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prev.cont.The treatment philosophy in psychiatry is just so completely insane. Any kind of mental aberration gets a prescription, and most conversations with patients only go as far as whether their medication is “working.”
Underlying that philosophy is the fundamental premise of psychiatry itself: there is a universally shared reality. The definition of psychosis relies on the fact of that reality, and the approach to diagnosis and treatment relies on the fact that it’s dangerous for people to diverge from it.
What’s the end game? To figure out how to diagnose everything, and eventually find cures for everything? For the first time, I can feel my body asking me to run away. "Run away," it says, "and hope to never cross paths with the people who came up with this."
How is someone supposed to heal in a place like a psych ward, a place that stays afloat by handing out (and injecting, and court ordering) medications with disturbing mechanisms and side effects? A place that evidently needs to operate like a prison to stay afloat? All 24 hours of the day are spent in the same three hallways and three rooms. At least prisoners are allowed to go outside. The staff are allowed to go outside as they please, and when inside, they sit in the nurses' station, their own fourth room, which is absolutely off-limits to the patients. They sit in that room, protected by lock and key, wire and glass, wood and concrete, making jokes about the patients from the belly of the beast.
Maybe I’m being unfairly judgmental of my coworkers after just two and a half days on the job. But if the shoe fits and you’re upset, don’t blame me. It’s the shoe that’s ugly. Maybe you should stop wearing it. Or maybe you agree with me, and you just don’t say anything. You tell yourself you should stop wearing the shoe (it doesn’t really fit, does it?), ask yourself to stop ignoring the obvious, imagine how it would feel to tell your coworkers that they, too, are wearing the world’s ugliest shoe. But the shoe fits, more or less, and saying goodbye is so hard. So you ignore those requests coming from deep inside. You go to work and put on the shoe, and you sit in the beast's belly, ignoring the voice that says "Run away," and "maybe you’re not helping these people as much as you let on."
I’ve gotten into trouble by ignoring nagging voices like that.
The jury is out on whether I even like medicine at all anymore. I guess I’ll just keep careening through life, the wind of undifferentiation in my hair, and take comfort in the fact that no matter what the jury says, they can’t sentence me to a life inside a glass enclosure looking out at people like zoo animals.
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