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Why We Don’t Go to Therapy The Shrink from Planet Zob, Psychiatry for
a Mad World - an extract from the book.
Why we don't go to therapy.
Okay, while the Zobians are holding planet Earth in stasis, let’s consider the process
which drove them to section the entire human race.
Dr Zab and his team are unusual psychiatrists. As we saw, they observe other worlds looking
for signs of mental illness. When they found our planet, they found what they were looking
for.
The Zobians are more advanced than our species and they look with different eyes at ***
sapiens. How would our world look if a perfectly mentally healthy and completely rigorous alien
psychiatrist was observing us? What would be different in their eyes than in ours?
When we are mentally ill, it is very difficult to be objective about the state of our mental
health. This is why psychiatrists have their use – they are psychiatrists because they
are not us. They have an external objective viewpoint which they use to see the truth
of what we are. Normally it is difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to do this for
ourselves. For example, when we are deluded, we will usually have no grasp of the fact
that we are deluded. We think our delusions are real. In fact, most mentally ill people
perceive themselves as mentally healthy, and that is one of the delusions they have.
This is one of the problems in mental health; that the ill people think they are healthy.
It is for this reason that most ill people do not turn to a therapist: they think therapists
are only for the other people – the ill ones. So on our planet it is the rare few
people who voluntarily go to see a therapist. Another reason that people don’t usually
go to a therapist voluntarily is that psychiatry often has a frightening presence, and it is
true that for many people the experience of mental illness and sometimes its treatment
are utterly terrifying. Psychiatry conjures up images of bizarre lunatics wandering the
streets in bewilderment, talking to empty spaces. We imagine psychotic axe murderers,
intent on killing people because God told them to do it, or we may think of the prospect
of being told we are mad and being put into a straight jacket, struggling to escape, and
being drugged against our will. Images of being strapped to a hospital bed and being
given electro-convulsive therapy may float into our minds. None of this is pleasant
to contemplate, and these extreme aspects of mental illness can scare us away from the
whole idea of psychiatry. It’s far more pleasant to go down the pub instead, or watch
telly and keep these disturbing thoughts at bay.
For me, psychiatry was for a long time a very scary subject. I was introduced to various
forms of mental illness at an early age. When I was about 13 I was told about manic depression
(now called bipolar affective disorder), and schizophrenia. I was told a story about
a doctor of psychiatry who one day ‘just flipped’ and turned up for work in his pyjamas.
It seemed clear to me in those formative years that at any moment my own mind might
flip and I would become one of those dangerous lunatics and spend the rest of my life in
a mental hospital. I became utterly terrified and severely neurotic. I remember for a
long time lying awake at night waiting to hear voices, and panicking. There were no
voices, of course, because I didn’t have schizophrenia, but with the little knowledge
I had back then I didn’t know that. I had severe misconceptions about the nature
of mental illness, which took a long time to correct.
Another important reason why people usually don’t go into therapy is that therapy is
all about truth. The therapist will put their clients’ minds under scrutiny, looking
for flaws in perception. To admit to being at fault is an uninviting prospect, so strong
is our fear of embarrassment – the therapist might tell us we are wrong, and that’s just
not nice. More worryingly for a prospective client, is that the therapist will also look
into their moral behaviour. They are certain to see the truth of our actions and potentially
expose our dark side. Instinctively, we know that therapy will catch us out – it
might expose the truth, and so we usually steer well clear of that truth-revealing process.
Finally, there is another reason which can explain why people often don’t go to a therapist.
It has to do with social esteem. If we go to a therapist, the implication is that
we are ill: we instinctively feel that to become a client means to be worthless, powerless,
and useless, somehow low down with respect to our peers. Deep inside us, we spot this
label of worthlessness, and we don’t like it. There is a sense of shame which we might
feel. For reasons which we will look at in later chapters, we fight violently to avoid
slipping down the ladder of social esteem. If we go to a therapist, the implication
is that we are low down on the ladder (or at least that’s how it feels).
For these reasons, and possibly others, we don’t usually go to therapists, we don’t
usually read books on therapy, and we don’t usually look inside our own minds. Most
of us don’t really like therapy.
Given that there is so much fear surrounding the idea of therapy, it follows that the people
who do enter therapy are notable not for their weaknesses, but rather for their exceptional
courage. People who don’t run away from therapy are the people who want to grow, and
become healthy.