Tag: psychiatry

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn17 Comments

People often reach out to me assuming that I’m now happy and high functioning—that I’ve “recovered” or climbed atop some “mentally healthy” pedestal. My first instinct when I hear this, ironically, is to clarify that I’m by no means what psychiatry would consider “well”—though this doesn’t mean anything to me. Instead, I explain how I’ve come to view the paradigm of “mental illness” and “mental health” as a false binary, and that I have found, in shedding this medicalized framework of self-understanding, that no state of being is permanent or anything to be attached to or worried about. And when I do seem to be falling into some kind of particularly unhelpful emotional or thinking “pattern,” I typically don’t need to sleuth around too long to figure out what’s going on. Inevitably, it’s rooted in my relationship to life around me: there is unresolved conflict between me and someone I care about; I have deprioritized social connection because I feel exhausted; I’m powerless about a difficult circumstance but haven’t yet let go of needing it to change; I’m placing too much attention on matters that really have no relevance for me. Much of the time, it’s because I’ve slipped back into my old habit of ignoring my intuition: I’ve spoken yes when my instincts said no. I haven’t had restful time to myself. Too many hours in front of a computer and not enough put toward the things and people that really matter—the things that, when I’m at death’s door one day, I’ll wish I’d done more of: expansive conversations at the reservoir with Cooper with scootering kids in tow, despite all those emails beckoning me to catch up on them; letting the boys blow up the living room to build that pillow fort even though it means more tidying; calling up the people who ignite me to catch up on life instead of just working more.

— Laura Delano, Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, March 18, 2025)

Notes:

  • Recommended: Not a warm and fuzzy page turner but powerful. Her insights and thoughts will not leave me soon, if ever.
  • Book Review of “Unshrunk” by Casey Schwartz, NY Times, March 20, 2025.
  • Book Review in Washington Post: “She stopped taking her psych meds. Now she helps others do the same. Laura Delano’s “Unshrunk” is more than a memoir. It’s a treatise against psychiatric medications.”

T.G.I.F.: I want what I want because I want it.

Live & Learn37 Comments

There is no end of advice these days on how to be a good person, how to make good decisions, how to be mindful and compassionate, how to have boundaries, how to be open, how to be assertive, how not to be self-effacing, how to be politically invested, how to live in the now, how to live in a world that demands immediacy, how to think about the future, how not to think too much about the future, how not to think. For a certain kind of person — the person who, usually, strives to be a responsible parent, a sensitive friend, an upright citizen, a person who tries to care about their community — it can be impossible not to succumb to the incessant urge to mimic someone else’s supposed balance and feeling of wellness in life. What do we even know about them really? […]

Listening to patients, it feels to me like we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance. This infinite pedagogical universe was recently, and aptly, named the shame-industrial complex; poured out from every angle of life on social media, pushed by algorithms. In this vertigo we’ve forgotten that no one knows, or has ever known, what it really means to be an adult. Also that pleasure is hard-won, small, ephemeral; singular to each person. Wishes are historically overdetermined — meaning it really is your pleasure, and your pleasure only…

What I found, after much work in analysis, is that there is no justification possible, no matter how hard I tried to find it. I want what I want because I want it. You have to live with your choices which are more-or-less inexplicable to others…

We are contradictory creatures, wondrously and terrifyingly so.

— Jamieson Webster, from “I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You.” (The New York Times · August 25, 2023). Jamieson Webster (@jamiesonwebster) is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and a professor at the New School. She is the author, most recently, of “Disorganization and Sex.”

Portrait via Peter Rollins

Plant myself at the gates of Hope

Live & Learn19 Comments

woman-portrait-hair-black-and-white

I have a friend who traffics in words. She is not a minister, but a psychiatrist in the health clinic at a prestigious women’s college. We were sitting once not long after a student she had known, and counseled, committed suicide in the dormitory there. My friend, the doctor, the healer, held the loss very closely in those first few days, not unprofessionally, but deeply, fully — as you or I would have, had this been someone in our care.

At one point (with tears streaming down her face), she looked up in defiance (this is the only word for it) and spoke explicitly of her vocation, as if out of the ashes of that day she were renewing a vow or making a new covenant (and I think she was). She spoke explicitly of her vocation, and of yours and mine. She said, “You know I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody or to save the world. All I can do — what I am called to do — is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they come in; sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day and I call out till my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them in toward beautiful life and love…

There’s something for all of us there, I think. Whatever our vocation, we stand, beckoning and calling, singing and shouting, planted at the gates of Hope. This world and our people are beautiful and broken, and we are called to raise that up — to bear witness to the possibility of living with the dignity, bravery, and gladness that befits a human being. That may be what it is to “live our mission.”

~ Victoria Safford, excerpt from “The Small Work in the Great Work”

Notes: