An Alternate Name I Gave to the DSM

Dark Secrets of Metaphysics

It is written on the metaphysical level and NOT the physical level as the system likes to claim, when it say these are “real diseases” just like diabetes. We all know that is not true. Although some real diseases can cause mental type symptoms, the symptoms which get psychiatrically labelled, the symptoms themselves, are not diseases. The problem is that this metaphysical level of diagnosis is wide open to interpretation.

Ideas like “she thinks she has been harmed by others” and all other statements delivered as abstractions, in absolute terms, do NOT even represent concrete reality let alone diseases. So they CANNOT legitimately be called “symptoms” unless they are never in actual existence in reality or can't be simply stated as reality at all times, for all people.

In the real world some people harm other people and some people claim they have been harmed as a way of doing harm. However this must be determined concretely and not guessed at, or even worse, defined as a symptom of mental illness in absolute terms with no concrete context at ALL and often none wanted, or accepted.

Psychiatrists get brainwashed by their own system. It is like putting the cart before the horse. Planted in their minds before I ever walk in the door is the idea that if someone “thinks” they “have been harmed by others” that is a sign of insanity because it is written as such in their Holy Book by THEM.

To the person being harmed by “others” in the real world ,of course this makes no sense at all. Yet if she SAYS, this does not make any sense, guess how that gets heard by someone who has been taught that the mentally ill “have trouble making sense of things”?....as an abstraction of course.

This is why there is no REAL communication between psychiatrists and the labelled much of the time. Because we are using the same WORDS but we don't mean them, or hear them, in the same WAY and the assumption is always the same one even if that gets understood. The assumption is-The psychiatrists are the ones hearing them the “right” way since they are the “experts” in this and we, who do not understand, (a TRUE statement usually since we don't understand them) are the genetic defectives, or the walking, talking, disease processes.

Frequently as well, the psychiatrist does not TELL the patient what the psychiatrist 'thinks” s/he is hearing and often that is because of one of their other beliefs, “you can't talk to a disease.” So the psychiatrist “humours” the patient pretending to take him or her seriously, when in fact, s/he is not. This then adds to the confusion and the chaos of communication. I know people who accidentally “found out” what their “real” diagnosis was years later. After that, the way other people who knew the label had treated them began to make more sense. Other people were treating them in accordance with who they had been TOLD they were and what they believed that really meant.

Psychiatrists see themselves as “objective observers” and not what they really are: subjectively projecting participants in group dysfunction, an ongoing imbalance (ironically) of power, authoritarianism, and unquestioned control of those whom they define as “less than” as the starting point of the transaction. This is a relationship between people that are operating on two different levels of meaning which are mistakenly perceived as the same one.

As patients we think we are talking to equal humans with special knowledge. The doctor though thinks he is talking to inferior humans with little or no knowledge; not even about the details of our own lives. The abstract programming, and opposing viewpoints from two different levels of communication ruins the relationship right from the start. What we end up with is what we actually started with except we did not know that going in and that is, an ongoing power struggle over who gets to decide who I am, what I know, what my life experiences really are and HOW I am going to FEEL about all of it. Very often the problem you had when you walked in the door, even if you did so willingly at first, may well pale into insignificance compared to the new one with which you walk OUT the door; your neatly defined, shiny new compact label reducing you to the parameters of a disease process and no longer a person. It creates a kind of containment which some say makes it easier to understand, yet we must also understand this: Containment is another way of saying isolation. That is how many of us feel after labelling; like we have been PUSHED out of our own reality and into an alternate “universe” that is “alien” to us and in which we are often viewed as “alien” to those who see themselves as “normal.”

I believe the metaphors of psychosis are very apt for those of us who actually experience it, rather than just being TOLD that we have or have not.

I also want to say here that “isolation” is not just meant as a being physically alone. I have no problem being alone physically. I even enjoy my own company. The kind of isolation I am talking about which devastates most of the psychiatrized is of the psycho-spiritual/social connection kind. All human beings need to be seen and accepted for who the really are. When the right to self define and self control is TAKEN away from us, it FEELS, as I expressed it when in an altered state in 95, like “I am floating in the infinite, all alone and I am not very big. There is no one else here.”