Secondly, and most importantly, I realized that psychiatry is not an evil in itself, but only a symptom of the malady that the whole Western society seems to be suffering from. To criticize psychiatry without regard to our society’s economy, politics, history or ecology is like treating depression without regard to a person’s lifestyle, income, diet or love. Such treatment, and such critique, generates a lot of visible ‘action’ but is in fact pointless and doesn’t help.

Besides, there are people who’ve said everything long ago and with such clarity that I can never hope to achieve. When’s the last time you read Orwell’s 1984? This book doesn’t even mention psychiatry, but it contains everything that there is to understand about it. If you’ve read and understood this book, I really have nothing else to say to you; and if you haven’t understood it, then no amount of my blogging is going to help you anyway.

And remember: Freedom is when you can say that two by two equals four, even if your Party (or your Doctor) claims otherwise. That’s all there is to it, really.

I am not trying to define good psychiatry here. The definition is no less elusive than that of good sex.

Suddenly the stupidity of the saying dawned on me. If you think about it, this motto of the modern science, when applied to the matters of the soul, becomes most arrogant, narrow-minded and barbaric. Out of the immensely complicated system of the human mind which we don’t understand, where everything is interconnected with everything else, we arbitrarily choose one or two buttons that we are evolved enough to be able to press, and decide to disregard everything else because we can’t control it anyway.  We behave like a child or a monkey inside the cockpit of a 747, who thinks that you fly the aircraft with the yoke and the pedals, and all those blinking lights are there for illumination. Well, maybe this plane will fly… for some time.

Too many people assume uncritically that if they go to a psychiatric hospital they will get help; even more believe that their children/parents/spouses will be helped if they send them there. This is what all the propaganda is about. But it is a lie. A mental hospital in this day and age is not an institution of help – it is an institution of confinement, much like a jail. It is a place in which kept are people who have not committed a crime but have nonetheless made their relatives or friends very uncomfortable with their being around. This point is so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be proved; just look at all the door locks and security guards in any mental hospital. If this institution was helpful, people would want to be there, and none of this would be needed.

Really, think about all the homeless people, all the battered spouses, all the terrified youngsters going through a psychotic episode, all the misunderstood children and suicidal adults longing for understanding or at least for a pacific place to curl up in the corner and sleep it over. Think about everyone who needs to get away from their environment for a while. If the proclamations of the psychiatric industry had some truth in them, if there really existed a place where they could relax and get help, those people would line up to get into this kind of institution! Obviously, a psychiatric hospital is not such a place, because most of the patients hate it there and struggle to break out. Until, of course, they lose their life drive and become dependent on the system.

Now, this is of course not to imply that the mental hospitals are completely worthless. There are people, and many, out there who are either morbidly stupid or completely out of their minds. They cannot survive in a demanding environment of a today’s city and therefore need to be confined and cared for. But to assume that the same mental hospital is a helpful place for all the able people just going through a difficult time, is a tragic mistake.

People who send their relatives to a psychiatric hospital never find out what actually happens there. Parents are told all kinds of stories about how helpful the place is and how much therapy their children receive. They don’t know that the therapy is heartless and superficial, or that the place is extremely boring and unfriendly. They never see their kids crying and begging a nurse for a breath of fresh air after being indoors for days and weeks, or being dragged to their room on the floor by uncaring strangers. They never observe their kids’ free spirit being broken into submission; if they did, they would not forgive themselves.

If there is only one thing to be remembered out of this whole journal, it is this. Please, don’t put your children and loved ones in a psychiatric hospital for help. Put them there because you want to confine them, get rid of them, forget about them! Put them there because you don’t care, or because you hate them – but not because you love them. Don’t fool yourself thinking that you are doing them good. For nothing can be farther from the truth.

Let us consider a traffic light as an example. When it is red, it is very different from when it is green. But think about all the forces in background that are responsible for the traffic light operation. The power plant that provides electricity, the cables that conduct it, the engineering of the light bulb and the physics of light, as well as the philosophy of the city traffic and its regulation – all are absolutely the same in both states, and what is different is only the position of a small relay on the very surface of the process.

In exactly the same way, both mania and depression stem from one common background force, and the difference is only in the way a person reacts to it. When a big black cloud starts to cover the sky and nothing seems to matter anymore, some people succumb to it and halt all activity; others choose to run away from it in denial, putting on a tremendous buffoonery of omnipotence and invulnerability. Sooner or later they are exhausted and the cloud gets them.

That is why there is depression without mania, but there is never mania without depression. That is why the symptomatic treatment of both is bound to be inefficient. What we have to deal with is the black cloud. And to deal with our patients’, we first have to come to terms with our own…

If you want to figure out a particular concept, thing or event, just go ahead and read about it. It doesn’t really matter what you read; you can read everything you find, just as long as you don’t believe everything you read.

If the points of view start to resemble one another, try to find books that have the opposite opinion. If you can’t find them, you are dealing with a taboo; try to find out why it is a taboo. If the opposite point of view is available, try to find the books expressing the opinion that is contradictory to both original opinions. Then use your common sense to come up with your own point of view, and be ready to change it at any moment.

