In the fall of 2022, on insistence from a pain specialist, I was tangling with the healthcare system for access to a clinical consultation with the head of the Johns Hopkins Blaustein Pain Treatment Center. I wish I hadn’t. The effort was not worth the months of stress.
The consultation was a sick joke. The head clinician acknowledged I had made great progress under my Interpersonal Neurobiology-informed healing framework and should keep doing what I was doing. But if I “hit a wall,” he would be happy to put me in a locked psychiatric ward for 3 weeks or more, take away the medicines that work for me, prevent me from interacting with the healthcare providers who help me, and put me on anti-convulsants and tricyclic antidepressants.
That would be the same harmful treatment I encountered at the Rockford Center for Behavioral Health–owned by Universal Health Services, notorious for patient abuse and neglect–but longer and with stronger medications, with worse negative effects. For me, that would be suicide. Such treatment too often results in suicide. We turn to institutions and people for help, and they smash us for profit and power. It’s deadly.
My psychologist was disgusted by the written report and the density of the contempt markers in the clinician’s written assessment. He’s the head of the Hopkins Pain Clinic, so he can write whatever he wants, even pure BS. Much of what he wrote was so out of touch with reality that a variety of therapists and counselors said they must have mixed up the records because that certainly was not about me. As an activist, artist, and educator, in response to such abusers in power, I can write and paint about my lived experience, the truth.
I would rather go through every level of hell I’ve been through again than be someone who sees even one person through the dehumanized, dehumanizing, and shame-based lens with which the Hopkins clinician presumed the authority to scrutinize me. I see him as sad, scared, ossified, and irrelevant. Psychiatry’s claim of science is debunked, which leaves psychiatrists in the lurch unless they have evolved and paid attention. Those who have not are also quite harmful.
