As far as my peripheral experience has been, I was given an antidepressant once, and when I told of getting suddenly depressed and wanting to kill myself since a couple weeks after starting it, then the first thing I was asked was, “Have you felt like this before the drug?” I had actually been pretty severely depressed and sometimes suicidal during earlier times in reaction to negative life events, but I gave a firm, “No” – particularly since this was one of the better years of my life (the drug, incidentally, was given off-label for seizures — even though it’s contraindicated against seizure history!)

The rest of my experience with this sort of nonsense stems from my encounters with my junior high guidance counselor, who seemed to treat me, when I went to her office to request witness reports of abuse from other students (which were all refused), as if she were a psychiatrist and I was her ‘hopelessly ill patient who clearly is the cause of her mistreatment’. I remember even one time when she was talking with another counselor about a student they suspected as being autistic, while I was in the room the whole time (an experience I brought to mind as resonating with when you described in Being an Un-person).

This list is a great satire (is that the right word?) of the serious yet ridiculously absurd state of ‘mental health care’.

I’ve said this before in response to people who characterize certain doctors as “quacks”– the word quack implies that the doctors in question are aware that their methods are ineffective, but promote them anyway just for the sake of turning a profit. I don’t doubt that this happens; doctors and counselors are often given financial incentives to “recruit” teenagers and have them institutionalized, so the institutions and doctors could pick up the insurance benefits. However, I actually think that the people who genuinely believe they are doing good, whether in the psychiatric establishment, in religious organizations, in schools, or in families, can be the most dangerous of all. After all, those who are in it just for the money will stop if their financial incentive is taken away; those who are motivated by a belief in their own truly benevolent nature and in their subjects’ need for them will continue to do so regardless of what they get for it. Amanda mentioned animal hoarders in one of her other posts– people who end up keeping huge numbers of animals that they can’t possibly take care of, at detriment to their own property and health, because they are honestly convinced that no one else can love the animals as much as them, even when the numbers of starving, sick, and dead animals in their “care” attest otherwise. Good intentions are not a substitute for good works. Good intentions do not necessarily naturally lead to good works. And wanting the best for someone does not necessarily make you a good judge of what is truly best for them.
I don’t know, for instance, whether the doctor who diagnosed us with “bipolar disorder” because we paced and repeated his words while he was allegedly evaluating us, had any financial incentive for doing so. I doubt it, however, because the only thing he was getting money for was a “learning disability assessment”– it was a one-time thing, so even if he thought we needed to be drugged up, he wasn’t going to be the one to prescribe those drugs. He was just hoping that someone else would agree with him about it. It was more likely that he’d simply trained himself to view everyone’s behavior in terms of pathology, and responded to us as being merely another pathetic crazy. His official report about us was full of bullshit that had little or no relation to anything we’d actually stated to him in the interview.

And I think he really did believe all of this implicitly– he was viewing everything through a mental lens which caused him to systematically discard all of the client’s explanations for their own behavior, and replace it with his own ideas of why they did things. As with a cult, people believe and are told they are doing good if they are “following the teachings,” no matter how cruel or unreasonable those teachings might seem– they’re just curing mental illness instead of saving souls, this time around.

And according to them, we are the ones who are delusional and have a distorted picture of reality. Huh.

I can’t imagine it’s all money, or that it’s some kind of conspiracy — rather, I’m compelled to think that there’s a sort of deep-rooted prejudice against unfamiliar things and people that is expressed in the language of fear on the part of these doctors.

Nevertheless, I’m seriously disturbed by all the emphasis (as evidenced by this list, experiences I’ve had, and experiences others have had) on keeping information away from patients about how they themselves operate — exactly what is being threatened by a person having greater understanding of how their own brain works?

Also:
The only thing you need to know about neuroleptics is that they aren’t addictive.

If a medication /does/ help, it will be changed.

If you are asked a silly question and give a silly answer, you lack insight. If you are asked a silly question and give a sensible answer, staff will make up their own anyway.

If you don’t hurt yourself, you aren’t in trouble and don’t need help. If you do hurt yourself, you’re manipulative and don’t deserve help.

Any female friend more than 5 years older than you isn’t a friend but a mother substitute.

No matter how much like a promise it sounds, any statement made by a psychiatrist is subject to whim. Any explicit request you make of your psychiatrist means exactly the opposite of what you thought it did when you made it.

Bafflement is not a correct reaction when you (a vegetarian) are asked whether you eat vegetables.

There are such things as correct reactions. Incorrect reactions are bad.

What you can’t do is much more important than what you can.

People who mean well and want to help can be really, really dangerous.