Dear Psychiatry

 ...Closing the Dysfunctional Loop
Then Opening the Door to a New Understanding

by Patricia Lefave, Monophrenic

You will never understand this group phenomenon until, or unless, you close the 'loop' by giving up the delusional belief that you are not seen, heard, or understood by a 'lesser' human being. It is your delusional belief, as members in 'good' standing of a delusional group, that you are all, as a group, 'hidden' from someone who is less than you, that is keeping the societal sickness, the dysfunctional relating, and the denial of it all, going to infinite destruction. Stop playing 'the overlook it' game. Stop telling the targets they have to let all the destruction to their lives. 'roll off their backs' and start handing the responsibility for it back to those participating in it. This is not a 'game' that anyone can ever 'win.' The ONLY way to win this game is to STOP PLAYING IT. You will not stop what you refuse to see in the first place. The group denial of this as reality IS the problem and is what is keeping it going. It is the other way around.'


I can see you. I can hear you. I understand this whole thing BETTER than you (even though you indicate to me, quite clearly from a few feet away of course, while discussing it with others) that you are 'quite sure' you all have a better understanding of me and the problem since you are defining my reality for me by 'group consensus.' You aren't entitled to do that. Your belief that you CAN do that without even knowing me or recognizing your own fabricated stories as they are repeated over and over again, is YOUR problem. Instead, you call the recognition of it, MY problem.


This 'covert' group dysfunction which virtually no one ever 'admits' to, IS the basis of the problem. So if you really want to assess and evaluate someone try self focusing. For example: How do you library employees who have been discussing amongst yourselves, my 'mental illness', unfriendly personality and sexuality (“a shiver ran down my spine when I found out she worked for a health care agency”) justify to yourselves, your denial that you are doing what you do while still doing it? One of you has said, “but people just don't behave like that,” even though you ARE one of the people who has behaved like that. One of the saner employees has said, “yes we do though. We just deny it.”


Self focus now and recognize the reasons you deny doing what you do while doing it.


Is one of the reasons that you believe the people you are talking about and not 'to' or 'with' are less than you so they won't know anyway?


Is it to keep your job?


Is it to be a member in good standing in a group.


Is it to mollify the other group members.


Is it 'fun.' Are you enjoying looking down on another who is not a member of your particular group?


Does it make you FEEL better?


Do you believe, and WANT to believe, that those you talk about, even if it is right in their presence, will see, hear know or understand ONLY what you intend them to?


Are you too “hiding in plain sight”


That is YOUR delusional belief. But rather than even considering that, you remain in denial, project it onto the person you are chronically gossiping about, and claim that reality is MY denial, thinking. Perception and reaction problems rather than your own denial, thinking perception and behaviour problem. Of course you then react to being TOLD that by a lesser human like me with some inappropriate affects of your own, like anger, sarcasm, and contempt. Naturally, you consider your own feelings to be legitimate. Only mine on the receiving end of the group experience are considered to be 'inappropriate' and part of a mysterious 'disease' process which, according to you who are hiding in plain sight, makes no sense at all.


I know that because I have stood a few feet away from dozens of people acting it all out for me while simultaneously denying the whole thing and their own behaviour. They are all hiding in plain sight you see. They also don't see themselves a part of a group phenomenon; a supposedly 'hidden' mob.


You know when you are the one on the receiving end of this it is pretty damned hard to believe that people like you have no idea about what they are doing. It is so obvious to me, and to many others just like me, that we cannot believe it isn't obvious to you too, and therefore you must be 'pretending' to be stupid, or doing it all deliberately while fully AWARE that we know it. You look like you are really enjoying driving us into madness and watching us disconnect from concrete reality. We disconnect because we can no longer identify it when all context is lost. The group members remove, or blind, the targets to specific context to protect and defend themselves. There is often NO communication between group members and targeted 'sick one' at all. There certainly has not been in my own case.


Some of you ARE enjoying it all too aren't you, and justifying it by claiming you targets are getting 'what they deserve.” I believe though that the majority of you are just blind to yourselves and the role you are playing, but you are also fighting furiously to keep from being awakened to this reality. Where will you be able to dump all of your suppressed rage and hostility of there are no socially sanctioned targets for it; especially when the 'no blaming anyone, for anything' dysfunctional direction has to be kept intact. Will you then implode, if you can't explode?


Perhaps a new paradigm for true Self control might help. I have one. Perhaps when you get tired of blaming me for you bad group behaviour, and admit this citywide phenomenon exists, you will 'lower' yourselves and talk directly and genuinely to an equal human being.


First though you are going to have to close the loop and come FULL CIRCLE.


359 degrees won't work. Let me risk further diagnosis and offer an old analogy of mine which I used with my recovery therapist in 96. I originally used this to describe what it was like dealing with psychiatric hospital staff but it can be expanded easily to include the population of the whole city and all it's dysfunctional participants.




The Observation Room
It is like being taken into a room and left by myself and then a group of people gets together in an adjoining room to discuss me. Between us is a window and they are clearly watching me and interpreting everything I say and do. I try to talk to them and although they can clearly hear what I am saying


they do not respond directly to me but instead discuss what I just say or do amongst themselves and try to interpret what it means. I am puzzled by this and assume it must be a joke of some kind. Most of 'us' think that. Yet they continue to behave the same way and eventually I realize this is no 'joke.' They are serious about reducing me to the level of an object. They are objectifying me.


Now, here is what I do not know about what they are doing as well as what they do not know about me.


I do not know that they believe they are in a soundproof room and observing me from behind a two way glass with a mirror on my side and a window on theirs.


In reality, there is a sound system, like an intercom, just below the dividing window and it is turned on. Furthermore, the mirror they believe is on my side of the glass is NOT a mirror at all but just a window into the other room exactly as it is on their side.
So their perception of me is based on their belief that I am deaf and blind to them and all their acting out when in fact, it is they who are deaf and blind to me as I really am. Conversely, my perception of them is based on my belief, which seems very obvious to me, that I can see them and hear them and that they must know that they are bombarding me with their own duplicity. Since they believe they are all 'superior' human beings they do not entertain the idea for one minute, that it could possibly be me who is much closer to understanding the whole truth of the situation than they are. They don't want to believe it either as it would ruin the group delusion of concealment.


Despite the analogy used to explain this to my recovery therapist, in 1996, the group behaviour has continued, unchanged (although they are not quite as careless or intense about it as they once were) to date.


I am still 'in the room with the window', watching and listening to the same old group delusion being acted out and recreated and I am still being called crazy for seeing and hearing it.



April 2010.


This group 'illness' will not end until or unless you close the gap being kept open by one degree. When the group recognizes there is no mirror on my side keeping me blind to them and that they are not 'hidden' by it either, then and only then will they be able to step back through the looking glass and into the truth of the collective reality as it really is. This is and has always BEEN two sides of the same experience. Not two DIFFERENT experiences with the group being the 'sane' ones and me the insane one. In fact, I am more sane than most of the group members.