizens. It’s at about minute 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-zgSNCpP5c
Thank you, Lawrence. This seems profoundly and sadly right to me. I think it is part of the larger trend of Focualtian “disciplining” of individuals and society, as opposed to more physical and explicit–and thus resistable–forms of control. I would add also to what you write the effect of “smart” (really dumbing) phones; in addition to what is obvious all around us, I believe there is no solid research showing sharp increases in childhood depression and anxiety within a few years of their introduction. We are, indeed, in truly awful shape, as a society, for dealing with what is coming down the pike.
I’m sure this is true about Norman Kline, but for an indication of just how early the drug companies were pushing substances that would “tranquilize us into oblivion,” as Kline says, see these ads from the 50s from Smith, Kline, and French for Thorazine. Good for, let’s see: arthritis, menopause, “senile agitation,” “hyperactive” children, cancer, bursitis, alcoholism, pain (wouldn’t want any pain…), and, of course psychosis and scizophrenia. My mother was given the stuff for several years as an alternative to being committed. It “became necessary” shortly after her parents told her they would not support her in any way if she left a bad marriage. So, you know, bad marriage + thorazine or mental institution, take your choice. Anyway, I would imagine Kline had things like this in mind when he said that about tranqulizing ourselves into oblivion.
Frank, while the interpretation offered here seems compelling to me I’m very interested in hearing why it may not be right. Could you perhaps offer something a little clearer in your crititique of what you call “rubbish”? You know, you gotta fight fire with water, not more fire. Right?
Yes, I am (despite my post below on the iceberg of trauma, which I think? you may be referring to here) also wary of that inflation. It sometimes seems like trauma is becoming the mot du jour, and overused, and so watered down, and also something a little too convenient to hang our neurotic hats on and evade our responsibility to act and change. Still..
In my own head (from which of course all this springs), you are prompting me to realize I sometimes mean different things with the same word–hence that wariness, but also the post below expanding the definition. So, for instance, when I read the much-lauded book “The Trauma of Everyday Life,” which is basically buddhist psychology about all sorts of everyday suffering that humans are always faced with, it seems to water the meaning of trauma down. Still, I think the subtler things I refer to are also a SORT of trauma, and while more subtle, perhaps even do overwhelm one’s sense of safety and ability to cope on a more subtle, sensitive or even spiritual (?) level that is essential to our well-being? Perhaps we cannot be “fully human” even in that more subtle realm because it inhibits our full sensitivity and creativity and vulnerability? And that, in turn, I am convinced, is making it more possible for us to tolerate and contribute to a system of (bell hooks) white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy that really is generating all sorts of capital-T trauma? I’m not sure, but that’s what’s coming to mind. A continuum of trauma, or trauma and Trauma. But perhaps it’s just stretching the word too far? I would love a lively dialogue on this and perhaps it is deserving of it’s own post. Thanks, Wayne, for your thoughts.
Yup. This sounds a lot like what Gabor Mate says about drug addicts. You spend a little time with them and…duh! It becomes very clear that trauma lies at the heart of it. I’m sure there are genetic problems, birth defects, brain injuries, etc. that cause “mental illness” but they have got to be rare. There is just no way nature or God designed us so that huge portions of people would have inherent defects of this sort. On the other hand, we live in a hugely traumatized society. I refer to it as the iceberg of trauma. There’s the obvious, spoken, explicit trauma; then there’s the repressed major trauma (those two of themselves are huge); but then also consider, on a subtler level, what we’re all embedded in. We live in isolated sterile lifeless little boxes. Maybe a house plant or two, maybe a dog or a cat. If we’re lucky, a loved one or two, with whom we probably have lots of tension because we’re unnaturally isolated in those boxes, which become familial pressure-cookers. Then we go to work and sit these beautiful bodies down in stupid chairs and stare at electronic screens. In order to connect with anyone or get to work we have to hurtle down to road in two-thousand pound steel boxes, squashing frogs and squirrels and mice, more beautiful miraculous bodies, spewing poisons out our tailpipe that literally kill people and are killing the planetary home we live in, and that originate from fossil fuels from half-way around the world secured by the most violent military machine the world has ever seen or gouging through fragile arctic tundra or rainforest and running through pipelines alone which peaceful native inhabitants are beaten and tear gassed for saying, hey, this is not right. So, you know, that would do a number on a person’s psyche. Then of course we’re also told that religion, which Jung referred to as the world’s great psychological healing systems (yes, I know they have their problems; I mean religion very broadly) are simply wrong or delusional by people who are so crude as to have no concept of how metaphor or symbolism work or just how the human heart works and insist that “rational science” and capitalism combined, which, in the way they’ve been combined, are flushing us all down the toilet, are in fact going to make everything just fine. So long as we keep buying stuff and voting in meaningless elections. Yup, that would do it.
Wayne (and others), I thought of this recent thread and especially this question of under-reported trauma while reading an article this morning about Michael Phelps and another olympic swimmer going public about “mental health” troubles that emerged after their competitive years. I dated a woman who had been a world-class tennis player because she had been driven rather brutally into it from the age of 5 by her father. (In this case, there were also military drills at 5 a.m., so it may be an extreme case.) It gave me a real window on how some, perhaps most, hyper-achievers are essentially driven by trauma and develop an incredibly effective sheen of calm control that hides it from view, often including from themselves. Of course they have enormous focus and discipline, and this can, in some cases, come from love of the sport (or other pursuits, including intellectual, business, etc.), but my sense is that it often, maybe usually, also becomes a form of addiction and a way to constantly keep the pain of trauma at bay. In line with our discussion of underreported trauma, I often have the sense that an awful lot of public personalities, and even people we think we know well, are operating at a high level in a way that is in part trauma driven. I’d be interested in anyone’s thoughts on this.
A window beneath the tip of the iceberg. It’s about time. Thank God there are a few academic researchers taking such things seriously.
Congratulations, Yet, on getting off what I call the FPs, or Fucking Pills. I was on fifteen years and it took me a solid five to get off, multiple hellish attempts before I finally pulled it off. How long since you’ve been off? I ask just because it can take a while for the system to equilibrate. Certainly it was six months for me, probably more, and some say it can take years. I hope you feel much better soon!
Yup, I think you’re right. And meanwhile, while I know this will be controversial here, other non-pharma substances that can really help will not be part of the picture. A friend of mine who is a palliative care nurse has, on the side, helped several people transition off of opioids with cannabis, but of course the doctors she works with won’t touch it. Meanwhile, one or a few sessions with psychedelics, coupled with ongoing therapy, can be extremely effective with all sorts of addictions. Someone above mentioned Gabor Mate, who I think is probably our best and most eloquent, and compassionate, person working on addiction. Until recently he led ayahuasca retreats in Mexico and has had remarkable success working with addicts in this way. See also the work of Dmitri Mugianis, a former heroin addict in New York who has helped many, many people with Ibogaine, and now has a clinic in, I think, Costa Rica. But those most effective treatments are on the fringes–precisely because they are not part of the pharma-industrial complex.