The last bit about “Maybe after I get this head case straightened out maybe Ill figure out what’s wrong with me.” I would think that if a person who gets a degree in psychology to help diagnose and treatpeople with mental or emotional problems would have accumulated enough information to be able to accurately do their job, that if said doctor had their own issues they would have at least identified
the cause or root while attending school. Im pretty sure a light bulb would go off when topics concerning their issue co-aligned with what they were learning. What if my issues were similar to my doctors?
Also I think a lot of people who take on that profession and had/have their own issues probably choose so because they are empathetic to others problems and don’t want others to suffer. On another hand I’ve also heard from students taking psychology courses that mental/emotional problems that people claim to have are easy to get through and over come, like its all uniform and black and white. When really it’s mostly gray areas. Not everyone experiences and handles the exact same situations. So yep, That’s it for me.
I have never read such an uncritical, assessment of an entire field that was so utterly oarless and confused as to be little better than a circus side show. Several paragraphs of meaningless factoids are trotted out with no indication of any thesis or empirical support of same other than the tedious and insulting wall of anecdotes making thetical noises.
Although if Cecil has the same extensive experience with neuro-psychiatric services that I’ve had as the result of brain trauma and a few decades of rehabilitation dealing with the sequelae, I might be able to at least understand from whence such a jaundice view might hail.
It’s apparent to me that though that he has some serious issues with cause and effect. Perhaps if he had made it clear that virtually all of the “crazy” shit he was pointing to was the result of unimaginable physical, mental and emotional stress and NOT just what you’d expect from a bunch of fuck ups, then maybe I would be making more of an effort to make it clear that I think Cecil probably isn’t making the points a superficial reading might indicate.
And that really was the direction I was going until I remembered that he couldn’t even be bothered to get the definition of transference right.
So I guess my work here is done after all. And after this little diatribe, that will probably take on whole new levels of meaning.
What I find fascinating is that this supposed critique of Cecil’s column is actually a critique of a completely imaginary column that doesn’t say what you say Cecil’s does. Indeed, your posting appears to be distinctly autologistic.
There’s always the infamous time Dr Brindley, psychiatrist, demonstrated the efficacy of his new erectile-enhancement drug by dropping his drawers on stage at a medical conference.
It might help to be more precise with the term “shrink.” I always thought it referred exclusively to psychiatrists, but I just looked it up and apparently it’s also used for clinical psychologists and psychotherapists. IDK, Personally I think you have to distinguish between the 12 years it takes to become a psychiatrist and the 2-3 years you need to get an MSW. It’s sort of like lumping optometrists and ophthalmologists together and then making generalizations about the entire group.
Of course psychology as a field has always had something of an inferiority complex in terms of being taken seriously as hard science. Economics was and probably still is in the same situation. Except that with every iteration of the DSM they seem to just dig themselves a deeper hole. DSM V might strike magma.