Sailor Beware!

My Psychiatrist’s Best Jerry Lewis Impression!

Time goes on and some things just don’t change! Yet another meeting with Dr X and yet more of his faff. It’s as if he thinks I learn nothing each time we meet. Like I don’t see his idiosyncrasies. Like his shit doesn’t stink. And yet it’s not that his shit doesn’t stink as bad as mine. It so does and that’s our entitlement as human beings. But it’s that he projects an air of his shit doesn’t stink at all. Every time I raise the issue of diagnosis and medication, he disconnects from his humanity, at pain of death and faffs about. Indeed, it feels like I’m in a fight with Jerry Lewis in the “Sailor Beware” movie over my diagnosis. A fight of which he obviously wants no part. And like Jerry Lewis this fight would be hilarious if he wasn’t stymying the liberty of my autonomy.

The truth, or at least my truth, is that he is most comfortable conducting his service from the diplomatic margins leaving Service Users like me with internalised befuddlement and frustration. You know, where he can say he is doing his job without actually doing his job. This is a man who doesn’t like getting his hands dirty with conversations about the truth of my diagnosis. And, why? It’s a debate he knows he can’t win. Which is to say, it’s too much like hard work when confronted with a Service User that knows his arse from his elbow. Nigh-on four years of service and he still can’t tell me why I must undergo the unscrupulous ignominy of being injected with his snake oil every three months. No, he’s more content penpushing and kicking the can down the road. And yet his apathy and procrastination has been a reflection of my own fragility and faux-fortitude. In other words, why have I allowed him to lead me up the garden path for so long? Because shame! When you’re raised Catholic you’re, instinctively, a pastmaster in self-flagellation mode! When I went through my nefarious chapter thirteen years ago, I royally broke my moral code. And even though I am now an atheist-cum-agnostic, that moral injury still feels like a mountain on my, unconsciously, god-fearing shoulders. Nonetheless, I have worked hard on my shadow over the last four years to offload the mountain. Which is to say, enough already! I’m dropping the hammer. Here follows my email to Dr X following our meeting:

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” ~ Charles Bukowski.

Hi Dr X,

We are almost two months shy of four years in this therapeutic relationship. And because of your laborious inability to justify the diagnosis and the necessity for medication, the relationship has not been at all therapeutic. Every meeting ends with you saying we will have to discuss your justification for the diagnosis that necessitates medication in the next meeting. Yet at each subsequent meeting you defer to my agenda, making it apparent that the agenda you have already set is not important to you. So when I then proceed to make my agenda what you disingenuously said was your agenda, as I have done every time we have met, you say we’ll have to discuss it when next we meet.

It seems obvious to me you are uncomfortable with said agenda or you wouldn’t keep beating around the bush like this. So I say this, enough shucking and jiving! Before we next meet, take the next month to formulate your response to the agenda at hand.

In my experience, intellectuals only ever make the simple thing the hard thing because they don’t really understand it themselves and fear the embarrassment of being found out. My clarion call to you is, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski, summon your inner artist and make the hard thing the simple thing! Or, put another way, make the insidiously opaque practices in Psychiatric Diagnosis transparent!

Regards,

Billy

It’s been eight days since I put the cat amongst the pigeons in this email and nothing but tumbleweed. No reply, nothing. It’s been apparent to me for some time that Dr X is conflict-averse, which is, no doubt, a consequence of the ghosts of his formative years! Because he simply doesn’t know how to explain his diagnosis in clinical terms. His apparent apathy, it seems, is rooted in raw fear. Which is why he’s been kicking the can down the road for the duration of our therapeutic relationship. I can see the appeal of a career in Psychiatry for someone like him. Because Psychiatrists live in a hegemonically asymmetric world that skews in their favour. Jerry Lewis, sorry Dr X!, doesn’t usually have to answer to plebs like me. Nevertheless, I am now frogmarching him into doing something a Psychiatrist is seldom asked to do by a Service User, “show your work!” Which is to say, I’m taking him back to school. Judgement day is coming! Not for me but for Dr X!

As ever, all views are appreciated, feel free to let me know how you feel in the comments.

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