The Psychiatrists: A Brief History of Benign (and not so Benign) Neglect
I 1997
After returning from the Fulbright Scholarship, I was sort of directionless. So, I slipped into a depression. Purpose in life is crucial and when you haven't yet outgrown existentialism you listened to Camus: 'The only question worth answering is whether or not to kill yourself".
Now, this is an artifact of one man's despair at a certain time and in a certain place, not anything anyone should really pay close attention to. So, you make a few half-hearted attempts. It's more common than you think and it doesn't amount to much. But, you show up to your first head shrinker and he gives you prozac, I think it was. It didn't take, in that after a while, I didn't take it.
Pushed through, got a job in the Spring and moved to San Francisco with a great old friend that fall. Had a high old time crossing the nation, about which I don't think I've yet written. So, you start over, no harm, no foul. So, an innocuous interaction with the therapy industry, turns out.
II 2004
This one was just the garden variety depression. Not a girl, just old man Weltschmertz. Showed up at some guy's office on Geary Street, some Kaiser facility. Again with the drugs, this time Wellbutrin. Again, after a year or so, stopped taking it. I think I did some German translation of Gustav Landauer at the behest of a great friend thereafter. Did whatever, traveling to the Sierra foothills. Worked temp jobs. Went to Cuba – an abortive attempt at that. I saved some guy from homelessness and he repaid my kindness by dragging me down to his level, as he put it.
III 2009 - 2014
This one pertained to a girl. Again, not her fault. Just lack of maturity. I took her seriously, which my more gross friends thought was silly. I think they fed me Wellbutrin and Depakote this time. Went to 'therapy'. Groop and individual, for 4 total sessions. Once I sussed out coping strategies, that was enough of that.
And I took it for years on end. Sort of muddled through. Got into grad school. Almost finished it too, with honors. I was going to be a transit bureaucrat, in part the 'inspiration' for Herr Klamm, which is a joke btw.
Then, alas, I met my match. The self-proclaimed Mastermind. Well, the smartest person I ever met anyway. Turns out, I gave as good as I got. Amor fou greaseball shit. Stopped taking the meds, possibly at her behest? I don't remember what occasioned it, euphoria over abuse? A rich girl with a fancy apartment and a fancier pedigree.
Uh oh, looks like vanity has arrived with a vengeance. Everything tells you not to do it, but you don't listen to your true inner self – your instinct and intuition. Screw the heart & intellect, that only gets you so far. For three weeks anyway, then you lower the boom with two words: a Dios.
At a certain point, after enough bullshit, you outgrow overrated styles of relationships. You focus on friendship. It is free and easy if you can see to it to cultivate it properly. That's really the only challenge, finding people with time enough to bother.
IV 2015 - 2025
Back on 'em at home in PA now. 6 years on the couch staring at a television. Only Covid really broke the spell. Meds cover some epiphenomena. It's a change in behavior which is necessary. No more girlfriends – and 12 years of relative sanity break out. 4 of them sans meds. Built a book business, started writing again, things looking up and voila! Family dynamics shi[f]t.
IV 2026
Learned a new vocabulary word. Crabs in a bucket syndrome. When your friends and family try to drag you back down, once you begin to emerge and see some success. This is one aspect of the Alice in Chains song Again, that I've been so fond of posting over the years. Forbes magazine covered it. It's around, you can find out about it, if you choose. Crabs in a bucket, what a fuckin' joke.
The 'help' and 'concern' and kindred ghoulish euphemisms for the actual motives of formerly loved ones. It's real greaseball shit among the humans. And it is transparent by now and is met with rhetorical force, when necessary. When unnecessary, simple silence obtains. Sometimes for a while, sometimes permanently.
As for the relevant details of the no appeal arrest and no appeal incarceration. It amounted to 4 things.
- Misdiagnosis (bipolar as opposed to being overwrought by family dynamics changing).
- Forced drugging (first Abilify – gimme a fuckin' break, it's like focusin for Bart Simpson – second Seraquil, then since the side effects were bad, old standard Lithium)
- Enforced obedience (you have to play the game and tell them they're right, otherwise they'll keep you locked up at a whim)
- Follow up bullshit (you're obliged to 'stay in touch', an ongoing farce I'll play along with irrespective of my real opinions)
It's just a pitifully unhelpful thing. Ok, if you have intrusive thoughts or unresolved childhood trauma and can't hold a job or keep in touch with friends and family, then by all means, let these quacks drug you. Somehow the human race managed to endure just fine for 4 thousand years prior to the introduction of the modern control mechanism which is psychiatry.
If I could wave a wand, I'd abolish this entire vampiric industry. Just talk to your friends and family, smoke cigarettes and drink beer to unwind. It's far superior to paying a stranger to put up with your whining, or enriching some giant pill pusher firm.
Oh, it's a rant. You can't listen to him. Listen or don't. Out of fucks to give. I'm going to Germany and the Czech Republic in under a month for the first time in 29 years. I'm going to have a great time getting out of this degenerate empire. And I'm going to laugh and laugh and laugh, breathing the air of a higher culture.
