I didn’t mean to become a psychology blogger. In fact, I really, really resisted. I don’t want to be the girl whose life and work is defined by the experience of having gone off her rocker as a child and having been psychiatrized in dramatic fashion. I was the identified patient in not only my family of origin but also many circles I ran in growing up. I was The Crazy Girl. Continuing to write and think publicly about this stuff feels a little bit like letting those people win. It feels, now that I am much more outwardly functional and my life is quite stable, like I will be seen as attempting to “gain mastery” over the experiences I had when I was young. I don’t want to be that, I don’t want to be seen that way. But the fact is that I still think about this shit constantly. I don’t mean I’m constantly raking over my own Trauma or Lived Experience or whatever, though that was true for a bit this summer, as you can see clearly in my RGR essay series and the suicidality essay. The fact is that the experiences I laid out in those essays have completely shaped my life and my mind in a way that is pretty unique in terms of the sheer stranglehold that psychiatry had on my upbringing, and that has lasting consequences for my “post-psychiatry” life, the vastness of depth and breadth of which I have only started to glimpse. I have to zoom way way out. So, instead of my own life, what I am constantly thinking about are things like these:
why what happened to me happens to people
why psychotherapists have a cultural monopoly on talking about distress
what psychotherapy is implicitly up to as a cultural project
what psychology even is as an ontological category
whether psychiatry is at all legit
whether it’s ever cool to give people government-sanctioned drugs to “make their mood more tolerable” or whatever mood stabilizers are really up to
who or what the project of classifying “““mental illness1””” is for
what we even mean by “““mental illness”””
whether a DSM-like classification system could be useful for people who are suffering, if such a tome didn’t come straight out of the medical model
I am constantly thinking about these things. I am constantly thinking about these things and I really feel like I have nowhere to turn with them, so I put them in this dang blog, and I bother academics and public intellectuals with them. I’m pretty hesitant to talk in my personal life about them. Most people I know don’t care very much or at least very deeply about these topics. Of the few people who are willing to engage these topics with me, many of them suffer from the upper-middle-class pathology of what I call epistemic arrogance: they do a cursory review of The Facts (read: the most surface-level, readily available data on the subject), they think about The Facts for one second, they regurgitate extremely mainstream line of thought as if they have invented it, and because they are used to being right (read:unchallenged) and because they have the cultural cachet of being highly formally educated (read:smarter than most people), they think that is as deep as the thinking needs to go. Well, if people don’t care, that’s fine; I can’t make them, and it would be out of line to try to make them. But the epistemic arrogance thing (re)drives me crazy. I am no longer willing to subject myself to it when it comes to topics as dearly held as these. I don’t want these topics to be sullied by such careless treatment. This is not an intellectual exercise for me. This shit matters and it has real consequences for real people’s real lives.
So, if I care so much about these topics and I want to talk about them so bad, why don’t I just enter an MSW or psych grad program? There are like-minded people in there. Why don’t I make myself useful out in the world by doing something about it instead of just thinking about it to myself all day?
Well, first of all, if I ever go back to The Academy, it will be kicking and screaming. I have a lot of, uh, critiques of my experience of the American public education system and of higher ed that are beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say for now that I had a bad fucking time in school. I dropped out of undergrad and I am never going back. Given that, it would be a real uphill climb for me to enroll in grad school.
