Mental Health Writings: NAMI’s Wretched Writing Style

 (The last of my mental health writings for a while, which was true at the time of posting--GF)

I know NAMI well, having been a member since December 2019 (but not going to renew my membership when it expires November 2023), receiving its publications, including its national magazine, NAMI Advocate, and reading many of the articles it publishes.  Thus can I properly pass judgment on what I’ve seen:  what I’ve seen is truly wretched, article after article (and the same goes for NAMI oral presentations at conferences) in the same breezy, superficial, saccharinely cheery “positive thinking” vibe that does massive injustice to the seriousness of the topics it deals with:  mental illness, its treatment, and its effects on families, caregivers and others.  Moreover, it’s a very homogenous style, where one presentation is interchangeable with another, as though they were auto parts.  This even carries over in the first full-length book NAMI has commissioned, NAMI Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Kenneth Duckworth’s You Are Not Alone (New York: Zando, 1922), wherein the breeziness and good cheer of the presentation once again belies the seriousness of the topics covered:  mental health and its treatment, and the successful navigation to get such treatment through the maze of clinics and practitioners, insurance companies, “stigma,” and the myriad of people affected by being involved with a person under psychiatric care, such as caregivers, family members, friends, and others.

 

This kind of language, which is assiduously promoted by many nonprofits, of which NAMI is one, and which is designed to be “inclusive” (even though some of us with a more “elitist” regard for language might regard it as “dumbing down” or “speaking only in euphemisms”), has been masterfully dissected by Atlantic staff writer George Packer in the April 2023 issue of that esteemed magazine (which is a hallmark of genuinely good writing).  His short but pithy article, “The Moral Case Against Euphemism” devastatingly mocks such “inclusive” but vapid language, language that Packer dismisses well and with flourish.  He writes:  “Imprecise language is less likely to offend.  Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.”  Such as, in the case of NAMI, the actual realities of living with, and suffering through, mental illness.  “Imprecise language” also infantilizes—another hallmark involved in its usage.  Again, as Packer points out, the euphemistic, “inclusive” language of the new nonprofit Language Police is pitched to a sixth- to eighth-grade reading level.  While such may theoretically garner a larger reading audience—after all, according to statistics I’ve seen, 57% of the US population reads only at a sixth-grade level or below—it does so by trivializing and infantilizing content, and making the expression of adult content childish rather than adult; thus radically oversimplifying and brushing off the inevitable hardships that will attend in the real world when people have to deal with mental illness and psychological disfunction, either in themselves, or in loved ones and acquaintances.  Remember, the sixth-grade level is only the beginning of real literacy, and is too young to acquire critical reading skills and understanding, which don’t even begin until the eighth-grade level.

 

NAMI’s wretched language also suffers from all the defects adult writer (who wrote as an adult for adults) Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in her excellent critique of the cult of “positive thinking,” her book Bright-Sided (New York: Picador, 2009).  Ehrenreich’s book is aptly subtitled “How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America” (emphasis in original), and tears apart all the “positive thinking,” “look on the bright side” pabulum that infests the culture particularly of the US in the present time.  This includes the world of the nonprofit advocacy groups such as NAMI.  Being forever “bright-sided,” always “thinking positive” undermines what Ehrenreich properly calls for:  not negative thinking but (her words) “realistic thinking.”  Infantilizing the issue of mental illness rather than writing about as an adult speaking to other adults doesn’t make its understanding any less onerous or palatable, and doesn’t extend the realm of proper diagnosis, treatment, and provision of help one iota.  And Ehrenreich should know—she wrote Bright-Sided by becoming involuntarily immersed in the universe of “positive thinking” when she had to deal with her own breast cancer, where the realm of “positive thinking” in the face of a serious medical condition abounded!

 

Yet, mental illness and its often-painful realities can be properly dealt with in adult ways by adult prose aimed at adult readers in very compelling ways.  We need not the saccharine nostrums of the NAMI Advocate or You are Not Alone.  As an excellent example, take a good reading of Jonathan Rosen’s “American Madness” in the May 2023 issue of the Atlantic, the poignant and often wrenching account by Rosen of his childhood best friend, a brilliant young man who became schizophrenic and, in a fit of schizophrenic hallucination, murdered his fiancé.  Rosen’s account brings home not only the realities of mental illness, but also, our failure to provide adequate psychiatric treatment for it all too frequently.  This is adult writing for adults.  And thus makes a positive contribution to the subject.  A greater contribution, I might add, than I think NAMI makes.

 

I, too, am a writer who’s had to deal with my own mental illness (or, technically, “mental disorder”) of borderline personality disorder accompanied by bouts of acute depression.  Often my own disorder would interfere with my writing, and chagrin not only myself, but also editors, who were understandably irked at my not always delivering on time.  I had to write under the double burden of professional pressures and mental illness going on simultaneously, and had to overcome both.  But overcome I did, had a fairly successful (not monetarily, but in quality and quantity of output) several-decades long writing career (which still continues, by the way).  I even became a biographee in Who’s Who in America for both 2019 and 2020, thus achieving my Andy Warhol fifteen-minutes-of-fame!  And, I can say, without the help, but only the hindrance, of NAMI.  (I’ve written on NAMI’s hindrance elsewhere in my other mental health writings such as my “Politically Incorrect Leftist” BlogSpot blogs of September 19 and 28, 2023.)

 

All of which makes me very appreciative of adult writing for adults.  Over the past few years, I’ve been reading adult writers who wrote for adults in both the socialist press and popular literature, from Frederick Engels to Ernest Hemingway, and can tell you firsthand, reading adult literature written for adult readers is a joy to behold!  It will also “spoil” you, make you not want to go back to “inclusive” infantilizing, “positive thinking” pabulum such as NAMI proffers.  But being so “spoiled” is definitely worth it. 

