*Transcendental *Logic

I’m staying with a therapist, here in Boston. She’s my best friend (which is why I forgive her profession), one of the brightest people I know and a very highly-respected Harvard graduate besides.

Yesterday she told me something about the psychology profession that even I can’t believe.

Apparently, to say it bluntly, one’s career in the field of psychology is over if anybody ever finds out that you’ve suffered any trauma or psychological problems yourself.

Not if you’re crazy. If you’ve ever even seen crazy. If your childhood was hard, or you’ve been caught up in a war, or been victimized or had a nervous breakdown or for any other reason had to struggle with your identity and your sanity, get lost! My friend says she knows of several respected professionals who wrote powerful arguments against this social aspect of the profession, and all of them had no careers left within five years.

The shallow response behind this is one of “people who help others be mentally sound must be mentally perfect”, but holyyyyy cow is that an obvious fallacy. Do you want a dietician helping you lose weight who’s never been fat? Would you prefer mountain-climbing lessons from someone who was born on top of a mountain and has never come down??

As may be obvious, sanity wasn’t given to me on a silver platter, either. I’ve done all my fighting either by myself or with the help of non-professionals, and now that I know this secret of the professional-psychology world, I’m getting a glimmer of why the “pros” were never able to help — they had no fscking idea what they were talking about! Mental health isn’t some blessed condition that you can confer on another person simply by holding them in your pure little presence, people. For a good chunk of the population, for whatever reason, living in peace with one’s mind is a struggle, and I can’t imagine how anybody who’s never even glimpsed what that struggle is like is could possibly help someone else through it.

Okay, I’d better stop now or this will rapidly get off-topic. ;)

-PD

This entry was posted 2 years, 3 months ago on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 10:07 am and is filed under depression, philosophy, psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.