The currently accepted definition of major psychiatric disturbances like schizophrenia implies the impossibility of being cured from them, and describes someone who has had symptoms in the past but is completely asymptomatic now as being in a state of persistent remission. In other words, a schizophrenic once diagnosed is a schizophrenic for life, even if he fails to produce а single symptom over the last decade or two. The truthfulness of this concept is questionable, but at least its reasoning seems non-contradictory. However, it can only be applied if we believe in the validity of the original diagnosis.

Given the ease with which psychiatric diagnoses are nowadays affixed to people, I feel compelled to question this belief in many cases. It is a known fact that in modern psychiatric institutions a diagnosis is often made in a hurry, with a certain degree of superficiality, and in an atmosphere of financial pressure that makes it necessary to use bold and definitive diagnostic labels instead of vague and temporary ones in order for the treatment to be reimbursed. In such circumstances, it seems quite plausible to suggest that at least in some cases the primary diagnosis had been made incorrectly, and therefore the asymptomatic patient in question is not in “remission”, but actually does not have this particular disease, and have never had it!

So what do I do with such a patient? How do I “take him off” of his diagnosis? The answer is not immediately clear.

The most important question therefore is: once we’ve understood it, what do we do with it? How does knowing psychology influence our behavior? The way I see it, the elaborate psychological knowledge we’ve gained is used largely for two things: to manipulate, and to find excuses.

The psychology of manipulation (I shall call it psychoinfluentics) is the money-bringing part of psychology. It has been sponsored by both governments and businesses, because both governments and businesses want people to behave in a certain way. Traditionally, it has been achieved by brutal force and disinformation. The wonder of psychoinfluentics that sets it apart from those earlier means, is that the object of manipulation can now be made not only to obey, but to actually want to conform. Not having to deal with rebellion saves so much headache to the manipulators that it comes as no surprise that they are willing to pay for it generously.

I don’t think I will be very wrong if I say that the greatest majority of people who receive money for their psychology-related services are actually the practitioners of psychoinfluentics. From HR consultants and campaign planners to school psychologists and marriage counselors, they all share essentially the same ultimate goal: to make people behave in a certain way and feel good about it. I cannot think of any paid practical or research activity in modern psychology that is not being funded (perhaps indirectly) by someone who wants to influence people’s behavior in some way.

Of course psychoinfluentics is not only used by professionals. The popular psychology books and magazine columns feed on the desire of laypeople to manipulate everyone around them. How do I make my ____ to behave differently? – this is the most common format of the initial question people ask a psychologist sitting next to them on the airplane. The urge to manipulate is so common and powerful that in some cases it has gone beyond any common sense. Take the phenomenon of the fake smile, for instance. The fake smile is performed in order to make the receiver feel good; but the act of faking a smile makes the giver feel bad. The receiver then senses the discrepancy and becomes irritated; meanwhile, he sends the fake smile back to the giver, and the whole sequence ends with two smiling people silently cursing at each other. The failure of the maneuver is quite obvious; yet, in their uncontrollable desire to manipulate, people continue to fake smiles.

The other big part of psychology, that I shall call psychoexplanology, comes into play when manipulation fails or is not an option – most commonly when people are trying to deal with themselves instead of others. The motto of psychoexplanology is: “This Is Only Human”, and the ultimate goal of its practitioners is to maintain the status quo and feel good about it. No longer needs one to take the blame for the behavior he doesn’t want to change, as he is now armed with a set of excuses good for almost all circumstances of life. Whether it is because he has certain temperament, or is an introvert, or because he was dumped by his girlfriend in the second grade, or because his father didn’t want him, or because his grandma had suffered a nervous breakdown when she was sixteen, is to be determined in each case individually. But the conclusion is always the same: any person in this situation would behave and feel the same way; it is only human; it is only natural. Ooff, what a relief. (Incidentally, psychiatry comes into this picture as a kind of heavy artillery. If the “introvert” talks are not convincing anymore, the missile squads of bipolar psychosis or schizophrenia start showing up on the horizon.)

It is sad that the use of the power of psychology is largely restricted to the practices of psychoexplanology and psychoinfluentics, because I think they totally miss the point. Nietzsche in his “Thus Spake Zarathustra” said “Man is something that shall be overcome”. In exactly the same way, psychology is something that shall be transcended and left behind. It is permissible for the ignorant to behave in accordance with the laws of psychology. But once you have the knowledge of your psychology, you can no longer afford to obey it!

Once you know it, leave it. Un-psychologize. This is the whole point.

Notwithstanding the bias behind the statement, if someone says to me that psychotherapy doesn’t work, I will probably agree. Because the person saying so is most likely referring to the classic American understanding of psychotherapy: “talk therapy.” It is just what it says: two people talk about the problems of one of them. I carry no illusions about such therapy, in part for reasons that I have discussed elsewhere. In my opinion, the majority of people who benefit from talk therapy belong to one of the two categories: those whose problems are so insignificant that they can be helped by a sincere conversation with any intelligent being (and they should really go talk to their friends instead), and those who don’t want to change anything in their life and prefer to use the therapist as a kind of garbage can for their perpetually accumulating waste.