 

  

 

   

Mental Health Writings: This Too Is “Spirituality”

 (This is a long post, nearly 6, 250 words, but if I may say so, an eminently worthwhile read, with much autobiographical detail about my upbringing, my mental health struggles and recovery, and who I am, that will be revealing to many who think they "know" me--GF)

Like so many other psychiatrists and mental health professionals, Dr. Kenneth Duckworth, national NAMI’s Chief Psychiatrist, notably in the book he recently wrote for NAMI, You Are Not Alone, praises “spirituality” and its close cousin, “positive thinking,” as coping mechanisms for those recovering from mental illness.  Like so many other mental health professionals, Dr. Duckworth sees “spirituality,” and its organized form, “religion,” as “warm fuzzies” (to use Transactional Analysis terminology) that impart “values” “sense of morality,” and “belongingness” to people.  This bias goes all the way back to arguably one of most important first books of modern psychology (along with Freud’s writings of the 1890s), William James’s 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience, which is very pro-religion, if only implicitly so—giving a very sentimental gloss to a wide variety of so-called “religious experiences” and their popularizations, and being thus a psychology book much beloved among the religious who’ve read it.  “Spirituality” and “religious experience” (unless obviously psychotic, i.e., hearing God actually talking to oneself, thinking of oneself as Jesus Christ, etc.) are looked upon by psychology and psychiatry as essentially positive, while atheism is not.  This bias extends to NAMI itself, an organization that, while having a large part of its membership and leadership actual mental health professionals, is formally a lay organization advocating on behalf of psychiatry and psychiatric treatment.  This bias also boils down to a very treacly, simplistic, definition of “spirituality” as a warm emotional feeling of being loved, protected, and looked out for by a divine figure of benevolence.  An Indulgent, Forgiving Sugar Daddy in the Sky, if you will. 

 

Sometimes psychiatry will distinguish between “spirituality” and religion itself as being separate, because, of course, mental health professionals often see a variety of patients who’ve been wounded by religion, i.e., live in morbid fear of a God[1] who sentences them to hell, viewing their mental disturbance as a just God’s punishment, deathly afraid of excommunication from their church, etc.  However, Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines “spirituality” itself as “sensitivity or attachment to religious values,” so the spirituality/religion link is always present.  And truth is, many cruel things have been done by humans to other humans in the name of religion.  From inculcating into young children a deathly fear of God and spending an eternity in hell to engaging in human sacrifice to appease a god or gods, to the auto-da-fe and burning alive of alleged witches, heretics, and homosexuals by the medieval Catholic Church, to the Inquisition, which was both Catholic and Protestant, to the burning alive of Giordano Bruno and the persecution of Galileo for the “heresy” of teaching modern science, to Catholics gleefully killing Protestants and vice versa during the Reformation, to Christianity’s and Islam’s open animus against the Jews, and much more, the crimes committed by religion, and in the name of religion, are myriad and nefarious.  That’s simply a fact of history, and impossible to reconcile with a “good” religious value system or “spirituality,” which either overlooks, tolerates, or engages in them.  And how, pray tell, does a “spiritual” person believe a benevolent God is specially looking after him/her when so often, both in history and the present, such a benevolent God is clearly not looking after such as Giordano Bruno, Galileo, all those burned alive and otherwise brutally killed during the Inquisition, the Reformation, and the other 900-some wars over religion in the West itself?  Not to mention today’s homeless, the mentally and physically ill, the poverty-stricken, and those subject to bullying and abuse?  Where is the God looking after them?  And why can’t he be found, even though all this misery supposedly has a “bright side,” because it’s all part of “his plan,” which is “loving” by definition?  The “spiritual,” the religious, can’t answer that!  In fact, the only logical explanation is that of the reprehensible Calvinist doctrine of predestination, that a “loving” God deliberately created some humans to suffer while he also created others to prosper, and that he deliberately created some to suffer eternal torment in hell.  Islam believes much the same thing, as it is stated in the Quran that Allah deliberately causes misery to those on earth that he has also willed will suffer eternity in hell for their alleged “evils,” “evils” he has willed upon them.  For that, according to the Quran, is Allah’s Will!

 

I myself came to atheism precisely through immersion in “spirituality”—that formal version that is Catholicism.  I attended Catholic schools from first grade through senior in high school, where every school day I was taught the Catholic religion, and again through the priest’s sermon at Mass on Sunday and obligatory holy days.  I went weekly to mass on Sunday, and in high school had to attend mass daily on school days.  I thought of myself as Catholic, and didn’t even question it until I was 16, although I first developed doubts in sixth grade, where it was hard to reconcile my sympathy for Galileo as a scientist with the Church’s then-teaching (during the Pope Pius XII reign) that he was a “heretic,” a teaching still in place though it was embarrassing for the Church.  I was enthusiastic about Vatican II, and thought “religiously” [! My sense of irony comes here to the fore] that it would renew the Church.  I was close to a then-liberal Catholic priest, and thought of myself then (1963-5) as a liberal Catholic, although as a senior I began to skip Sunday mass and go out for coffee instead (needless to say, not telling my parents I was skipping church).  Only when I attended college (fall, 1965) did I first call myself an agnostic, and a little later, an atheist.  My Catholic parents, of course, thought I’d become an atheist because in college I’d been “duped by communists.”  (I’d also simultaneously become an open New Leftist, though as a high school junior I’d first thought of myself as a socialist, telling my classmates but, of course, not my parents.)  I’ve never regretted my atheism since, and regard Dr. Duckworth’s positive view of “spirituality” for mental health coping as embracing a reliance on a thoroughly unneeded crutch.  Nothing in my mental health recovery required any form of “spirituality” whatsoever.  Nor did I ever feel unhappy over my atheism.  I was often unhappy, needless to say, while I was fighting my mental illness of borderline personality disorder accompanied by chronic depression, but that was completely independent of my atheism.  Today I proudly sport on my car a bumper sticker from the outstanding nonprofit, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF):  “Unabashed Atheist: Not Afraid of Burning in Hell.”  I deliberately write sardonic irreligious poetry that one of my fellow atheists (also an ex-Catholic) pointedly notes are “theologically correct.”  (As far as I’m concerned, all theology, of any religion, is logical hash.)   My old academic advisor (himself a Jewish atheist) and I used to joke that, if we died and found out afterwards that there was a God, a heaven, and a hell, we hoped “God had a sense of humor”!  In short, I’m completely happy and “normal” as an atheist.

