Restigmatize mental illness

 

Sadly, NYT doesn’t publish all of my pungently condemnatory comments. Here is one for oblivion, dripping with a strange irony:

Trump has accomplished what countless do-gooders of the liberal persuasion have largely failed to do: He has destigma­tized mental illness. His is the first blatantly, proudly psycho­logically disturbed presidency, with his two virulent Cluster B personality disorders (Narcissistic and Antisocial). And he has so normalized his dysfunction that almost half the population sees a “playful sense of humor” where there is predatory cruelty. People, breathing four years of his ether, have come to view person­ality disorder as mere person­ality, narcissism as bravado, psychopathy as “winning.” So I suppose we could say “Thank you, Don. You have caused us to believe that the most pernicious mental illness is nothing other than an adversary’s ad hominem insult.”*

Goodness! Could it be true? That Trump has succeeded where all the sweet propa­ganda, the somber admonitory billboards, the Oprahs and Army Corps of twenty-something social workers have failed? To have us metro-emasculate mental dysfunction, diametrically transforming toxicity and dire illness into sympathy and respect for personhood?

I know the goal of destigmatization has been to help people with psychological problems not feel shameful, and to have their audience not think they are “dangerous and unpredict­able.”** But our problems don’t deserve this finesse, this politically correct treatment. They are the injury caused by flawed parenting. They are murdered souls*** and lost love that didn’t have to happen. They are the prevention of identity formation, and of the future. And in the public sphere, they are the loss of billions of dollars in productivity,**** the poisoning of an entire culture, and they are homicide. President Trump is the “I AM WHO I AM!”***** of moral destruction not because he chose to be a rogue, but because of his childhood and the disorders it implanted. Say them: Narcis­sistic Personality Disorder. Antisocial Personality Disorder, also known as sociop­athy and psychopathy. These are the words that should be on billboards, the targets whose bullseyes are the wounds we carry into adulthood, that parents inject into their “poison container” ****** children.

Frankly, the woke destigmatizing of psychological disorder is just another species of the faux wisdom all societies imbibe. We live on the adult plane of defense and illusion and remain ignorant of our deeper nature. Arthur Janov noted that parents hedge their children in, after which children hedge themselves in.****** This is what we do to ourselves when we avert our eyes from mental disaster and indictment. Society deserves better. Trump deserves worse.

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 * Actually, the comment was published many hours after it was submitted for review, in the dead of night when the world is asleep. This is what NYT does when it wants to appear accepting but doesn’t really mean it.

** https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/07-08/upfront-destigmatizing.

*** https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/health/leonard-shengold-dead.html.

**** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsR4wydiIBI&t=514s

***** https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/why-does-god-call-himself-i-am-that-i-am.html.

****** https://psychohistory.com/articles/the-history-of-child-abuse/. See first subheading.

******* https://www.amazon.com/Primal-Scream-Arthur-Janov/dp/0399505377.

 

Hasty draft: Let's hope the cancerous scumbag is gone

 

Here is my comment to a New York Times op-ed piece:

Mr. Bruni’s article is superb for what it says, and for what he had the nuance and discretion NOT to say: Maybe this 46 percent of the voting population are flawed in a special, different way from the ways all human beings are flawed. Maybe there’s a splinter deep at the bottom of their heart that circumstances have turned to angry pain, not just pain more maturely managed as other people do.

We can’t avoid the fact that while everyone contains embedded emotional injury that cannot manifest perfection in their lives, there is something uniquely wrong in people who admire a heartless, malicious and solipsistic man. This wrongness materialized in a client I’ve worked with almost weekly for over a year. I only saw it now, when it appeared under the lens of Trump’s malignancy.

