I really depends on the conversation, and the participants. You’re always free to start a new one if you prefer. However, when the original topic has pretty much been covered (and there’s a strong consensus, nobody’s hashing it out) then I don’t think people get bent out of shape about it. I dunno. As the OP here, I say hijack away – and if you start a new thread, feel free to linky.
I sympathize with Yag, too, because his remarks about perfection remind me of where I was many years ago (I thought I was a hebephrenic schizoid for a while there in college - shoot, I might’ve been, I dunno). I was scared to death of therapy - I didn’t want anyone messing around with me. Nope. No way.
Beware of Doug, OTOH, you remind me more of my husband. I’m genuinely sorry to read that you’re not happy, but geez – look at your name! Your location! If my name was “Beware of fessie” that would be sending a very specific message, no? It doesn’t surprise me that several therapists have failed to reach you, because that’s really not their job. It’s your job to reach them. This is your life, your journey. It’s your pain.
But, that’s not to say “You must change! Now!!” You DO sound like a really interesting and accomplished person. I don’t see anything wrong with remaining single - being in a relationship IS a lot of work, and finding a good one is even more work (unless a person happens to get very lucky).
Meh. I think it says a lot about a person. In my case, things I’m not yet willing to face.
BWHAHAHA! Good one!
Oh, wait… 
But seriously, not having a sense of humor or being a conversationalist would make the person you are with feel witty and bright. I know I’d feel less intimidated. Is it that you can’t tell a joke or you don’t enjoy jokes either?
I’m single and want to remain single. I’m happy with my life and my friends. I probably could find someone to have sex with, but due to my lax standards I caught something that I could pass on to others… so I don’t.
I’m happy living alone and having lived with enough women at various times, I know that living with most people just gets on my last nerve.
Well, if the OP says to hijack away, who am I to disagree?
I would not be able to trust someone who would have me committed for saying this. Similarly, I wouldn’t be able to trust them if they would have me committed for saying I’ll go shoot up the grand central station with an UZI I bought yesterday. They can, of course, have police waiting at my house to arrest me when they find me in possession of an UZI, and maybe some sort of premeditated attempt to commit murder charge, but the decision to, or not to, go to a mental institute or jail should be mine alone. The reason I wouldn’t be able to trust them is that I can’t be sure that my idea of what is ‘safe’ is consistent with theirs. I might think staying up for 24 hours drinking is ‘safe’, they might decide that it’s ‘harming myself’, for example. (Obviously that’s a contrived example)
I think we mean slightly different things by impossible. When I say something is impossible given your current choices I mean to say that “it can’t happen unless you choose something else”. Or, to put it another way: given the choice to never board an airplane, flying on an airplane is impossible. Sure, the premise could be wrong (you might be forced onto an airplane), but I’m conveniently assuming that your choice is the way things are until you change your mind.
Given the way you’re using impossible, I will concede that me being in a relationship is not impossible. Someone could decide that, despite me making very little attempt at social contact, and zero emotional contact, they want to be in a relationship with me. I’m not actively forcing everyone away by being rude to them or anything, and if they, for some strange reason, want to move things past ‘lunch friends’ then I’ll consider it. Hasn’t happened yet, though.
I’m worried because seeing a therapist would be out of curiosity, not because I think that there’s anything wrong that absolutely requires ‘fixing’. If I thought that I did have problems that must be solved, and that a therapist would solve them, I’d be there in a heartbeat, despite the minimal risks. That, however, is not the case, so I let my inner paranoid run free :). After all, it doesn’t make much sense to me to risk “ability to get insured” for the possible reward of “satisfying my curiosity”.
My biggest worry about therapy in general is that I may say or do something to negatively impact my life in the future. When I’ve got a life that I’m living just fine as it is, I don’t want to take risks that could jeopardize that, unless I have a damn good reason.
I have had one brief encounter with a therapist (I was forced), and it ended up with the therapist telling me how they would feel in the situations I described. I suppose they were trying to empathize with me, or something?
Thanks, Maastricht. I was brought up to never say thanks without a specific reason, but in this case, you’ll have to make do with this. (in fact, punished in some form or other if I said thanks without being able to give a reason)
“Have you committed” is really a misnomer. They closed the mental hospitals a couple of decades ago (right before the number of homeless went through the roof). People aren’t “committed” anymore. Nobody wants to pay for it.
But if you told someone in the medical field that you had specific plans to harm yourself or someone else, then yes, they would have a professional obligation to seek treatment for you. It’s called an “emergency hold”. That’s just the nature of their job, it’s a requirement of being licensed. Kind of like the way childcare workers are obligated to report physical signs of abuse.
Y’know, if someone posted something like that HERE, people would act. We just would, it’s an ethical obligation.
There was a lot in the press about psychiatric treatment recently, because of the shootings at Va Tech. Laws vary by state and situation, but a typical emergency hold is roughly 72 hours. Just long enough for the crisis to pass. Doing more than that, intervening in someone’s life against their will, is very, very difficult.
