It's 7am as I type this out. I've woken before dawn. For several years, taking meds, I woke regularly at 7am. Lately I've been alternating between waking at this time and 11am. I think it's out of depression. My living situation is depressing. I've been sleeping more.
I feel jilted by my psychiatrist, and the mental health system in general. Mental illness must equal idiocy or it doesn't make sense to the high-level providers, the psychiatrists and clinical psychologists who do extremely well in the system, even at a low level, taking care of poor people on Medicaid. I don't even know how many times I've been thwarted from talking about my problems because the clinician cannot see me as intelligent and capable of self-awareness. Thus I've become confrontational. Again, it's difficult to see whether they don't feed on this too.
I've only been in to see a clinical psychologist once (in the context of talk therapy) and he actually rolled his eyes when I started to talk about the roots of some of my problems. Apparently, my role was to express approval of his photographic talent, which was clearly not as developed as my own. What can you say? Nothing. You have to sit there and take it. Like watching pro wrestling with someone who takes it seriously. If you laugh or scoff, you lose a friend. Lawyers and doctors (contextualized as agents of the legal and medical establishments, respectively, anyhow) behave in the same way. These two establishments are patently expert at making you lose friends, and thereby keeping you in their clutches, and maintaining the capitalist foundation of the system, where the ultimate goal isn't Justice or Health, but lifelong consumerism, the buying of ever more and better hotdogs.
Your role, as a non-rich person, is idiot. Your intelligence does not compute.
Your intelligence is an oil executive's unread copy of Walden.
Your intelligence actually is Walden Pond, but the oil executive owns the mineral rights.
And what does he do with ownership rights to another five or ten million dollars?
The whole system is built around this role, that you know nothing, and have no rights to your own way of being, that is, your own intelligence, and moreover, that their knowledge is completely beyond your ability to know, that plugging 50 or 100 hours of psycho/philosophico/literario theory into your headphones is unthinkable to anyone. Try being on Medicaid while reading Jung and Freud. You are discouraged from achieving insight, while simultaneously and sternly informed that your goal is to accept your situation with insight. Well, there's no money in that, no financial growth, so when it really happens, the system or the public, or some collusion of the two, they work to increase your so-called insanity on a larger scale, so there is no end of your personal failures, until you're better off skipping the doctor's appointment and reading your Kafka.
The glue that holds the system together, the good people, are the social workers. They tend to be caring, genuine people who want to see you healthy. They may or may not know the underlying psychology and economics, but they tend to be nice folks either way, not "numbers-driven" authorities who check on their financial portfolios every day, those with "doctor" in their titles.
For many years, I saw the same psychiatrist. He never expressed any interest in my creative writing, or the skill I had built up as a computer programmer. Finally, he made a bad joke that betrayed this failure of decency. I won't retell it right now. Building a website is no joke. The technology can change daily, unlike medicine and law, which may not change even yearly, and they are both reactive systems. Anyway, after taking a few hard hits from the wigs, I lost my fragile will to make websites, which only perpetuates my status as helpless idiotic mental health consumer. Big win for subconsciousness and illness everywhere. More money for Pfizer.
Watching reactive systems perpetuate themselves is disgusting. More than half of it is wig making, as in the old joke about majoring in underwater basket weaving. Now you know what that means, and why they mean it. So, go on and make yourself an incomprehensible but indestructible wig. And try not to breathe, as the air is too gross to mention.
Once while I was seeing a psychologist, he mentioned how refreshing it was to talk to someone who was actually self-aware and capable of articulating his feelings. He seemed to think that because I could talk about my feelings I was doing better than his other patients and therefore needed less help. This made me feel horrified, insulted, and even more depressed than I already was.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Kafka hated doctors and refused to even take valerian for his insomnia.