Second, it’s not clear to me that there are like-minded people in MSW and psych programs. I have the lofty privilege of living in a city that also houses one of the most acclaimed MSW programs in the United States, and a pretty good clinical psych program. As a twentysomething, I also brush elbows with many students and grads of those programs. Some of those people are vocal about their criticisms of the status quo of clinical mental healthcare (or whatever to call it). But people who are choosing to dedicate their professional lives to the reproduction of a given system are shaped by that system and that system is reproduced within them. There isn’t really a way around that as far as I can tell. All the consciousness-raising and self-awareness in the world can’t shift it. If people in therapist grad school are thinking about the questions I bulleted above, they are thinking about those questions in the context of being trained to keep things the way they are. The key thing that distinguishes me from a person who chooses to do graduate work in the mind-work realm is that I abstain from the conditions that would have me reproduce the clinical and epistemological systems that rule mind-work world and reproduce those systems within myself. On another note, to put it bluntly, the stereotype about therapists being weird and issue-laden in their personal lives is not disproven by most of the MSWs I am loosely acquainted with. That’s not to say that I’m not like those girls (and they are all girls); I know I have issues and am interpersonally weird. But it does remind me of the pitfalls of choosing to work out your own issues by working out the issues of others. It seems like a cliche but it bears repeating: if you focus too hard on other people’s problems, you might be neglecting or deluding yourself about your own problems. I don’t want to fall into that trap. I would rather own my shit than disown it.
Third, it’s just not clear to me that becoming a clinician is how I would be most useful. I like to help my loved ones with their problems when such help is welcome. I don’t think I have the wherewithal to help an ever-growing number of artificially acquired loved ones with their problems in the way that clinical work would want me to do. I am sort of unconvinced that unconditional positive regard can even exist, let alone that it should be the axis around which people’s healing rotates. I definitely have mommy issues, but I don’t have the right kind of mommy issues that would give me the psychological makeup of a typical therapist. I want to zoom out; that’s the vantage point at which my thinking is clearest, most useful, and least like others’ thinking and therefore contributes something meaningful to The Discourse. The jury is out on whether or not I want it to contribute meaningfully to The Field. I think maybe my thoughts might be most useful as a layman’s thoughts for other laymen. I think part of my work might be showing that people who are non-formally-educated can learn as broadly and think as rigorously as those who are formally educated, and I hope that will help give other non-formally-educated people the confidence to do the same. In other words, part of my work might be evangelizing autodidacticism. I can’t do that as effectively if I cease to be an autodidact2.
Some people who find themselves in the bind of wanting to think deeply about psychology but not wanting to do psychology wind up becoming academics in fields like philosophy of science or history of science. Unfortunately, if I want to keep dedicating as much time to thinking and reading about this shit as I do, I might have to think seriously about these avenues. It would be a dream to get paid for thinking about this stuff; I can’t afford many of the books I want to read (“A Metaphysics of Psychopathology” by Peter Zachar and “Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients” by Glen Gabbard are two books that I’m coveting at this time, but I need that hundred bucks for my rent. One of the sexiest perks of going to grad school would be decent libraries and JSTOR access). But I don’t want to go back to school. It’ll be an act of sheer desperation if I do.
I guess this article is just the emergent theory of the psych portion of this blog. I wrote it because I have been trying to gather my thoughts about the ontology of psych diagnosis and realizing that I am cut off from a lot of the resources I need to be as well-read on the subject as I want to be. I am frustrated and mad about that, and I as I was feeling into that frustration, I was realizing that I’m frustrated and mad that I am even on this blog in the first place. Sometimes I feel like I am shouting into the void. But if these words reach you and you get something out of them, that soothes me a bit. I’m not asking you to let me know about it (though you can if you want to). Just go and do likewise.
I don’t like to describe what I went through as an experience of “mental illness”, though I guess it’s an accurate description. As the likes of Emmet Rensin and Freddie DeBoer have pointed out, “mental illness” has been co-opted by the unhappy sane, the anxiety-and-depression-havers. For clarity, I don’t lump myself in with that crowd. I talk about my experience of having been crazy, because I think it’s more semantically accurate.
I have kind of a funny relationship to the word “autodidact”, even though people sometimes describe me that way and I don’t disagree. It’s not because people look sideways at self-proclaimed autodidacts. It’s because “autodidact” literally means “self-taught”. I don’t believe that I taught myself; I engage with the work of other people and I shoot the shit with other people and that is how everyone learns. I just don’t do it in a state-sanctioned way.