I don’t like to suffer. But if I had to, I would rather suffer from the evilness of my enemy than from the kindness of my friend. An enemy I can fight or avoid; a friend sincerely willing to help is much more difficult to neutralize. Hence, my friend can do me good more efficiently. That is what psychiatry realized long time ago.

There is a thing about modern psychiatry, that makes it both more humane in its nature and, paradoxically, more cruel in its outcome for some patients. Psychiatrists and mental health workers sincerely believe that they do good. That their mission is not that of punishment and suppression, as it was so well portrayed in a famous movie, but that of help and guidance. Now, this is wonderful, but there is one thing that sets psychiatrists apart from many other people who like to help and guide. It is the issue of involuntary help.

Even your common-sense, garden-variety psychology tells you: don’t give advice until asked for! Don’t try to help somebody unless they understand that they need to be helped, and are ready to accept this particular type of help. These are issues that most of young psychiatrists go through when they start their career. But with time, they adopt the paradigm of their teachers, which says that in psychiatry things are different because, presumably, mentally ill people do not by themselves understand what they need, and we are here to provide them with the help that we deem necessary, even against their will.

The theory is good; the implementation is not as reassuring. The notion that you know what the patient needs better than he himself does, requires a therapist to have tremendous amount of wisdom, compassion and purity of mind and soul in order to prevent the whole thing from turning into a terrible abuse. Well, those things are difficult to teach and learn in medical schools; thus, wisdom is substituted by knowledge, compassion by interviewing technics, and purity, I guess, by medical ethics (which these days is mostly about how to protect yourself from legal problems while at work).

The bottom line of what I am trying to say is this. Psychiatry as a system may be regarded as good or evil, depending on the circumstances. Psychiatrists, however, are not evil. They are doing what they had been trained to do, and they sincerely believe that it is good. When you see a psychiatrist ruining your life, remember: he does it inadvertently. He thinks he is helping you; he believes he is your friend. He does not take pleasure in your suffering, as it may sometimes seem – he believes that it is a necessary stage, and his heart is aching for you as he envisions himself in a role of a surgeon cutting someone apart to save their life.

I am not being sarcastic. Most psychiatrists I meet are wonderful people (certainly more pleasure to deal with then some surgeons). Most of them choose this stigmatized profession to serve the greater good. Most of them are full of noble intentions. And this is something every patient needs to understand, and learn to deal with, if they want to keep going their own road.