This page serves two purposes:
Give you an idea about me and help you assess whether we should work together
If we don’t work together, it might help in assessing whoever you do end up working with
I care a lot about this part. Therapists and psychiatrists get away with a lot. No one checks their work in a meaningful way and whoever sees them as a patient or client has no choice but to trust them.
Who is responsible for the state of mental healthcare, therapists, psychiatrists today? So many places to point fingers. People, systems (or lack thereof), societal orientations, at-large priorities and powers that be. All of us. Importantly, not in any one direction or at any one person.
I am upset (i.e. hurt) about the ordeal because I care. And we don’t get upset about something unless we secretly hope it can and/or should change. The hidden hope within my upset: that we realize a society where we do not need to rely on any gatekeepers of mental healthcare in the first place. An emotionally healthy society is the answer, not better therapists and psychiatrists. We therapists and psychiatrists are little more than necessary symptoms of a sick society. This situation will exist until society itself heals, which I hope we will see someday. As enough of us hurt and heal, I hope we start to realize we are in this together. Then, that we do something about it together.
Things I would say to fellow therapists, psychiatrists (& all the other titles):
Our responsibility is to provide guidance and support in mapping out a journey towards healing that everyone is capable of leading themselves. All humans are capable, I know this to be true. We don’t need large swaths of time to make a meaningful difference if we know what we’re doing. If you forgive my being simplistic about it to make the point, a ‘good’ therapist or psychiatrist can do in weeks what a ‘bad’ one can’t do over the course of years.
Like everywhere else within or without medicine, second opinions and outside perspectives are critical. We should not expect to be believed right away or just because. Anyone who claims to be a healer and the like should not be trusted until they prove that they are worthy of it. Myself included.
Humility above all.
People are not guinea pigs.
There are better ways to treat people than empirically.
Medicines are not a substitute for psychotherapy.
Medicines should always be prescribed on a timeline, not indefinitely.
Innovations and new interventions abound, learn them.
Learn what language someone speaks, then speak it.
Don’t strong-arm others into speaking your language.
If you don’t know how to speak someone’s language, admit that. You can still work together from there.
Stop assuming you know someone better than they do.
You do not know someone better than they do.
In all things, assumption destroys the path to true knowing.
Exception: assuming you could be wrong about your assumption.
This is not the place to give advice and directives.
There is no such thing as a positive or negative emotion.
Stop projecting and treating your own anxieties through the person you’re treating.
Coping mechanisms are temporary tools that can worsen things when used too long.
Validation is often harmful.
This work that we do is a great responsibility, there is nothing casual about it.
When you inhabit compassion instead of judgement, you get to the roots of things.
We can delude ourselves into believing we are being compassionate when we are actually being judgmental.
Always question your judgements.
Try not to invade or influence someone else’s experience with your own.
When you do insert your experience into someone else’s, recognize it. Name it out loud.
Psychoanalytic principles are important, so are modalities like Internal Family Systems. But none of it should be treated like religion. Build a pantheon of approaches.
Know your history—of psychology, psychiatry, medicine, drugs, peoples and cultures, and on.
If you want to sit across someone’s suffering, you should attempt to be as knowledgeable as is within your capacity in as many different approaches of understanding people as possible.
The deeper one’s knowledge in medicine, physiology, spirituality—all fields related to understanding the human, really—the greater one’s ability to be of aid for the things we call psychological and emotional.
Knowing only ‘psychology’ is skateboarding with one wheel.
Psychedelics, in and of themselves, are not the answer. Just ask any culture around the world that’s been using them for thousands of years.
If you are giving advice and directives, you are no longer a psychotherapist. You are a coach.
If you are a coach, you are mostly someone who believes your life experience informs you, in and of its own virtue, enough to direct another’s life. Quite a serious supposition. I hope it’s a well-founded one.
The connotation and meaning of mental healthcare is an inadequate way of understanding. But I don’t really have something better. Language fails us here. I think that’s feature, not a flaw, illustrating the complexity of understanding our human experience. We should treat it as such.