Page Eleven, website outline
Abraham Maslow
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I found these two insightful observations in another text, written by a person who is neither Maslow nor Krishnamurti. I fear from the context in which I found them that these quotes are being liberally used by new-agers of the airhead philosophy variety to proselytize for meditation and yoga and letting go of ego and becoming one with everything, which are fine ideas if you don’t go haywire with them and shoot out into the ozone. But most new-agers do shoot out into the ozone.
I, a committee of one, will turn these insightful observations to a completely different purpose. I use them here to condemn, fervently, this psychopathology of the average. To condemn, vehemently, the idea of becoming well adjusted to a very sick society. It is the succumbing to the conditioning that browbeats us to become part of this average, to become this so-called “well-adjusted” robot in the sick society, that is partly responsible for allowing the sickness of society and the lacklustre of the “average” to proliferate to their current malignant levels.
And now a hypothesis of my own (formed with evidence garnered from much personal experience):
Many people who go into the psychology profession, at any level, do so because they are pretty well screwed up. They believe that taking this course of study will make them better, and then they can hang up a shingle and make OTHER people better. Fraid not.Let me qualify that a bit and narrow my hypothesis down to therapists in Franklin County, Massachusetts. While I lived the first half of my life in eastern Mass, I did have some very good therapists. But moving to western Mass has been a descent into ignorance, in the therapy world and in many other ways too.
I stopped taking the antidepressant (celexa, if that’s how you spell it) midway through December 2010, having started it about seven months before. The longer I stayed on it, the more tired and listless I became. Lowering the dose was tried, but over time the same thing happened. I still take the anti-anxiety, but an attempt to raise the dose from a half milligram to a whole one brought on the same tired, listless result. There are a great many things my abnormal immune system doesn’t like, and I don’t think it likes these drugs.
… Now it’s April 2010, and I don’t take the anxiety pill anymore either. Though I’d like an anxiety pill to use as needed, to take when it really flares up, they won’t prescribe them that way anymore. At least not here in Franklin County, where people make their own rules about absolutely everything. No, they make you take these pills twice daily and have the junk in your system all the time. I don’t want it in my body all the time, and neither does my fierce immune system. The longer I stay on any one of these “psych” drugs, the more side effects I have. A doctor told me twenty-five years ago when I had side effects that I couldn’t take these types of drugs and should never take any again. But they keep coming out with new ones, and people periodically talk me into trying one, and it’s always the same: the longer I take it, the more depressed I get, the more tired and listless, headaches, and more. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a match, my body and the psychobabble boneheads’ drugs.
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read… Lifelines… Mental hell…
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contoveros said,
September 13, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Anne Nakis,
As a young lawyer, I would go from one senior attorney to another until I found one who gave me the answer I was looking for, and damn it, it worked for me.
Sounds a little like taking or not taking meds and finding the senior person to tell you your actions are OK just the way you originally thought they should be.
As far as mediation goes, however, I beg to differ. While I don’t know anything about the ozone, I believe I have reached the “Cosmos,” a place in the universe that is above my normal conscious level while in deep meditation. I might have tasted what others have called “Nirvana.”
And that’s before drinking any Ouzo!
michael j
braonthree said,
September 14, 2010 at 3:51 pm
It’s not meditation I have difficulty with. I do it myself. It’s the out-in-the-ozone place that so many new-age and other “philosophies” drift into.