 

That above was my own personal immersion into “spirituality.”   My immersion into the “spirituality” of others, however, was horrendous—decades of abuse, deliberate social ostracism, bullying, backbiting, and deliberate rejection at the hands of the “spiritual,” those professing religion, and wearing their “religious progressivism” on their sleeves.  People with no inkling of Jesus’ “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” even though they went to church and professed Catholicism, various shades of mainstream Protestantism, even Judaism (which attributes the same thought to the rabbi Hillel).  People who were just plain cruel and insensitive, though their formal religious beliefs said otherwise.  Of the 520-710 professed Christians or students at Catholic schools I estimate I’ve personally known over my lifetime, only 60 or so were at all moral toward me; that is, lived up to the moral and ethical codes of their professed religions, especially the “Love thy neighbor” part.  The rest all “conveniently sinned” against me as the pariah, as Buber’s Other, as the one they needn’t give a damn about.  They were the classmates and upper classmen who deliberately physically bullied me, and then, in high school, deliberately socially ostracized me, making my older childhood and adolescence a living hell, and contributing mightily to my social awkwardness and inability to socially interact.  Then there was the nun I had in fifth grade in the Catholic grade school who deliberately picked on me because I had once corrected her when she maintained that salt was “sodium nitrate” and I correctly informed her it was “sodium chloride.”  There were my Catholic parents, who were both abusive and neglectful:  neglectful because they utterly ignored me when they weren’t screaming at me at the top of their lungs, which they did regularly albeit capriciously from late childhood on, through adolescence and even young adulthood.  My Catholic father called me “sissy” and “n****r-lover” regularly, and yet, when I was a young adult, had the temerity to say to me he wished I would at least be a Unitarian, so that I would just believe in God!  However, when I was the victim of a homosexual rape, he showed he cared and expressed consideration of me by—acting utterly indifferently toward me!  Yes, because, if he’d been upset with me (as my mother later was, and showed it by spewing venom at me), he would’ve screamed at me!  That was the way both my parents were toward me (but not toward my five younger sisters): they were silent toward me when they weren’t screaming at me.  They raised me by the “Out of sight, out of mind” manual of childrearing.  I could never talk to them because they were too busy watching TV, and one of us “mere” kids just didn’t interrupt our parents’ TV watching.  So, I had to keep all my pain and hurt from the bullying and ostracism at school inside of me.  My mother would go off on me at a trifle, screaming at me at the top of her lungs, her face red and the veins and tendons in her neck standing out, “All women just hate that”!  That was not putting the toilet seat down, or even “worse,” urinating standing up, thus allegedly “dripping and splashing.”  My mother was obsessed with toilets and toilet cleaning, and when, as an adult in my early 30s I had sent her a long, heartfelt letter on my abuse as a child, she responded only with an indignant “You never had to clean toilets!”  (Even though that had been one of my adolescent household chores, along with mowing the lawn, and that I had also worked as a young adult as a building janitor; both of which she knew, but now conveniently forgot.)  When I was 15 my father, in a rare display of gathering up the family to engage in a whole family activity, took us all bowling.  It was the first time I’d ever bowled, and thus, naturally, I wasn’t very good at it.  So my father took it upon himself to scream at me constantly for my “failure” in the public bowling alley, humiliating me publicly for it.  One of my classmates, who was among my school enemies, worked at the bowling alley that day, witnessed all this, and was doubled up laughing, further adding to my humiliation.  The next day, a Monday, my humiliation was all over school, and I was laughed at constantly for it; this provoked me to get into two fights, both of which I lost.  A couple of decades later, I wrote my father about this incident; he responded back tersely by letter, “I’m sorry you don’t like bowling.”  A few years later, my mother and my father took my baby sister bowling for the first time, and glowingly reported back how good she’d been for a first time—she got a score of 86!  I’d gotten that fateful day a score of—87.

 

I’m sure many a psychiatrist would say, “Your parents obviously also had personality disorders, same as you did.”  After all, personality disorders are 47% heritable.  And one of the major signs of a personality disorder is over-the-top emotional responses, such as my parents constantly yet unpredictably screaming at me.  Yet that hardly absolves them of their atrocious behavior toward me.  To understand is not necessarily to forgive, not by a long shot.  However, to my parents’ “credit,” while they certainly verbally and emotionally abused me, they never physically abused me.  They didn’t have to—they’d already cowed me by forcing me to always walk on eggs around them, lest they suddenly go into a raging fit.

 

Further, new psychiatric research demonstrates that while not all child abuse leads to mental illness, all those with a diagnosed personality disorder did suffer from such abuse!  (And, of course, I have such a diagnosis.)  Moreover, from what little I know of my own parents’ upbringing, they may well have themselves suffered from abuse.  In fact, probably did.  (They were very secretive about their upbringings, never really ever talking about them; however, when I was twelve, I met my father’s father for the first and only time; and was struck by what a cold and unfeeling man he was.  As for my mother, she was raised by very orthodox Catholics, and surrounded by other relatives who were very orthodox Catholics, with all the Church’s misogyny—and my maternal grandfather, when he became the undisputed patriarch of the whole extended family, indulged in his favorite pastime, which was giving morality lectures to the young!)  As for me, growing up Catholic, I got the triple whammy of abuse—from parents, from classmates, from teachers.  A couple of years ago I confronted the three Catholic dioceses where I had been abused by their Catholic school systems, and two them, where the office handling such matters were run by lay persons, apologized for what I’d endured.  The third, which did not, and where I had talked to a priest, gave me a very telling reply by that priest on why that diocese would not apologize:  “If we apologized, we’d be admitting our guilt, and you might sue us.”  Yes, at bottom it's all about Mammon!

 

On Pearl Harbor Day 1979 I left Fort Wayne, Indiana, to move to Indianapolis to take up a job as statistician with the State of Indiana—my first full move away from my parents since moving back with them in January 1971, although I did live independently from them for a while in Fort Wayne.  I lost my job in Indianapolis six months later, due especially to my heavy drinking (but as a later excellent psychotherapist later informed me, my drinking was not that of the typical alcoholic, but was instead a form of “self-medication” for my psychic pain as a now-seemingly-perpetual consumer of psychiatric services, without which I couldn’t seem to cope).  When I had started the new job, my addled thought to myself, “Oh boy.  Now with my new job, and the substantially more income, I can drink the way I want,” without constraint.  Now, in June 1980, I was once again without a job, without hope or prospects for another one, and feeling like a whipped dog with its tail between its legs as I contemplated moving back to my parents.  But I vigorously rejected this last option, as it would’ve utterly defeated me for the rest of my life, and would’ve also been disastrous for my mental health.  So, even though I had only poverty to look forward to in the immediate future, I toughed it out and stayed in Indianapolis—where I’ve been ever since.  That definitely turned out to be the right decision.  In September, in a rare bout of complete sobriety brought on by lack of money, I wrote my first short story, submitted it to a local literary magazine for possible publication, and had it accepted in December.  At last, I was the writer I’d for so long wanted to be, but had been too busy drinking to actually write.  By spring of 1981 I was writing for publication regularly in local publications, in 1984 I published my first national article, in 1992 I was included in Who’s Who in the Midwest, in 2004 I branched out into writing poetry as well, and in 2019 and 2020 I was further included in Who’s Who, with long biographical entries about me and my writing in both the 2019 and 2020 editions of Who’s Who in America.  I had achieved at the very least my Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame!  (“in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” Warhol had said notably.)