The only people who “are committed” are people like Andrea Yates, who drowned her children. Convicted criminals are occasionally committed.
To the best of my knowledge, and again IANAD, specific threats of violence against yourself or someone else are the only red flags. Hmmm, or maybe hallucinations? I don’t know, perhaps if a patient is hearing voices and talking back to them, perhaps then a doctor will do something even if the patient doesn’t want to. Probably depends on their insurance 
.
OTOH, I don’t think there are any kinds of “abnormal” ideas, or thoughts, that come up in therapy that cause the therapist to act. I think they’ve pretty much heard it all - sex with anyone (or anything), hatred, love, fixations, quirks, phobias, fears.
But I can understand fearing that our intimate thoughts will be rejected or mocked, or land us in trouble. Especially if you’re someone who’s avoiding relationships and trying to fake perfection. I used to feel that way myself.
Typically I wouldn’t bother with bothering you on this, because it’s absolutely your free choice to live an isolated life. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with it.
But you describe a perspective on the world that isn’t entirely accurate – and I wonder if those inaccuracies are guiding your choices. You seem to assume that being in a relationship (whether therapeutic or romantic) means being controlled and learning to hide flaws. That isn’t necessarily true at all, BUT it IS sometimes true of dysfunctional families. It IS sometimes true of abusive parents.
And then, it’s my experience that we DO tend to find what we expect. We tend to interpret our experiences based on our assumptions, so our views are corroborated more often than not. Sometimes we wind up trapped by preconceived notions.
If someone wants to challenge their assumptions, therapy is an opportunity. Posting on a messageboard is another opportunity 
.
Yag, Doug, and anyone else who feels the same way, have you investigated the autism spectrum; specifically Asperger’s Syndrome? And Doug, have you checked into AD/HD (which can be comorbid with Asperger’s)? What I’m seeing from you both is sounding like that kind of thing rather than a personality disorder.
That is unfortunately not yet true.
• People still get committed; while there are fewer large sprawling gothic facilities to lock us in, it hasn’t made involuntary commitment a thing of the past;
• Commitment, while generally not of the “for the rest of your life” variety that was common decades ago, is generally indefinite (they can keep you and keep you) and the trend is towards revolving-door: once you’ve been in once, they’re more likely to put you in again, and again, and again.
• Several states now allow for involuntary commitment not only on the basis of “danger to self or others” but also “gravely ill and in need of treatment”.
•It’s not like a criminal court, it’s not “sane until proven psychotic”. They don’t have to prove you’re a danger to yourself, or that you’d slash people with a knife if not locked up. In some jurisdictions the hearing is pro forma: if a psychiatrist thinks you ought to be locked up, psychiatrist says so, judge looks at allegedly psychotic you over there saying you ought not to be, and you get locked up.
Please Google “Paul Henri Thomas electroshock”. I think you’re in for a, ummm, sorry shock.
Meanwhile… I can related to some of what Yag Rannavich is saying. I myself oscillate quite a bit from feeling there’s nothing different about me & I just had a sequence of events happen that resulted in psychiatric incarceration, and feeling that whether I go along with it being called an “illness” or prefer the more neutral “difference”, I am different. When I’m thinking of myself in the latter terms, I’m most often going to centralize the ways in which I don’t mesh socially, that I don’t really learn who individual people are, that without me consciously intending it I am emotionally less involved with individual people and instead get an emotional attachment to the group as group.
Yag Rannavich should know and expect that statements such as those he has made in this thread are going to elicit “There’s something wrong with you, dude, you need HELP” responses. If he’s pretty clear with himself that he doesn’t consider these differences to be a problem, he may find these threads run better if he’s emphatic about that; if on the other hand he’s exploring the possibility that there’s something he’s missing out on (aside from a smoother fake front), there might be a middleground between “This is how I am, respect my differences!” and “Yo, man, you’re a sociopath, you got mental illness and you need psych drugs”, the latter clearly being a form of response & advice he doesn’t welcome.
For good reason, in my experienced opinion.
So, what, you’re saying you went to a therapist and said “Gee, I’m feeling down and I don’t connect with people” and you got locked up? There HAS to have been something more dramatic involved.
I won’t deny that you have been treated badly or by incompetent doctors, but c’mon, it’s not like that’s commonplace.
I know someone who’s been batshit insane at times – we’re talking many, many suicide attempts – and she’s still out roaming around. Nobody ever tried to lock her up. Actually, she’s doing a lot better now, following ECT (hey, for her, it worked) (she was really loopy for a few months afterwards though).
However, I am making a couple of big assumptions here – first, that someone who can participate in lucid conversations online and has some financial wherewithal (Yag described being able to earn a living) is well enough to seek and receive ordinary outpatient therapy; and second, that someone who takes the time to describe his fears about therapy is looking for a way to overcome those fears in order to receive treatment.
I may be completely wrong about both of those.
