The Maze of Bio-Psych

By Patricia Lefave, Monophrenic 

All the things Bio-Psych claims it is trying to “fix” are exactly the same problems it CREATES with it's reductionism to the level of “disease process.”

The system itself generates: hopelessness, helplessness, dependence, rage, fear, confusion, frustration, resentment, the invalidation of individual experience and feelings, a loss of a sense of SELF, and of self control, in any and all that this implies, and a profound psycho-spiritual isolation.

It is the easiest thing in the world to transform perfectly appropriate and even predictable reactions from real stressors into “inappropriate affects” related to “imaginary” pressures and abuses. Changing the names of human feelings into something that implies they are 'different' and not as “real” as your own is a big part of that. 

Psychiatrists might just understand the real world better if they stepped “down” into it from their current lofty position on Psychiatric Mount Olympus. That is not the real world “up” there. You aren't really operating with the spirit of Apollo folks. That is just the metaphysical illusion in which you are living. So dress DOWN and join the real world to see what it's like.

Go for rides on buses and sit right behind, or across from, the drivers getting all the latest slander from the addicted community. Sit at the back and listen to the mouthy teens and students tearing everyone who is not there with them apart.[1]

Sit in the mall food court and listen to the BS being passed along daily by people who don't actually know the people they are talking about all day as “entertainment.” Hang out at the Library, chat with a shoe salesman about all the latest he has heard and passed along to others.  Get an apartment in housing and “socialize.” 

I think it would be a real eye opener for you. You may even become able to connect what many of your patients are telling you about, with the real world in which THEY must live.

Human beings do not benefit by being talked out of their experience under pressure. In fact, most are not talked out of it. They just know that they have to agree with you for no other reason than the fact you have absolute concrete power over them, and their lives, which you can use any way, and any time, you like.

Human beings are benefited though if they find someone who will listen and support them in their distress, acknowledging that they are not in life alone but as part of relationship to others, situations and events, and that often other people really ARE a big part of the patient's problems, even if they are related to them. Many people could be helped by allowing them, with support, to talk their way THROUGH their distress rather than suppressing it, denying it and burying their truth as a “solution.”

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[1]  Or even those who are there with them but which they in their arrogance cannot really “see.”