 

I’d been a left activist since 1965, and so, once in Indianapolis, tried to connect with the left here.  The Indianapolis left was dominated by self-proclaimed “religious progressives,” overwhelmingly Christian, mainstream Protestants with a smattering of Catholics and a handful of Jews; but although I agreed a good 90% with them politically it was not to be, as I was shunned because of my atheism, my Marxism, and my alleged “mental instability” for even seeking psychiatric help.  I had opened up to one of Indianapolis’s leading “progressives” (that’s how they referred to themselves back from 1980 on.  Never as “leftists” or “socialists”), a prominent local Quaker, telling her of my atheism, my Marxist background prior, and how I’d suffered what I termed “psychiatric oppression,” none, absolutely none, of which she liked at all.  Atheism was taboo, for it violated the local “religious progressive” mantra:  “Karl Marx bad, Jesus Christ good;” Marxism, ditto; and as for “psychiatric oppression,” this person, Jane H., drew the following “false ‘Aha’”:  “George has seen a psychiatrist.  He’s one of Those People.  Therefore, he’s too mentally unstable for us, regardless.”  However, I was intelligent, and as I proved later, could write, so I was more or less tolerated, but never, ever, fully accepted.  Jane H. slammed me behind my back, groused about my writing, “George uses too many big words” (Jane would’ve considered “prolix” a “big word,” but not “granddaughter,” even though, by letter count, it’s twice as “big”!  Yes, despite having a Master’s degree), used the alleged defects in my writing to impugn my moral character, and did this for twenty-six years, from March 1980 until around January or February 2006.  She also busily recruited, from her ample circle of cronies and admirers, others to also shun and demean me.  One such example was a certain ordained Presbyterian minister who worked as a computer programmer for a private insurance company, had a Master’s in theology and a Ph.D. in comparative religion and was a part-time adjunct college professor to boot, so should’ve known better, who said to me, “I avoided making your acquaintance because I heard you had ‘mental problems’.”  Sheesh!  This was the bigotry among the “religious progressives” I was up against!  Almost 100% from every Indianapolis “progressive” man or woman!  However, in her later days, after 2006 but before her death from liver cancer in 2009, Jane H. did once offer me an “apology” that my best friend and closest political comrade sneered as being “an apology not an apology” when she wrote me:  “My comments were wrong to say that your writing was confusing. The comments were made when I was reading them as a part of the Journal [the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Journal, monthly newspaper of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, 1986-2006, for which I wrote regularly] and the complexity of detail that you included probably is why I was left with the impression of confusion.”  A classic, even textbook, case of psychological projection:  she was confused by a self-evident strength of my writing, my “complexity of detail,” so I became—“confusing”!

 

I was to find no welcoming place on the Indianapolis left, or what passed for it, until 2001, when a group of feisty anarchist youth founded Solidarity Books, a local non-sectarian left bookstore.  They were verbally militant, though, in practice, nonviolent and democratic; most considered themselves atheists, and were openly anarchist and friendly toward punk rock.  So, from the beginning they drew the ire of the Indianapolis “religious progressives,” who, above all, were “respectable,” while these youth in their eyes, were anything but.  (Affectionately called “The Kids;” they ranged in the original group from 17-25, and welcomed me heartily.)  All but one or two ended up leaving Indianapolis in frustration, disgust, and anger in 2005, and I wrote an affectionate blog about them here in “Politically Incorrect Leftist” that was posted  October 15, 2021. 

 

In 1996 I was asked to join a resuscitated DSA (Democratic Socialists of America, the local affiliate), which I did and in which I was active, despite being red-baited and mental health-baited (an opponent of my joining characterized me as an “ex-Maoist [never, ever true; I was a Trotskyist, but never a Maoist] with a long history of mental problems”).  But there was never anything of consequence to local DSA.  Same as with the inconsequential local here of the Socialist Party, we met regularly, much fewer always than even a dozen of us, and discussed matters of which we had no influence on anyone outside our own very tiny circles.  Always.  However, in 2010 I did conduct classes on Marxism and the Communist Manifesto that drew a small but appreciative student body from both the Socialist Party and DSA, and both the classes, and I, were well received.  We who met regularly, both Socialist Party and DSA, met together as the Socialist Coalition. However, when I criticized the website for the group created by one of its members as inadequate, these “comrades” of the Coalition (who were also students in the classes I taught on Marxism and the Communist Manifesto) turned against me and plotted against me behind my back, and vindictively drove me out.  This whole sordid matter is the subject of two blogposts on “Politically Incorrect Leftist” by me, August 4, 2010’s “Dregs,” and February 17, 2011’s “Dregs Aftermath1; Letter from ‘One of the Masses’,” which quotes a letter to the Coalition  from a friend and supporter of mine which pointedly comments and asks: 

 

At the outset, I’m amazed that, considering my 65 years of Indiana residency, I’ve never even heard of your organization! You’re who, and you do what?

If your group were a major force in the political arena, perhaps making major contributions to American society, I’d like your club a lot more.

 

In December 2001 I’d also joined the nationwide socialist group Solidarity, which had no presence in Indianapolis other than me, an At-Large Member.  However, I was active in the group, regularly writing for its bimonthly national magazine Against the Current, as well as its internal discussion bulletin, and tried to sell Solidarity literature (with poor to middling success) in Indianapolis and the college town to the south, Bloomington (home of the main campus of Indiana University, my Alma Mater).  But, despite this positive activity for the organization, the national leadership of Solidarity drew up charges for expulsion against me, on the grounds that, in writing "Dregs,” I’d insulted other socialists.  My “trial” was held by phone conference in October 2010.  However, as my witness commented afterward, the whole thing was a “kangaroo court” in which I could not possibly get a fair hearing.  The vote to expel me was unanimous, save for one “No” and one abstention, and I was out.  I can’t say at all regretfully.  My expulsion proceedings made me see forcibly the fraud behind Marxist-Leninist or Leninist-Trotskyist (which Solidarity was) organizations, with their rigid internal discipline that allows no real freedom of thought or action whatsoever.  Well, today Solidarity is an irrelevant left sect, same as it was in 2010.   However, back to Indianapolis (as Solidarity was based in Detroit), the Socialist Coalition dissolved, the Socialist Party part of it essentially dissolved into nothing, and the old leadership of DSA, the leadership that had railroaded and ostracized me, was replaced by a new body of activists who’d come to DSA following Bernie Sanders’s two runs for the Presidency, 2016 and 2020, and who held the old leadership in contempt—which was fine with the old leadership, as it had become tired of DSA, and no longer wanted anything to do with it.  Today, October 2023, DSA in Indianapolis is a vibrant organization with a core of a good thirty or so activists, is on the verge as I write of electing one of its members to the Indianapolis City-County Council, and actively participates in tenant and labor organizing, electoral politics, and strike support.  And I am a member in good standing of that DSA.

