Comments on: Unbecoming https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/ Science, Psychiatry & Social Justice Sun, 21 Apr 2024 15:34:49 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-278805 Sun, 21 Apr 2024 15:34:49 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-278805 In reply to Birdsong.

CLARIFICATION: [psychiatry] is a uniquely harmful pseudoscience that ruins many people’s lives which makes choosing to ignore the harm it’s capable of doing inexcusable.

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277945 Sun, 14 Apr 2024 18:58:45 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277945 In reply to Elisabeth.

“Neither an Eeyore nor a Tigger be.”

“The Overselling of Gratitude — Always being positive makes no more sense than always being negative”, by Alfie Kohn in Psychology Today

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277714 Fri, 12 Apr 2024 17:29:01 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277714 I think anyone who has the audacity to call themselves a healer of the mind, brain, soul, etc., is remarkably unaware (unconscious) of their own limitations (unhealed wounds).

They should ask themselves why they feel the need to see themselves as a healer, or more precisely, why they feel the need to have others see them as a healer.

In other words, most often in jobs like this it’s the wounded ego that’s in charge, not ‘the wounded healer’ they may (pretentiously) declare themselves to be.

IMHO.

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277516 Thu, 11 Apr 2024 02:46:07 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277516 In reply to Elisabeth.

Elizabeth, I do not see myself as a victim and for you to suggest that I do is very offensive. Expressing displeasure does not equal victimhood; it indicates quite the opposite.

Please remember that you do not know me outside of this forum, a forum that I am very grateful for because it does not shut people down for speaking the truth as they see it no matter how uncomfortable for others, which is the only way that real change (and healing) can occur.

I’m sorry you have been through so much but am delighted you have made so much progress and I hope you continue doing so.

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By: Elisabeth https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277503 Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:45:02 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277503 In reply to Birdsong.

Hi Birdsong, I already experienced iatragenic harm and recovered. I’m about 90% fully recovered, and still have some trauma to work through.
It’s taken years me years… about 10+ so far.
However, I prefer to focus on gratitude for the recovery I have achieved, and for the practitioners who are willing to take responsibility for their harm, and the practitioners who have helped me along the way, primarily herbalists and true healers who have done the work themselves.

I have been through forced psychiatric drugging and physical restraint. I have been through 15 hospitalizations and psychiatric holds, experimented on by doctors and the mental health system as a whole. I literally should be dead right now. I was not supposed to be able to heal or get off of any medication. But I’m med-free and my brain works pretty good.

I choose gratitude. I can spend my whole life focusing on how I was harmed, but I am not a victim anymore. I was. But I don’t want to live the rest of my life that way. I couldn’t heal if I didn’t choose to change my perspective on life and how I relate to the world. That changed my brain and helped me heal more than anything else.

I am sorry for what you have been through. I wish you hope and healing.

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277168 Mon, 08 Apr 2024 09:24:31 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277168 In reply to Elisabeth.

P.S. I will say this: Florian seems to be an unusually self-reflective person with enough integrity to not only stop practicing psychiatry but to call it out publicly for what it actually is: a uniquely destructive pseudoscience that ruins many people’s lives. And for that I, too, am grateful.

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277144 Mon, 08 Apr 2024 03:49:25 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277144 In reply to Birdsong.

CLARIFICATION: …stories like this are good at shedding light on what the purpose of psychiatry really is: a way of denying the reality of the inner healer within each human being.

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277142 Mon, 08 Apr 2024 03:27:48 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277142 In reply to Birdsong.

CLARIFICATION: …unconscious patterns that have ‘clinicians’ wrongly believing their INDOCTRINATION makes them indispensable.

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277118 Sun, 07 Apr 2024 22:10:33 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277118 In reply to Elisabeth.

I have two questions for you: How grateful would you be if the “medications” you were prescribed had caused you significant iatrogenic harm? How grateful would you be if you were hospitalized and drugged against your will? Because in case you don’t know, that’s the unjust reality facing more than a few people, and hypothetically ANYONE who happens to fall into the hands of a psychiatrist at an inopportune moment in their life.

Sugarcoating reality is an insult to the people who’ve been harmed by psychiatry, and no one harmed by psychiatry needs to be preached to.

Maybe you should consider that before you start singing kumbaya.

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By: Elisabeth https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277053 Sun, 07 Apr 2024 03:00:16 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277053 “I feel grief that I was unconsciously living inauthentically for so much of my life. I feel grief about, and want to acknowledge, the patients I may have unintentionally harmed while practicing unconsciously. That grief can be overwhelming…”

I am impressed. A psychiatrist who is doing the work. I appreciate your story and willingness to share, especially on this platform.

