How to Reverse Bad Psychiatry

Psychiatry helps many people cope with mental illnesses ranging from the moderate and episodic to the severe and long-term. But bad psychiatry, like bad medicine or psychology, can cause real distress and harm. Reversing its effects can never completely wipe the slate clean, but people who suffer an incorrect diagnosis or improper treatment can nonetheless overcome the worst effects. Often, expert guidance becomes necessary in the form a second opinion from an experienced psychiatrist or ongoing counseling from a psychotherapist.

Instructions

• 1

  Don't continue to suffer unnecessarily. If your treatment isn't helping you, tell your psychiatrist as soon as possible. Most will listen sympathetically and may readily offer alternative treatments. If you receive medication, describe any uncomfortable or distressing side effects as clearly as you can. However, if you believe your psychiatrist has not listened to you and if you disagree with either the diagnosis or the treatment, you may ask for a second opinion from another expert qualified in psychiatry. By all means, give the psychiatrist treating you a chance to modify a diagnosis or treatment plan but call for another opinion if you remain unhappy with your care.

• 2

  Name the issues that troubled you during your bad episode of care. Allow yourself time to let thoughts come into conscious awareness. Jacques Lacan, one of Sigmund Freud's most original and innovative followers, believed that human beings suffer from any experience they subsequently fail to symbolize. Unsymbolized and unnamed, such experiences haunt the psyche as incomprehensible fears and irrational expectations, black holes of depression and bizarre feelings of panic. They function as emotional magnets, sucking attention and energy into them and leaving little left over for ordinary living.

• 3

  Use other means of expression besides words if words fail you. Begin by drawing, painting, dancing, sculpting or throwing clay. Freud believed that thought gained expression through gesture, art and even bodily tics as well as through speech and writing. Lacan privileged the latter because words are infinitely substitutable. Preoccupation implies fixation and blockage whereas, as Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink argues, finding words for a previously unspoken experience immediately introduces it to a universe of other words and metaphors. Through continuous re-description and thought, the emotional traumas resulting from bad psychiatry become available for psychological integration.

• 4

  Seek psychotherapeutic help alongside psychiatric treatment. Psychotherapists often work closely with psychiatrists and help patients find meaningful narratives for their experiences of both illness and treatment. Depression, for example, may be biologically associated with impaired processing of the neurotransmitter serotonin. But a psychologically internalized authority may perpetuate this biological malaise by subjecting a person to a constant stream of criticism and disparagement. Psychotherapy helps counter the harmful beliefs generated by such mental structures. Knowing how an inner authority functions makes people less inclined to submit deferentially before bad social authorities, psychiatric or otherwise.

• 5

  Convert passive to active. In his famous account of psychoanalytic treatment, Freud said that the goal was "Where Id was, there Ego shall be." Lacan reformulated this as "Where 'it' was, there 'I' shall become." In other words, passive victim beliefs like "it happened to me" or "they did this to me" should become "I arrived, I saw, I experienced it this way." People cannot change the material facts of the past but they can change the significance it holds for them. Historical facts, like bad psychiatric treatment, can't change, but their meaning and influence can.