 

This above does tie into Indianapolis “religious progressivism” in the following ways:  Jane H. and her husband were members of the Socialist Party (though inactive by the time I was railroaded; Jane had died the year before, and thus her husband, without her to drive, didn’t attend meetings), and the head of DSA locally from 2010 onward was someone who, while calling himself an “agnostic,” nonetheless had a theology degree from Indianapolis’s Christian Theological Seminary, and like everyone else on the left (save for the Solidarity Books youth, who’d been driven out in disgust five years earlier) kowtowed to the “religious progressives” and made sure their “progressivism” was “religious” in nature.  No room for secularists here!

 

But that is no longer the case here in Indianapolis as I write, September-October 2023, as all the old “religious progressives” who were such banes to me are either dead, incapacitated, or retired, while I myself am 76 going on 77.  A new crop of youth, to whom I relate well, has taken over the helm.

 

I also joined the local freethought/atheist group, the Indianapolis chapter of the national Center for Inquiry.  Unfortunately, same as with the “progressives,” I wasn’t really accepted, due, I think, mostly to my rather plebian employment.  I found out the hard way that my “fellow” Center for Inquiry members were a bunch of well-off, upscale snobs, many with terribly bad politics.  It got even worse when I attended Center for Inquiry’s showing of the Irish film Magdalene, on Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries, where “wayward” young women were sent for “rehabilitation;” the open Catholic-aegis sadism depicted in Magdalene really caused an intense emotional reaction in me, as personally this wasn’t just a film, this was a mirror held up to my own life as an abused Catholic.  Well, in discussion on the film that night, my emotional upset came out, as did four-letter words when I spoke, much to the consternation of the Center’s Executive Director, who was primly self-righteous herself (not only would she have made a very good Catholic, she would’ve made even an excellent Carmelite Catholic nun!  That is, cloistered, removed from reality, and self-righteously sanctimonious).   So she banned me permanently from the Center for Inquiry in  Indianapolis, and that ban was upheld knee-jerk by the national leadership.  Further, no matter how I tried, I could never apologize or explain myself “adequately” to this sanctimoniously prim “freethinker/atheist.”  Just another way in which everyone, it seemed, kowtowed to the “religious progressives” in smug, cliquish IndiaNOPLACE (as it was also ruefully known), even supposedly “bold freethinkers.”

 

In September 2001, in good Indianapolis news for me for a change, my thirty-eight years of unemployment, underemployment, fitful employment and unemployability finally came to an end, as I landed, at age 54, a job scoring the standard achievement tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, a job that required my college degree.  I worked it for the next ten-and-a-half years, even though it was only a seasonal, albeit regularly recuring, job.  This job was a tremendous breakthrough for me.  Not only was I making decent money while I worked, and qualifying for unemployment when work wasn’t available, I also loved the work I did as a test scorer, especially scoring math tests.  And my immediate supervisors were quite pleased with me.  Moreover, I was surrounded by appreciative co-workers who were not only bright college grads such as myself, they were also folks who had never even heard of the Indianapolis “religious progressives,” a closed, cliquish, incestuous lot—so I no longer faced the invidious discrimination I’d faced at the hands of the "progressives”!  This employment really enhanced my life, and was made even more rewarding when even the anxiety caused by my case worker’s dereliction in my applying for SSDI did not remove me permanently from this job I loved!  My supervisors all came to bat for me, and enabled me to keep my employment.  As a final coda on this, though, let it be pointedly noted that in 2006, when I’d confronted my case worker about his malfeasance and he conceded the point, he had the chutzpah to tell me, “If I hadn’t have messed up, would it have made any difference?”  “Only” several thousand dollars’ worth of income, my continued employment, and my self-esteem and mental health, that’s all the “difference” it would’ve made!  (From my many rueful experiences with “mental health professionals,” I often wonder which rock or rocks they crawl out from under.)  But even after I no longer had test scoring I had other temp employment, and was fairly regularly employed for a total of fourteen years, 2001-2015, after which I landed my current job, grocery stocker at Kroger, a job which not only is full-time and permanent, but one in which I also have union protection.  (I’m proud to say I’m a member of UFCW Local 700, the Indiana mega-local of the United Food and Commercial Workers, AFL-CIO.)

 

In March 1980 I sought psychiatric help again, now in Indianapolis, same as I’d sought it since 1965 off and on at university clinics and CMHCs while at Michigan State University, Indiana University, and living in Fort Wayne.  This time, though, I was pretty much continually involved with it weekly, with regular psychotherapy—psychotherapy that turned out, although with some notable exceptions (especially with a psychotherapist I had from 1983-1996), just as ineffective and wretched as it had been at Michigan State, Indiana University, and in Fort Wayne.  (By the way, I’m presently working on a complete account of my experiences with psychiatry; I’m currently up to the spring of 1971, when I was finally successfully, permanently, treated for my Tourette’s Syndrome, which, somehow, had gone unnoticed by psychiatry or indeed by any medical practitioner until 1970.)  Thus, in Indianapolis especially I was reduced to a desperate, dependent psychiatric outpatient until 2012 by the CMHCS in Indianapolis I had to rely on.  But I was a mess as well at Michigan State, Indiana University, and in Fort Wayne, an extremely troubled young man; and though it showed in my behavior and in my inability to successfully cope, all that had been missed by psychiatry almost completely!  That, in a nutshell, was my psychiatric history from 1965-2012—forty-seven years of malfeasant and inept psychiatric treatment!  Substantially cancelling out almost five decades of my life!  I resumed psychotherapy in 2014, only this time successfully.  For  sixty-nine months I received outstanding psychiatric help from practitioners of their own versions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, 2014-2022, and finally completely recovered.  My psychotherapist from 2014-2021 said it was “unconscionable” the way past psychiatry had “allowed [me] to fall through the cracks.”  I couldn’t agree more.

