(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
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.
