Psychiatry and Abuse | A Letter to Alice Miller

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From Alice Miller: Child Abuse and Mistreatment: “In the last year of medical school, I was appointed personal ‘therapist’ of a 32-year old female ‘schizophrenic.’ After I talked to the ‘patient’ several times, I could not find any sign of ‘mental illness’ in her. She talked to me about being sexually harassed by one of the staff, and this was interpreted (after a formal, non-revealing ‘investigation’) as a sign of ‘deterioration’ in my patient’s ‘condition.’ This was not the first time she was talking about sexual abuse.

My patient was first hospitalized when she was sixteen. She was reportedly very upset then and talked loudly about being sexually exploited by her father and uncle. Massive doses of medication and intensive ‘medical’ brainwash made her take back what she said and denounce the truth. Since then she was hospitalized several times, every time with a new ‘paranoia’ about sexual harassment.

When I met her she was at first hesitant to talk about the abuse, and claiming she was in agreement with her psychiatrists. She said she understands that she was crazy, and that in reality, what she thought had happened didn’t really happen. When I asked her how she got to that conclusion, she said that’s what the doctors all say. I did not argue with her and instead asked her questions about what she remembered. I listened to her and thought she looked reliable. It didn’t look like she was making it up, or trying to make the story look big. On the contrary, it looked like she was minimizing terrible abuse. I asked her if she really intentionally made this all up, and she said no. But because the doctors say she was ‘insane’ at the time, then she must have imagined it.

This was her only problem: she was completely invalidated and isolated by the label of ‘paranoid schizophrenia,’ and so she couldn’t trust herself at all. When I looked in her earliest hospital files, I discovered that the psychologist in charge of the ‘case’ determined, after a brief, non-revealing ‘investigation,’ that the abuse probably never happened, and the girl is suffering from delusions. No evidence was given. The nature and extent of ‘investigation’ were not recorded. No one dared to question the original diagnosis in all her subsequent hospitalizations. It seems that no one had taken the girl’s complaints seriously. And worse – because from the day she was ‘diagnosed,’ no one believed anything she said anymore, and so could be easily controlled and further abused in the future.

But now she could feel I believed her, and in a very short time she was very confident in her truth and didn’t look confused at all. But she still found it hard to give up the idea that ‘something was the matter with her.’ It took me several more months to convince her that she was never schizophrenic and that she did not need drugs. Her self-esteem was completely ruined by this ‘diagnosis’ – years of humiliation cannot be easily erased.

I don’t think this case is unique. Every day, people who tell intolerable truths are labeled as ‘paranoid schizophrenics’ by psychiatrists. This case only shows how easy it is to invalidate a victim like that. The label of ‘mental illness’ often is nothing but the invalidation, stigmatization, humiliation, and drugging of victims who try to complain. The complaint is never seriously investigated (as in criminal investigations), and the case is closed forever. Psychiatry is thus a crucial factor in eliminating victims’ voices, abusing them ‘for their own good,’ and ‘protecting’ society from the outcry of the abused.”

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2 COMMENTS

  1. This is brainwashing!

    This article comes like another article a bit similar that I read. A pontificating expert gnostic body language reader who came peering into my psyche as if it is visible to her even though she does not inhabit MY mind or MY brain or MY soul or MY body. She rootles in my underthings and digs in like a bendy spy laparoscopic probe looking for the monster daddy or the witch bitch mommy haunting me. Actually she does not. She has professional boundaries. But a gazillion armchair gnostical knowers who are wanna-be garden gate therapists, of what makes me tick have no compunction about rummaging in my garbage or reading between my lines rather than reading my lips. They come smugly thrusting leaflets at me that order me “to know” the latest way I “have to” fix myself. Fix myself according to someone else’s blueprint of what makes a broken person fixed, which is really a facsimile of how they themselves have been healed. An evangelotherapy stripping back of my layers to reveal the jackpot, the jack the lad abuser who “gave me” my schizophrenia like a talent show prize. I am presumably TOO STUPID not to have noticed it earlier, or seen the light that says my schizophrenia is but a by-product of “a terrible event”. A “trauma event” that can happen to “anyone”. So presumably this means schizophrenia-level breakdowns can now happen to anyone and everyone. Roll up, roll up! Get your schizophrenia here everyone, just sign the memo that says you were looked at seductively by a drunk cousin and that will be you sorted and done all ticketty boo. But wait! You don’t want the stigma from being thought schizophrenic so hows about binning that word and just claiming that not getting a valentine card has upset you beyond endurance. A big upset. An upset of the sort that used to be regarded as “severe”. Like schizophrenia used to be regarded as “severe”. Hey if nobody has that “severe” slot anymore since it has been raised to the ground then anyone and everyone can wear the severe shoes of the severely schizophrenic. As if they are that suffering one. And they can then dispense with the stigma by giving it a new friendlier name. A “consensus normal” name. A trauma sounding name. No shame in it. Hey, now everyone can fall apart for legit! Everyone can scream that they are having the worst ever breakdown. Worse of a breakdown than my pal Frank who is so schizophrenic he cannot iron his shirt.

    But did everyone have to steal the schizophrenic shirt off Frank’s back just to ape being sevely upset, in this “prove it” “prove it” “prove it” “logically demanding world”?

    Surely everyone who “feels” broken, for what ever “reason” or “non reason” can just have a big breakdown without tearing the identities of other people who perhaps seem more broken?

    It is ABSURD, if not AN ABUSE, to ridicule or try to “fix” someone else’s identity, like a happily schizophrenic individual’s identity, by coming the “abuse labelling” evangelotherapist expert on their private unique inner self and telling them that they do not know themselves in the “RIGHT” way.

    The pushing of the abuse narrative has gone too far. Sadly there WILL be a pendulum swing away from hearing about it everywhere. By the time THAT happens a new generation of messed up children WHO REALLY ARE probably going to be endemically raped are going to be met with global compassion fatigue and global indifference.

    Alice would be disappointed in the way her good studies are being rolled out as modes to persecute all ages of people who DO NOT WANT CREEPY INTRUSIVE OBLIGATORY FOISTED ABUSIVE SO-CALLED TRAUMA HEALING and who feel happy AS THEY ARE.

    Why THIS matters is also because the future promises to be filled with millions who will tell you that you do not know yourself until you get converted by a DADDY GOD.

    What Alice Miller feared most is returning. It is returning because individual humans do not know when to stop at the words…..

    “LEAVE ME A L O N E!”

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