 

Although I consider that my mental health recovery considerably advanced after 2019, it was already advancing earlier, although I didn’t realize it at the time.  The psychotherapist I had from 1983-1996, Allen F., said to me notably in our last session:  “Congratulations.  By rights [by which he meant “by statistical probabilities”] you should’ve been institutionalized, incarcerated, a hopeless alcoholic or drug addict, a suicide, or otherwise prematurely dead, but you turned out to be None of the Above.”  This same psychotherapist had a ten-minute long-distance phone conversation with my father in the early 1990s, and relayed his impressions of my father to me.  He said that, after talking ten minutes with my father, he’d concluded that my father “was just an asshole out to vindicate himself,” “an ignorant fascist,” and “a tyrant and a bully”—all of which I found tremendously vindicating!  For this was the first time ever a therapist had realized the true nature of the father I had known so ruefully all my life since at least the age of eleven.  This was also the first time my father had been seen by others as quite other than what the relatives lectured me constantly on what my father was:  somehow, a “good parent,” though obviously I had experienced otherwise.  For the first time in psychotherapy, I felt tremendously vindicated!  I wasn’t so “crazy” after all.  I also felt much vindicated—and thus much recovered—when my last psychotherapist, Max, noting I was angry, said simply, “Your anger is justified.”  When the patient is made to feel properly and appropriately vindicated, when the patient is no longer dismissed as simply “crazy,” then recovery can ensue—a most valuable lesson from therapy I pass on especially to “mental health professionals.”  Yes, accept that ofttimes your patient is grounded in ugly reality, even though his or her responses to it may not always be the most “appropriate.”  If this is “Freudian,” so be it!

 

I’d also made substantive progress on my alcohol problem.  In the late 1990s, early 2000s, I became more concerned about my heavy drinking, though I couldn’t seem to overcome it.  Then, one afternoon in October 2004, I noticed that—though my living situation was none too good and my anxiety over it was still high, I wasn’t responding to it in my usual way: by drinking.  In fact, I was spontaneously, unconsciously, refraining from drinking—and feeling good about it!  From then on, my dependence on alcohol noticeably abated, and I became a strictly social drinker, not someone who was half-buzzed all the time (I was rarely fall-down drunk in these later years, the early 1990s on).  That has continued ever since; I’m not an abstainer, but also, don’t feel the need to self-medicate myself with alcohol the way I used to do.  (Allen F. had noted, as mentioned above, that my drinking was not of the usual alcoholic sort—it was more along the lines of psychological self-medication.)  Further, I hadn’t had a major depressive episode since 2003 (I’d been successfully on antidepressants, lithium and Prozac, since 1986), and when my antidepressants became unavailable for me due to my being frozen out of Gallahue Community Mental Health Center in the summer of 2004, I found out that I neither needed them nor missed them.  When I was able to go back to Gallahue in February 2005, I told the staff psychiatrist how I’d been off antidepressants since November 2004 and had experienced no depressive episodes; he agreed to continue monitoring me off them, and then said, in December 2005 I no longer needed them.  And haven’t since. 

 

I’ve also had active Christian friends, even as an atheist—which may surprise some.  I’d become good friends with Roy Bourgeois, the noted former Catholic priest of conscience and determined advocate of women’s ordination, and wrote four articles on him and his work in In These Times, a nationwide socialist news monthly.  (Two of these articles were long ones.)  He continues to be a good friend, and someone I stay in touch with.  My Indianapolis Quaker friend Gilbert apologized to me for mistreating me in the summer of 2015, the only “religious progressive” who’s ever done so!  (Even though my mistreatment at the hands of Indianapolis “religious progressives” goes back to 1980, as noted above.)  Also, my fellow writer friend Cheryl, who’s written books on her childhood and adolescence in Kokomo, Indiana which are well regarded, and even garnered notice in the New York Times, and who believes that she got through her rough growing up because there was a God watching personally over her—she also is a supportive and encouraging friend.  And there are a couple of others.  While I am indeed a militant atheist, and express my atheism pungently in irreligious poetry, I do not act in a bigoted way toward other believers.  I believe in “‘Live and let live;’ but also, ‘Don’t tread on me.’  Don’t proselytize me in your religion, and I won’t proselytize you in atheism.”  That doesn’t prevent me, of course, from sharing my irreligious poetry with those who want to read it, although I don’t force such reading upon anyone against their will and desire.       

 

So thus is the “spiritual journey” of my life to date—without any “spirituality” on my part, but plenty of victimization by the “spirituality” of others!  Yet, I am anything but psychologically unhealthy for rejecting all notions of “spirituality.”  For me, it is but a crutch, a blind spot one is better off leaving behind.  It is not needed, and never will be. Grabbing ahold of reality earnestly and firmly is a far better tonic than any notion of “spirituality” will ever be, or indeed, can ever be—for it is but a chimera.  That, to me, is what “spirituality” really is, and the mental health profession and NAMI are just dead wrong to think otherwise.        

 

 

 

 

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[1] My capitalization of “God” is used to refer to the Judeo-Christian sense of a god, which is what we are de facto referencing here.

NAMI Paper: Psychiatry Finally Makes a Necessary “Mea Culpa”

 

As part of my process of recovering from borderline personality disorder, I’ve been reading psychiatric textbooks on its etiology, development, and treatment.  I also read NAMI’s first book written by its chief psychiatrist, Dr. Kenneth Duckworth, You Are Not Alone.  One of the heartening things I’ve learned from this reading is, psychiatry is finally offering “mea culpas” for its past mistakes—at least to other psychiatrists, and people interested in the dynamics of psychiatric treatment.  While heartening, it’s also both surprising and disheartening, because psychiatry is just not known for a public face of admitting it was wrong.  Which it has been, and so, while it is heartening to finally see psychiatry admit it’s made errors, it’s also disheartening, because its usual public face is, “Don’t worry, we know all the answers.”  Which has been the public face of psychiatry at least since the days of Freud, and maybe even all the way back to Kraft-Ebbing, the inventor of the modern case study, who was so sure that the cause of mental illness could be found—in masturbation!  Freud and later psychiatrists were also so sure the causes lay in their own often arcane theories of the unconscious mind, even though they were also so sure that competing psychiatric theories of the unconscious were so very, very wrong!  Following B.F. Skinner, the behaviorists were all so sure that we humans were basically like pigeons, and could be trained just like pigeons to modify destructive behaviors.  And so it was, and so it has been, until very recently. 

