I Hate the World #3

I hate modern psychiatry, and all it has wrought.

Earlier this week, my 24-year-old cousin drank a bottle of vodka and put his head through a wall. He ended up in a psych hospital, where they diagnosed him bipolar and started him on meds. His mom wasn’t surprised, because she’d already diagnosed him herself. ( “He has 11 of the 15 signs!”) This morning I got an email from her saying that they’re sending him home today, and also, “now he won’t have any more problems.”

PHEW!

I’m not a fucking doctor. I’m not saying I know what to do. But here’s the thing I hate: how everyone wants to take this mixed-up, high-strung, weirdly stunted, grandiose, deeply insecure, voluptuously angry kid with considerable musical talent and a semi-disturbing obsession with Brian Wilson, who dropped out of college in his senior year, who is half Turkish and really conflicted about it, who drives an aqua Camaro, who can sing arias from German operas, who lives in central Jersey with his mother and works at a grocery store–a kid who is fucked up, and wildly complicated and, in his way, full of life–and reduce him to a diagnosis, and fix him with pills.

What is psychiatry but a series of bullshit simplifications and bullshit fixes?

Reality is unruly, people!

Being human is a problem, goddamn it!

But we’d rather turn people into obese, diabetic zombies than face that.

Luckily, the psychiatrists have science on their side.

Now that my cousin has been declared sick and damaged, it’s even more likely that he’ll never leave my sad sack aunt or their tiny, creepy, smoke-stained apartment–which are probably the very reasons he drank the fucking bottle of vodka and put his fucking head through the wall in the first place. Now he’s got meds for all that!

There was an article in the Times the other day about how pharmaceutical companies basically pay psychiatrists to prescribe their drugs. For unapproved disorders. To children. It was hard to read. The psychiatrists come off as wishy-washy and inarticulate and maybe even a little stupid. The story of a fifteen-year-old afflicted with a psych-drug-induced nerve disorder is heartbreaking. And the pictures. She’s half wounded bird, half Lolita. Jeez.

What a world.

by Pistol Whip | 13 May 2007 | rant | Comments