A long time ago, she had rejected the only man in her life she knew to be decent, loving and respectful. She lived in an abusive relationship, and later married a vicious socio­path. She came across as both victimized and childlike, or maybe childish. Divorced, she raised her three children whom she would describe as angelic then demonic. Cooperative and warm then berserk. Loving then psychopathic. How could this be? Months on, I finally saw the Borderline personality (I am purposely and lazily slow to label). She was fun then cruel, caring and trashed their soul. In time, she became engaged to a new man whom she described, in ongoing sessions, as wonderful then childish, solicitous then cloyingly needy, generous then reclusive, different from then like her ex-husband. Conflict and contempt pervaded their new home. I realized that there was no love there.

I had never, in all this time, wondered about her political affiliation. After all, she was a thirty-something mother who enjoyed our therapy, who listened to caring and unpleas­ant confrontations, who had never named any prejudices. Suddenly it came out: She was “extremely conservative” and had a Trump sign on her lawn.

Her nature became clear, or at least clearer. This marriage would either not happen or would fail, and the bond would become progressively toxic. I applied my Bruni concept: Has the unhelped pain in your childhood transformed to anger? Will you snarl or gripe and have discontent on your deathbed, or feel love, loss, sadness, peace? Did you reach a conclusion, when you were forced to become an adult, of condemnation, of a world out of your reach? Have you ever settled, or are you an unsettled person?

I left her with the assignment to look inside, to see what was down there, at the very bottom. I am sure that the best she might find is a primordial ambivalence: fire burning forever or mitigated by some dream of love. For now, though, the ambivalence has landed Trump-side up, and I am hoping my vote defeats her.

Little boy, what are you doing here?

 

My progress note read: “26-year-old client continues to ‘wear’ his fawn-in-the-headlights affect, which has not been understood, possibly, until this session.” Bottom of the note: “We determined that client has a pathological need to see his parents as ‘all good.’ He has effectively ‘EMDR’d’ (retained cognition, lost feeling of) their stunning neglect at critical points in childhood, and now cleaves to them as his primary structure.” Clinical summary suspected that he has never left childhood and ego-syntonically needs his parents as a four-year-old would. Brutal summary is that he is more psychically attached to his Mommy and Daddy than to his fiancée, and that this will cause ruin before too long. I would be surprised if he returns, unless he enjoys these long, doe-eyed peeping-out-of-the-womb silences.

A different client, 63 years old, is diagnosed with Avoidant Personality. He “knows” that every­one bullies and rejects him. I introduced him to Vereshack’s winsome concept of the “time pebble”: “These are the childhood phrases and feelings which . . . lie scattered on the beach of adult conversation.” I suggested that “his sense of being ‘bullied’ is a childhood feeling that has remained in place from early experiences, possibly going back to an epiphany of mortification in second grade.” I offered encouragement: “If you are able to see the childhood roots of your present ‘avoidant’ character, you may then be able to effect safeguards and insights to enable you to improve.” I added that he should NOT look at himself with contempt, telling himself to “grow up,” but that he should have compassion for his holistic self, which is composed of past and present processes.*

Imagine saying that to a seven-year-old – which is essentially what I was doing. With thirty minutes remaining to the session, he got up and left the room.

In so many cases, therapy hopes that the adult client will be primarily invested in his adult persona. We may not realize, deeply, how often this is frustrated. The Borderline we teach solid-gold parenting principles to, which are forgotten or failed by next session. The countless men and women who should tell their parents to shut up and keep their distance, but who continue to be guilted. The alcoholics who drink more after a good session. My clients who still sit on mother’s knee or alone in their childhood bedroom, who I can’t make grow up. Sometimes I purposely – for study’s sake – scare myself by suspecting that most of our clients are only two parts: their injured child psyche at the beginning and the unintentionally insincere words of their presenting problem at the end. Nothing but acting and dreaming in between.

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* Clinical theatre critics may fault me for failing to go full empathic, for not supporting his self-sense: “It must be terrible to feel that everyone is bullying you, everyone is rejecting you.” Empathy is a great healing agent. But when it’s offered to the client whose personality disorder has frozen him at infancy, we would only be encouraging the infantile.