puzzle pieces

Today's Google harvest:
There's a horrible diagnosis in the DSM called bpd, and I'm going to leave it at that - I don't want any more of it to pollute this blog. Bullshit Psychiatric Diagnosis is what we're calling it here. I only bring it up because all of these artificial categories have some overlap, and sometimes you find a bit of gold even in the deepest pile of horseshit...

Time did an article on this Bullshit stuff, here's the link, and a particularly useful quote from the comments thread:

...an interesting approach is Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman’s Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT), which has shown some preliminary results that are promising. The idea is summarized as follows:

“… a pervasive history of invalidating (non-mentalizing) responses from attachment figures generates skills deficits primarily in emotionally charged interpersonal situations where social-cognitive capacities are essential. The failure of interpersonal understanding further compounds the social stress, leading to major difficulties of emotion regulation and interpersonal problem solving – at worst, actively evoking chaos in relationships” (Mentalizing in Clinical Practice, 2008, p. 275).

In other words, when you grow up with parents who haven't a clue, it fucks with your mind. It messes you up. It programs that little blank slate of your developing psyche with a bunch of weird-ass, unhelpful shit that keeps you from learning how to read other people's emotions and interact with them in useful ways, especially in the most important relationships in your life, namely, the close, so-called 'intimate' ones. (I say 'so-called' because I'm doubtful, skeptical that very many people really have genuinely intimate relationships. I think most people have a lot of sex, and when that runs down, they either have a lot of fights or a lot of silence, and if they stick together after that, it's usually out of habit and no other better offers coming along. What, me, a cynic??? Surely you jest...)

Another comment that I'm saving because my gut agrees with what she says, but my mind can't quite come to terms with the 'language' she uses, which I think is the product of a particular era of shrink-speak, in which brine she seems to have been immersed for some time. She's responding to another commenter, the two of them appear to be longstanding opponents (boy, I'm having to work really hard here not to use any dismissive language. Interesting - and scary - to see how consistently and automatically it crops up, like dandelions in the lawn).

The quote (bold mine):

You're an abuser Sally, maybe not the welts and bruises sort, but the emotional, deeper, more insidious and damaging form seems to be your preferred method of pathological abuse. Why don't you see a doctor? Oh, right.

To colonize is to invade and occupy territory, it's the transfer of one population (the abuser) to another (her target). Welts and bruises are preschool, what abusers want is psychic territory; ownership of their target's voice, her subjectivity, and sense of self, who she is and what she's all about. That's what successful abusers steal. It is the most difficult violation to overcome, but those who have come with radar, and see it a mile away.

I think what FP says is true - possibly not about Sally (don't actually care to take sides), but about the concept of colonizing, which seems useful to me. If I'm understanding it at all (and not sure I do, yet), it seems a bit like gaslighting, which is essentially a mindfuck dressed up in prettier words. Somebody who takes a special kind of sadistic pleasure in messing with your head, and then revels in the control they have over you because of it. Images of puppeteers and marionettes come to mind - scary...

I'm thinking that women get this diagnosis when they've been 'kicked' so many times that they become like a rabid dog, the first reaction when feeling threatened is to snarl and snap at people, to keep them away. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty normal reaction to threatening behavior.

***
Search string "bullshit psychiatric diagnosis" came up with Has American society gone insane (bolds mine):

Is American society a healthy one, and are those having difficulties adjusting to it mentally ill? Or is American society an unhealthy one, and are many Americans with emotional difficulties simply alienated rather than ill? For Fromm, "An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility (and) distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton." Fromm viewed American society as an increasingly unhealthy one, in which people routinely experience painful alienation that fuels emotional and behavioral difficulties.
[...]
The essential confrontation for Fromm is not about psychiatric drugs per se (though he would be sad that so many Americans nowadays, especially children, are prescribed psychotropic drugs in order to fit into inhospitable environments). His essential confrontation was directed at all mental health professionals -- including non-prescribers such as psychologists, social workers and counselors -- who merely assist their patients to adjust but neglect to validate their patients' alienation from society.