 

Of course, none of these psychiatric notions was at all noted for providing empirical evidence to back up their various claims of successful treatment.  If they relied on evidence at all, it was only anecdotally, through carefully-written case studies, or else by referring to an alleged self-consistency in their various theories.  But that is not, needless to say, how they were presented to the public at all.  What we can properly call the “psychiatric spin machine” was busy triumphing how it had found the way, or a handful of various ways, to solve the problem of mental illness, and restore its sufferers to “normality,” whatever that meant—as so much of what was touted depended on who was doing the touting.  Whether it was freed libido (for the Freudians) or modifying behavior to stay within acceptable bounds (for the behaviorists), the answer to the “unacceptability” of mental illness was now at hand.  There were even those who touted the superiority of the “mentally ill” (think Foucault, who, in his confusion, sees humane treatment of the mentally ill as depriving them of their “liberty” to be mad, and who reduces all of psychiatry except Freudian psychoanalysis to mere “positivism;” or R.D. Laing, who maintained that insanity was but a sane way to respond to a crazy society; or all those insisting that those on psychotropic medication go off such drugs immediately, and be “cured naturally”).  Freud was probably the first one to tout his particular way—psychoanalysis—as the way to cure mental illness once and for all, but he soon enough spawned psychiatric and psychoanalytic rivals to challenge his particular way.  Needless to say, all these various claims were advanced without much in the way of clinical evidence demonstrating their success, but relied more on beguiling theories that were supposedly self-consistent as evidence of efficacy.

 

Such, in a nutshell, was the history of psychiatry before the advent of the current fashionable notion (for lack of better terminology) of “evidence-based treatment,” i.e., supposedly statistically sound analyses of large groups of psychiatric patients receiving certain treatments, with comparisons to control groups not receiving such, and from such studies, assessing their effectiveness.  From such studies, it was determined that psychoanalysis did not pass the evidentiary bar, but that other therapies did—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, certain drug and other medical treatments for schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, etc.  They passed the evidentiary bar based on measured outcomes, were thus “scientific” treatments with proven efficacy, finally making psychiatry a “real science,” a “real medicine.”

 

But even in the heyday of “unscientific” psychoanalysis, the psychiatric spin machine touted it as not only the way, but even as the only way!  So also with its chief rival, behavioral modification.  Same also for Jungian, Adlerian, Gestalt, and other approaches. Thus, each treatment had its own spin doctors, its own pitchmen and admen when it was touted before the general public, which, of course, lacked the ability to discern truth or falsehood among the various claims, and claimants.  But the psychiatric spin machine, nonetheless, was adamant: “Despite the various rival claims, we, Official Psychiatry (representing whatever claimant sounds most acceptable to you, John and Jane Public) now have all the answers.  We are the Authorities, and authoritative as such.”  Such was the marketing of Official Psychiatry: “We have all the answers you are looking for.”  And such was how psychiatry and psychiatric efficacy was sold to the general public.  “We are also Real Medicine,” touted Official Psychiatry—whether Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, behaviorist, or whatever.   “When you are looking for Mental Health, come to us, for we have All the Answers.”

 

Now, psychiatry is admitting, at least among other psychiatrists and informed students of psychiatry, “No, we don’t have all the answers.  And a lot of the answers we had in the past have not panned out.”  Gone thus is the universal efficacy of psychoanalysis, gone also is the notion that schizophrenia results from bad parenting, gone as well is the notion that personality disorders are untreatable, and being questioned is the notion that there will come a time when there will be a pill for every psychiatric disorder, that it’s all a matter of unbalanced brain chemistry, and other nostrums within psychiatry, each one fashionable at one time, many of them now discarded, with psychiatrists themselves admitting (at least among themselves), “No, we oversold ourselves to the general public.  We simply have not produced a lot of the results we promised.  Our State of the Art isn’t so Stately after all.”

 

This was most ruefully brought home to me in my life, during my 47 years of inept and malfeasant psychiatric treatment, where I was reduced to a desperate, dependent outpatient with my life literally on hold.  I had believed in the promises of psychiatry, and as a troubled youth, I literally jumped at the chance to get psychiatric help for my troubles and depression when it was offered to me by my Resident Advisor in the dorm I occupied as a college freshman.  So began my fruitless odyssey of nearly five decades spent in university clinics and CMHCs (Community Mental Health Centers), where all I did was age, nothing more.  I found out the hard way that many of the oversold promises of psychiatric treatment simply weren’t true.  But within it I remained, feeling quite hopeless without my psychiatric “fix,” which somehow got me through to the next session without making things any better.  I felt trapped:  unable to advance within psychiatric treatment, but convinced by psychiatry itself that, without it, all would be hopeless.  So there I stood (or rather, sat) immobilized, somehow suspended between a sense of “almost (but not quite) normality” and “abject mental sickness,” with little actual life going on around or about me.  I was trapped.

 

Later, after this 47-year debacle, which went on and off (but mostly on) from 1965-2012, I did finally get the psychiatric help I needed from a private therapist, beginning in 2014.   He applied his version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (previous therapeutic approaches had been pretty much haphazard, directionless), which was both conversational and helpful, but most of all, he was engaged with me, and I felt it.  I felt his empathy, his compassion, his understanding, whereas with so many of the previous therapists I sensed only their indifference, their unconcern with me personally, even their boredom, their sense of “I have to put up with this to get a paycheck, so I will.”  My good therapist of now once said to me it was “unconscionable” the way the university clinics and the CMHCs had let me “fall through the cracks,” as so often I was not 100% qualified for this offering, but also not 100% qualified for that offering, so I got nothing, according to the rules set by these most bureaucratic systems.

 

I had encountered good, capable therapists in the university clinics and CMHCs, which is much of what kept me going back in anticipation, but for the most part they were either fired or quit.  It seemed only the most bureaucratic, the most merely timeserving, were the ones that survived, and I got far too many of them.  I didn’t have much contact with psychiatrists as such in the clinics and CMHCs, as my condition wasn’t deemed responsive to medication, which suited me fine, as I was all too aware of medicinal side effects from the medications psychiatrists prescribed.  However, in 1986 I was finally put on effective medication for my chronic spells of depression, which would often immobilize me in despair for days at a time, and out of which I emerged usually jobless, when I was finally prescribed lithium, later supplemented with Prozac.  I was on these antidepressants for 18 years, 1986-2004, when my CMHC suddenly abandoned me for a year because I had too “volubly” complained about the case manager messing up most ineptly my application for SSDI benefits I was entitled to, but found myself, in 2004, without my Prozac and lithium—and also, most importantly, without depression!  When this CMHC let me back in, February 2005, I saw the staff psychiatrist and told him directly I’d been off antidepressants since November 2004 and hadn’t had any depressions, so he agreed to monitor me while off antidepressant meds.  He so monitored me until December 2005, after which he said I didn’t need them anymore.  What had happened, I surmise, is that the antidepressants I’d been on did actually change my brain chemistry, my way of thinking, so I was now permanently thinking in a non-depressive mode.  I haven’t suffered from a depressive spell since 2003, 20 years ago as I write now.  So, no, my experience does say one doesn’t have to stay on medication forever; however, if one does go off meds, always be sure to be monitored off them by a psychiatrist or other medical doctor.  That I have learned.