I have unconsciously believed psychiatrists are monsters for all of my life. I didn’t realize how afraid I truly was until I caught myself freezing up when I had to go to an appointment last year. My last appointment in the spring of 2023, I felt anxiety by having to sit next to my nurturing and kind trans psychiatrist as she spoke of women’s circles and her respect for me as I could “manage my life/moods” without a mood stabilizer. I got my last prescription for Trazadone, and I am now med free.

I hope you share your healing journey within the psychiatric community. More practitioners could benefit from what you learned about yourself. You could save the lives of patients by educating psychiatrists. Just a thought.

I am grateful for your share. I am grateful that you are doing the difficult work of healing. I have respect for you, even if the small part of me still fears psychiatry.

I look forward to reading The Alchemy of Healing. I love Jung as well.

With gratitude —
Elisabeth, Integrative Health Coach
@wildmoonfeather

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277043 Sun, 07 Apr 2024 01:24:18 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277043 In reply to Birdsong.

…and stories like this are good at showing what the purpose of psychiatry really is: a way of denying the reality of one’s own and others spiritualty.

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-277025 Sat, 06 Apr 2024 22:01:09 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-277025 In reply to Birdsong.

…the biggest being an ability to project unconscious feelings and impulses onto ‘clients’ by way of so-called ‘diagnosis’, which, btw, means never having to face their own demons…

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-276993 Sat, 06 Apr 2024 16:14:10 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-276993 “Through reading Whitmont’s book, I realized I hadn’t ‘examined myself’, and hadn’t put something right in myself, and thus I couldn’t hold the space for clients to put it right in themselves. To me there were unconscious aspects in myself I needed to examine and get clear about… I realized that there were fundamental issues in the way I had learned to participate in and contribute to the mainstream behavioral health system.”

Like any other cult, deprogramming from psychiatry’s omnipresent narrative can be extremely challenging in a culture with an overreliance on ‘experts’, many of whom know diddly squat about themselves or the pontifical world they inhabit. And goodness knows playing the guru has its advantages…

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-276689 Wed, 03 Apr 2024 17:02:30 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-276689 “The power differential and the power of diagnosis and prescribing, really the entire system of behavioral health, wounds the client and the provider. It dehumanizes both and keeps them trapped in a mostly unconscious pattern.”

There’s so much wrong with the “mental health system” it’s hard to know where to begin. But unconscious patterns are where to begin, unconscious patterns that have people wrongly believing they’re “ill” for struggling emotionally, and unconscious patterns that have “clinicians” wrongly believing their “training” makes them indispensable.

However, I definitely think most psych professionals are far more unconscious that any of their “clients”, because to me it seems the “clinician’s” inauthenticity is what keeps the system running the way it does, which is inauthentically.

It’s basically a power struggle that’s as old as time. IMHO.

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By: Mae https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-276618 Wed, 03 Apr 2024 06:19:58 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-276618 Lovely work. Thank you, truly.

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By: Birdsong https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-276481 Mon, 01 Apr 2024 23:05:35 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-276481 In reply to Amy.

Speak for yourself. An apology from psychiatry isn’t enough if their “treatments” have harmed a person’s ability to provide for themselves financially.

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By: Kevin Smith https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-276429 Mon, 01 Apr 2024 18:10:46 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-276429 Thank you Dr. Birkmayer for this generous and enriching narrative. I can’t but help but wonder what the practice of psychiatry would offer if every psychiatrist dared to step into the journey you’ve undertaken. And for the life of me I don’t know how I never made the connection between wounded healer and “wounding healer”! Wow! If there’s a single attribution for me when I think of psychiatry, it is the structural (systemic) inclination and propensity to “wound”, a rather troubling consideration given the nature and role of the profession.

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By: Someone Else https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-276082 Fri, 29 Mar 2024 22:54:58 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-276082 “I feel grief about, and want to acknowledge, the patients I may have unintentionally harmed while practicing unconsciously.”

There are so few psychiatrists who will apologize for the harm the DSM deluded psychiatric and psychologic industries are systemically doing. Thank you for apologizing.

And I agree, Jung’s theology is likely closest to the truth. I’ve got my own, wounded researcher and truth sharer, story … and it is about equating my conscious and unconscious selves. Ironically, brought about by being slowly weaned off the psych drugs, by my former psychiatrist.

Thank God, for the psychiatrists who are actually slowly, and with respect for their patients’ opinions, weaning people off the psych drugs.

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By: Amy https://www.madinamerica.com/2024/03/unbecoming/#comment-276078 Fri, 29 Mar 2024 21:05:53 +0000 https://www.madinamerica.com/?p=255360#comment-276078 Thank you for your ability to do what was best for you and your patients. I worked with a Jungian analyst for 14 years, and when l called out her shadow side or projections, she bristled and denied it. I should have left much sooner. The upside is that l did become familiar with Whitmont, Hollis, and particularly Kalsched, who’s writing on trauma was pivotal. Admitting ones mistakes is no small thing, and an apology goes a long way when harm is done.

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