Those comfortably atop societal hierarchies have difficulty recognizing that many American institutions promote helplessness, passivity, boredom, fear, isolation, alienation and dehumanization for those not at the top. One-size-fits-all schools, the corporate workplace, government bureaucracies and other giant, impersonal institutions routinely promote manipulative relationships rather than respectful ones, machine efficiency rather than human pride, authoritarian hierarchies rather than participatory democracy, disconnectedness rather than community, and helplessness rather than empowerment.In The Sane Society, Fromm warned, "Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man. The specialists in this field tell you what the 'normal' person is, and, correspondingly, what is wrong with you; they devise the methods to help you adjust, be happy, be normal."
[...]
Both the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and psychiatry's DSM (the official diagnostic manual in which mental illnesses are voted in and out by elite psychiatrists) have much more to do with dogma than science. Both Scientology and psychiatry embrace science fiction technobabble that poses as scientific fact. In Scientology's "auditing," the claim is that the Hubbard Electropsychometer (E-Meter) can assess the reactive mind of the "preclear" by passing a small amount of voltage through a pair of tin-plated tubes that look like empty soup cans wired to the E-Meter and held by the preclear. But psychiatry is no more scientifically relevant, as its trendy chemical-imbalance theories of mental illness have shelf-lives of about a decade, with establishment psychiatry most recently having retreated from both its serotonin-deficiency theory of depression and the excessive-dopamine theory of schizophrenia.
[...]
Scientology and establishment psychiatry have something else in common. They are both orthodoxies that deal harshly with their ex-insiders who have come to reject them. Currently, psychiatry is the more prevailing orthodoxy, and, as George Orwell explained, the mainstream press does not challenge a prevailing orthodoxy. Orwell wrote, "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
[...]
It is my experience that psychiatry, Scientology and fundamentalist religions are turnoffs for genuinely critical thinkers. Critical thinkers are not so desperate to adjust and be happy that they ignore adverse affects -- be they physical, psychological, spiritual or societal. Critical thinkers listen to what others have to say while considering their motives, especially financial ones; and they discern how one's motivation may distort one's assumptions.

A critical thinker would certainly not merely accept without analysis Fromm's and my conclusion that American society is insane in terms of healthy human development. Perhaps a society should not be labeled insane just because it is replete with schools that turn kids off to reading, for-profit prisons that need increasingly more inmates for economic growth, a mass media that is dishonest about threats to national security, trumped-up wars that so indebt a society that it cannot provide basic health care, a for-profit health care system that exploits illness rather than promoting health, et cetera.

A critical thinker would most certainly point out that there have been societies far less sane than the United States -- and Erich Fromm made himself absolutely clear on this point. In the barbaric German society that Fromm fled, disruptive children who couldn't fit into one-size-fits-all schools were not forced to take Adderall and other amphetamines, but instead their parents handed them over to psychiatrists to be euthanized. Fromm, however, knew that just because one could point to societies less sane than the United States, this did not make the United States a sane, humanistic society.

***
An interesting way of looking at coping mechanisms, Early maladaptive schemas, will just link here for now to keep track of it.

Just want to say, I really want to see all this harsh judgmental language just disappear, go away, go poof. Now. Immediately. It's bullshit, counterproductive, does more harm than good. People who need the kind of 'help' these things purport to offer are usually operating from such shame-based places of damaged self esteem to begin with, surely it's not helpful to further burden them by labeling our naturally occuring coping mechanisms with such words as 'maladaptive'? Why not just say, 'adaptive', and leave it at that? Then we don't have to further shame ourselves for having coped to the best of our ability with impossibly limited resources.

In fact, you could say we were fucking geniuses with our coping mechanisms, or as Alice Miller honors it with the title of her book, Drama of the Gifted Child. That word 'gifted' is meant to represent the ways in which children cope with variously fucked-up parental situations to get their needs met the best they could with inadequate resources. Anyway.