You Teach People How to Treat You

By Patricia Lefave, Monophrenic

Mental illness pros like to say that a lot from their blind spot. Most of them don't know they have this blind spot but many of us now are doing our best to shine a light on it for them.

Labelled people don't “teach people how to treat us.” Psychiatrists doing the labelling, and all who blindly follow the authority of psychiatrists, without question or debate,  teach people how to treat us. They are the ones who are now labelling children O.D.D. How odd!

When they do this, they set the tone for that child's whole life by telling other people that they should pretty much disregard anything he says, his protesting of the way he is treated by others, and his feelings about it. Most people will do as they are instructed to do too, and they will feel blameless as they do it. If the child is driven to the predictable end “game” (murder and/or suicide) all will blame his mental illness for the results, no doubt while lamenting, “oh...if only we could have seen it coming...”

The child of course, may have reached the point of “realization” that there was no way out. For O.D.D. like it's predecessor “schizophrenia,” the foundation stone upon which psychiatric labelling is built, it is it's own tautological argument created to justify its own existence. If the child so labelled and defined resists the diagnosis, or tries to fight against it, or to fight the authority that defines him and his life experience in such a way, the resistance to it will only “prove” the authority figure to be “correct.” The predictable reactions to such total invalidation have already been written in the book which defines them as  “symptoms” which the psychiatrist has been trained to use for “diagnosis.” There is no better way to fulfil a prophecy than that used by the DSM which is inventing more and more diseases for inclusion all the time. How O.D.D. Isn't it?

Though the child may well be able to see this, since he is the one on the receiving end of the authority's control, most adults who blindly follow authority, will not see it. Such reversals of reality are often the case in dysfunctional families as well.