You have to understand my “viewing angle”: I go to conventions of people who have been labeled mentally ill, and who are organized against forced treatment. Naturally that’s going to concentrate those of us who have had spectacularly bad experiences with forced treatment. Note that that doesn’t mean those experiences are discountable, invalid, etc; but that I do get easier and more pervasive interaction with outspoken folks who’ve gotten the shitty end of that particular stick and who are inclined to talk about it rather than hide and hope no one finds out.
Having said that… to answer your question, NO, there does NOT have to be something more dramatic involved. People have been incarcerated in psych wards and subjected to forced treatment for LESS cause than “I’m feeling down and I don’t connect with people”. Honestly, do you think we’d bother to have a movement if the only people who got locked in the looney bin were demonstrably and genuinely violent berserkers?
I actually don’t know how commonplace it is. I don’t think anyone does, and that’s part of the problem. It’s commonplace enough to fill a large auditorium and generate a movement, but as a percentage – ?? A significant portion of the folks who have been involuntary psychiatrized are very private about it — we therefore don’t know the circumstances of their commitment. A significant portion of the folks who are not so private about it are somewhere short of overwhelmingly articulate, urbane, unflappable, and in possession of supportive evidence, thus leaving those who hear their tales to wonder if things actually happened as those folks described it. (Hey, that’s one of the big reasons that people do keep their silence. One of the quickest ways to be thought a nut is to complain that you got locked up for being nuts when you hadn’t actually done anything to precipitate that. I kid you not.)
Certainly, though, however often it does happen, its occurrences take place contemporaneously to other people not being incarcerated who then turn out to actually be dangerous to self or others. Not to mention people actively seeking help and not getting it. I know that may seem contradictory; but I think it mostly points out the inability of psychiatrists (or anyone else for that matter) to predict dangerousness with accuracy.
Yeah, as I said, he’s got to be more explicit about what kind of feedback he’s open to. He does seem pretty emphatic that getting psychiatric help is not on his list of possibilities though.
Holy cow, I really didn’t know that.
I wrote out about 4 different replies, with varying levels of detail concerning the psychologists and psychiatric patients with whom I am personally familiar. I know quite a few of these people, but somehow it seems less than circumspect to go around blabbing about them (even anonymously).
Anyway, in one of those earlier versions I said something along the lines of “Obviously I can’t deny what you’re saying.” Sorry that didn’t make it to the final cut - I didn’t mean to disrespect you or your experience. Much less the movement of which you are a member. I found your post very moving.
In my opinion, Yag’s willingness to discuss his experience is already a sign of progress. I’d never suggest that therapy is the only route to personal growth.
I dunno - surely there’s plenty of room for a whole, wide range of “normal” human beings.
Certainly. It’s just in some ways mental health professionals are the least likely to tell someone that he or she is a little odd, but not too bad.
Have you read the thread about Midwives vs. OBs vs. GPs? There’s a brief discussion at the end about why OBs have such high rates of “bad outcomes”. Part of it is that they end up with all the high-risk pregnancies, but part of it is arguably that they see a potential baby in distress in every womb, and make different choices than a Midwife might, which in turn leads to a situation where an emergency c-section is performed.
I think a dose of that same mentality, a dose of experience with truly troubled people who sometimes seem normal, and a dose of experience with troubled individuals who have been helped with therapy/drugs/etc., mixed with the lack of brightline tests to distinguish between the mentally ill, and those who aren’t sometimes lead to “bad outcomes” for the mentally ill. AHunter3 sees more than his share of those with bad outcomes–and periodically comes along to point out that seeking help with mental health issues is not without risks.
No worries, Fessie! I didn’t take anything you said as disrespectful. Me, I have a well-known tendency to climb up on my soapbox whenever the topic arises, so thanks for listening.
That’s certainly t-shirt worthy 
How about I meet you in the middle…I don’t consider my differences to be a problem, but I’m exploring the possibility that there’s something missing. I don’t, as of yet, know what it is I’m missing out on by not having emotional relationships with other people.
I’m not really looking for specific advice…
Getting ‘psychiatric help’ is an option, however, it’s only an option if my conditions are met. Or if I become convinced that I actually have a problem which, if left alone, would present a greater risk than the risk of seeking such help.
You’re right. I do assume that being in a relationship means being controlled and learning to hide flaws. I’ll extend it a bit further and say that the only way to be free of it is to exist where there are no other people. As for my family…well, one of my parents may have been psychologically abusive, maybe not, I can’t remember. And no, they didn’t leave so early that I don’t remember them.
Fears…I really don’t like that term, since I’m not afraid of therapy, not in the ‘someone pulls a gun on you in an alley’ sense of fear. I am looking for a way to ‘receive treatment’, but only because I’m curious. I’m curious what it is therapists do, and what people get out of it, and what the nature of the help it provides is. My preferred method of understanding something is to involve myself in it, after evaluating the risks, and observe. The not-quite-as-good method is to try to learn it from other people, but that only gives me secondhand experience. I’m also open to the possibility that it will help with something I don’t currently recognize as a problem.