Fundamentally, all that the stereotypical talk therapy can do is generate new words. It allows the client to verbalize his feelings, give coherent definitions to his problems, and re-formulate his “wrong” principles in a different way. If the therapy is successful, the client can gain insight (which is learn to describe his internal happenings in words), reach new understanding (which is improve the wordings of his personal law-book of life) and, hopefully, achieve the improvement (which is also a word).

The whole system is based on a presumption that if you say the right words, the right doings will follow. But the universe doesn’t quite work this way. The acknowledgment of your sins by itself doesn’t cure those who suffer from them, nor does it teach you to live your life differently. To define and describe yourself as kind and balanced a person is not quite the same as to become one in reality; no more so then proclaiming yourself a violinist teaches you to play.

In fact, it works in exactly the opposite way. The more you talk, the less you’re able to do. Moreover, filling your head with the nicely-formulated verbal solutions to your problems discourages you from seeking the real, nonverbal solutions. Planning the future prevents you from perceiving the present. Conceptualizing your experiences spoils all the fun. Producing the more and more elaborate descriptions of your life leaves you no time to actually live it.

Good therapy, therefore, should be more like teaching; the art being taught, the art of living. A good teacher, or coach, does not talk much with his students; his role is to motivate them and gently correct their mistakes while they practise, practise, and practise. There’s no point in having conversations about the art of swimming; one simply needs to get into the water, and swim until he does it well. It may help to have a responsible adult nearby at first to save you if you lose control; but once you’re resuscitated, there’s no need to discuss it for too long – simply jump into the water and try again. The danger of talking about it too much is that eventually you may become completely convinced that you are capable of swimming. With this conviction under your belt you will proudly drown in the first real river on your way.

Don’t talk about it! Do it. Don’t verbalize your feelings; feel them. Don’t acknowledge that you’re bad; become good. Don’t apologize; start behaving differently. Don’t thank; accept. Don’t seek the correct definitions; definition is just a word.

If you don’t have a Zen master nearby as you’re reading this, take something heavy from your desk and, without saying what it is, hit yourself on your head.

The easiest way is not always the best way, especially when dealing with such a complex system as a human persona in the web of its societal interactions. Very few people actually go to a psychiatrist “to fix the flat tire”, that is with only one specific easily fixable symptom in mind. And even when they do seem to have only one symptom, in the course of therapy the picture may prove to be more complicated.

Sometimes it may become apparent that this symptom is only a superficial “patch” – a distractor by means of which the real disturbances are concealed from other people or the subject himself. It is not uncommon for people to pretend, and actually believe, that their problem is simple and solitary, and that the only thing they need is a quick-fix of some kind. Nobody likes to think that they are seriously mentally disturbed, or be reminded about some unpleasant intentions or memories they have chosen to suppress.

For example, if a young mother suddenly finds herself wanting to kill her baby, she will be, for obvious reasons, quite apprehensive of revealing her desire to anyone including herself, and instead will unconsciously channel her frustration in the form of seemingly irrelevant psychological symptoms, such as obsessive-compulsive behavior or hallucinations. It will make very little sense to try and get rid of her behavioral issues with a quick-fix, because the underlying problem will not be recognized or explained, and will produce other issues in replacement for the fixed ones.

But even if our patient really has only one specific symptom, he would not have come to see a psychiatrist unless this symptom has been causing him a considerable discomfort for some time. Not only the symptom now needs to be removed, but the patient may need help with repairing his disrupted environment, or adjusting to a new one. For example, if a man prone to anger outbursts comes for therapy after his wife divorces him, then not only we have to deal with his anger per se (suppose we have a quick-fix for that), but also help him survive the loneliness and sudden financial difficulties that he will have to endure even after his anger is gone.

It is especially apparent in children. When a child has some behavioral or psychological problem, the task of whoever is taking care of it is not only to treat the problem, but also to help the child in his further development. The development of a child into a mature independent adult is unimaginable without his learning to deal with difficult situations and find the way out of them by own effort. By giving the behavior-altering drugs to children we educate them instead to seek easy external solutions, and thus, no matter how helpful and time-saving those drugs may be in relieving symptoms, the developmental aspect of our care will be severely hampered.

And not only this approach saves the patients the effort, it saves the carers one too. I always feel very sad in the hospital when some kid is having a hard time, because the best thing to do would often be to give them a hug and let them cry on your shoulder, but it would of course be “unethical” to do so. To hell with the hugs, but the nurses usually don’t even talk to the kids anymore. What they do is make a compassionate face and say: “M-m, you’re sure having a hard time… Would you like something to help you cope with it?”

The extensive use of drugs has corrupted the whole idea of psychological help, ridiculed the importance of a therapeutic relationship, and stimulated people to be dependent and weak rather then productive and creative. Even if drugs really worked, they wouldn’t be my treatment of choice.