 

I kept with my Cognitive Behavioral therapist until 2020, and shortly thereafter went to other therapists at a private clinic (both these places were exceptional among private practitioners, as opposed to public CMHCs, in that they accepted my Medicare, without which I couldn’t have afforded them).  In all, I had 69 months of effective psychiatric care, which wiped out the previous 47 years of inept care.  That, and the scientific fact that personality disorders do tend to heal themselves over time, actually made me able to feel fully recovered, and to be a “normal” person now, although I was in my early 70s when I finally had such success.  So, my own experience does not make me anti-psychiatry; however, it certainly does make me anti-bad psychiatry, which I do definitely feel is all too common.  And I do believe a lot of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals would agree with me.  Certainly that was the lesson I drew from my dismal years in the university clinics and CMHCs, which do not pay well, but which do provide perks and benefits, among them “iron rice bowl” security of employment once hired.  It should be pointedly noted, though, that I did file three written complaints against four therapists I had in the CMHCs (two of them worked together as a team, the other two saw clients alone) who had been especially pernicious in their psychiatric treatment of me, and I do wish now I’d filed complaints against several more.

 

Modern evidence-based research on treatment of personality disorders indicates that there are several effective modalities of treatment, but that it is also important for the therapist to be not only skilled, but also empathetic, considerate, and understanding.  I would generalize that to say, that applies to all therapeutic relationships.  If the so-called therapist is hostile or indifferent to his or her client (and in the university clinics and CMHCs, as I found out myself, so many are), then the whole relationship is undermined, and effectiveness of therapy is reduced to naught.

 

Sadly, even though I am a strong believer in public medicine and supporter of Medicare for All, I have to admit that CMHCs were a good idea that just had too many obstacles in the way to make them effective, which is why so many of them give only mediocre care.  Their budgets are set by politicians who are often hostile to the whole concept, and the community resources truly needed by the mentally ill are often beyond what is available.  The result too often is inadequate care, neglect, jail instead of treatment, and the proverbial “falling through the cracks.”  (By the way, I was once jailed for a week for a suicide attempt; I was placed in a cell for psychiatric observation because there were no hospital beds available!)  My own rueful experiences in CMHCs attests to this.

 

This excursion into my own mental health recovery history indicates how I went from an uncritical believer in the automatic effectiveness of psychiatric care into an informed skeptic of so much of it.  I once myself was a true believer in what the psychiatric spin machine peddled.  I learned better the hard way, though lived experience.  That is why my welcoming of the “mea culpas” psychiatry now gives (at least to itself) is so rueful.  But in our capitalist society day, so often marketing is everything, and can spin the bad or indifferent into the positive good.  Think only of cigarettes, sugary soda pop, or bottled water instead of tap water!  And in the end, I did indeed benefit from good psychiatry.  But it is necessary here to do the math, and to point out that my 69 months (5.75 years) of good psychiatry in a “career” of 52.75 years as a psychiatric outpatient (with occasional hospitalizations; from which I was often prematurely released as too “normal”!) had to overcome 47 years of bad psychiatry.  This meant that the good psychiatry came only to 11% of my time, as opposed to 89% of my time trapped in the bad!  Not a good augury, by any means.

 

But the spin continues, always trying to put a pretty face on what are not always good results.  For example, an online psychotherapy site advertises that therapy is effective for 75% of its patients.  But what of the 25% for whom it is not effective?  Too often the blame for ineffectiveness is put on the patient, going all the way back to Freud’s famous case of his patient Dora, who was blamed by Freud himself for not positively accepting his rather hairbrained suggestion that she marry the man she accused of harassing him!  She was simply dismissed as “hysteric.”  (Which was a common psychiatric diagnosis of women back in Freud’s time, the ending years of Victorian prudery, with its expectations of what was socially “proper” for women, i.e., submissive acceptance.)

 

But the history of psychiatry is often a history of fads, and what was the cutting edge of yesterday is often dismissed as wrongheaded nonsense in trendy today.  But as a former work colleague put it so well metaphorically, “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn sometimes.”  The leading figures of psychiatry both historically and now were, and are, intelligent, educated men and women.  So there is often a kernel of truth in what they said and wrote, even if much is dismissed later.  That goes for Freud, as well as for others.  And what is considered “cutting edge” today may well be cavalierly dismissed in the future.  “State of the art” should thus be regarded as tentative, “the best as we know now,” but always, subject to later change or modification.  Same as in physics, or chemistry, or in any science.

 

But such honesty, such “This is what we know now, but that could all change,” goes against the effectiveness of marketing the product.  And, after all, psychiatry is a business, an income-generator, as much as it is a profession or science.  And a good business does not plant doubt, even informed doubt, in the minds of its prospective customers.  But if psychiatry were to be truly honest, psychiatrists and psychotherapists would admit to their prospective clients seeking help:

 

I may well be able to help you, but perhaps not.  I believe I am a skilled and able practitioner,

but perhaps I am not right for you.  Then again, although I feel I am State of the Art in what I know, we in psychiatry don’t yet know as much as we’d like to, and perhaps what problems you bring to the table may be beyond our present state of knowledge.  Having said that, it is now up to you to decide if you want to give it a go with me.

 

Needless to say, such blunt honesty could be bad for business!  Good for ethics, of course, but bad for business.   And goes against the grain of the psychiatric spin machine, with its omnipresent messaging that it has all the answers, even when it doesn’t.  As the examples given above demonstrate.   With psychiatry as with so much else, “Caveat emptor.”  Which is why, though psychiatry’s “mea culpas” are welcome, and we the public should be glad they have finally been given, there may well be more to come.  Of necessity, of course, as times change, and knowledge grows.  As the Communist Manifesto states so notably, “all that is solid melts in air….”  That holds for psychiatry as well.