I’m doing coursework at a community college in order to earn substance abuse counselor certification. This is my first semester. One instructor teaches all twelve courses in the program. This is about her.
The program has classes in various counseling skills and classes like pharmacology and introduction to dual disorders. The instructor claims over 25 years in counseling, and her counseling classes so far have been well-taught and useful, but…
She is shockingly naive about “recreational” drugs and their effects and has on a number of occasions given jawdroppingly incorrect answers to some simple questions in the pharma class, which is supposed to be a thorough review of the effects of psychoactive drugs.
Example one: a student asked if the reason addicts needed to take increasingly larger amounts of drugs was because they developed a tolerance. The instructor’s answer was no, it was because the addict’s brain, after experiencing the effect of the drug, just wanted more and more.
Example two: I asked for a clarification of a reference in the text to “old” brain vs. “new” brain, which later in the text was defined as: old brain is the part of the brain all animals have, and the new brain is the parts that developed in man like the neocortex and such. (Sorry for the ultra-lame definition.) She said to me the old brain is the brain before you try drugs, and the new brain is your brain after drugs, which wants more and more drugs. Wow. Even after we covered the correct answer in class, she did not acknowledge her error.
These are but a few of the pearls of wisdom she has dropped during class. She has a MS in psychology, by the way. She also is kind of a loon about medication in general, and has proudly proclaimed several times that she does not take any medication, ever.
Which leads me to Tuesday’s intro to dual disorders class. For those who don’t know, dual disorders, also known as dual diagnosis, is when a person suffers from a mental disorder, such as bipolar disorder or depression, as well as drug and/or alcohol addiction. This is more common than you may think. I am such a person.
The instructor has made it clear that she does not believe in the “medical model” of addiction, which essentially views addiction as a chronic, progressive, incurable disease (much like diabetes), for which total abstinence is the only effective treatment. (Again I apologize for the lame definition.) This is the definition of addiction held by the AMA, among other professional associations. I have not pressed her for what she does in fact believe in for a number of reasons, including the fact that she is a Christian and works that into each and every class as well, so I’m afraid that her answer will include Jesus, and I don’t want to go there. Nope. No sir. Don’t wanna.
All this, and thanks for sticking with me, is the introduction to this: on Tuesday she showed part of a movie called “Psychiatry: An Industry of Death.” This movie starts out with a bunch of “statistics” showing how many deaths can be attributed to psychiatry, and their lust for profit, and how they medicate so many people, and how the whole idea of mental illness is a crock without a shred of actual proof. It then refers to the proprietors of Bedlam, the 18th century London insane asylum, as “psychiatrists,” and their crude methods of attempting to cure the insane as “the medical model.” Oh shit, I think. But wait, it gets worse.
Eugenics is mentioned, which is blamed on psychiatrists, and the Nazis show up, with lots of graphic images, and the whole thing is blamed on “Nazi psychiatrists.” We quickly move into apartheid, which is blamed on psychiatrists, and the racism card is played. It segues into image after image of lobotomies, shock treatments, babies being tormented by dripping water, Pavlov, Skinner, Watson… mercifully the class is over. The instructor, who has been exhorting the class throughout with tidbits like, “see, that’s why you have to know your HISTORY,” announces she will show the rest of the movie next class. I go up and ask to see the DVD case. I pull out the booklet and lo and behold, the movie was made by the Citizen’s Committee for Human Rights, which is sponsored by the Church of Scientology.
I pointed this out to her, and she gave me a bright smile and said “That’s right!”
Here’s my dilemma. It’s a bit complicated. First, I am well-educated, well-read, have at least a modicum of critical thinking skills, and my time at the Dope has trained me to see a straw man a mile away. Most of the rest of the class? Not so much. They ate this shit up. Exclamations of “No!” That’s hella deep.” et al resonated throughout the movie, and when the racism card came up, that fanned the flames a bit.
Now I have been in AA for a few 24 hours, and thanks to a lot of hard work I now know it is not my job to correct the teacher, and I have kept my mouth shut during her many gifts of misinformation to the class, no matter how misleading and even dangerous they have been. Not. My. Job. Just gonna do the classwork, get the coursework done and move on. I am not going to do any more classes at this here community college after this semester, but I am in too deep now and have spent 700 bucks which we don’t really have to spare, so I will bite my tongue and stick it out.
But this is beyond the pale. Absolutely beyond the pale. Most of my classmates are not kids, have not been to any college before, many grew up pretty low on the socio-economic totem pole, with all that implies. Any many, like me, are recovering addicts and alcoholics who have spent much of their adult life in their disease. Simply, quite a few of them have not been provided with the educational background or acquired the critical thinking skills necessary to see through this terrifying straw man ridden hatchet job of a “documentary.” Am I coming across as a judgment-having privileged racist? Maybe I am. But I am also stating facts, and I saw firsthand that the vast majority of my classmates bought this disgusting shit hook line and sinker. Honest.
Add this to the fact that most of the dual diagnosis clients they will encounter in the field will most definitely need to be under the care of a shrink and need to be on meds just to be able to sober up, and to my thinking the showing of this movie is starting to border on the criminal.
So there it is. I am almost sure that of course I will continue to hold my nose, keep my mouth shut, and so on. It’s not my job to be a whistleblower. Is it? It wouldn’t do any good anyway. Would it? Any and all opinions welcome. Thanks for reading. I really needed to get this off my chest.
P.S. I just want to touch upon what I said about my classmates. I know that this is community college, and community college is for everybody. I am most emphatically not passing judgment, intellectual or otherwise, on the smarts or ability of my classmates. I also saw that the vast majority of them are not prepared to take a critical look at this movie. As far as they are concerned, the teacher is a college professor, with all the prestige therewith. The teacher showed the movie, the teacher acted like she believed what was presented in the movie, so the movie must be true. I’m not making this up; this was the way many of my classmates reacted to the film.
That’s all. If you want to take a shot at me for being a judgmental racist asshole, so be it. I obviously think there is more to the situation than my judgment of my classmates. It’s a slippery slope to walk, and I almost didn’t write this just because of that. I am willing to hear whatever you have to say. Maybe I am blowing things out of proportion, and maybe my cultural and socio-economic bias is making me blind to the racism and classism I am spouting. I am certainly willing to consider that possibility.
