An essay on psychiatry inspired by CBT

This essay includes my opinions and understanding of psychiatry after more than thirty years of being a psychiatric patient. Initially I was stimulated by concepts imparted to me by consultants. Concepts included blind emotion, breaking patterns, detachment and imposing patterns, also the definition of cathexis meaning why money is more important than a stone. These ideas occupied my mind and served to distract me from how I was feeling. I would meditate on these thoughts hoping for insight into what I was going through and a greater perspective
A weak point was that I had been stabbed in an assault and I was struggling with the psychological distress of such an incident rather than making progress with my illness of schizophrenia. This was only remedied about thirty two years later when cognitive behavioural therapy put forward a suggestion of post traumatic stress disorder to address the trauma resulting from such a wound before I could move on and address myself to the feelings and problems which precipitated my schizophrenia.
Walking miles from Bristol to the local asylum at Barrow Guerney and spending a day or a night out there in the countryside enabled me to feel more tranquil and allowed me to escape what I thought was curiosity from other people in the city.  In the end just before I moved to rural Devon the government sold this asylum / psychiatric hospital and there was no escape from the city.
After some years I began to experience some frustration with psychiatry. I would give an account of some difficulty or problem or a new development and some of the time the conversation led to the comment from the consultant “Well lets see how the medication is doing”. I worked hard reflecting on my situation and tackling other activities and all that seemed to matter to the doctors was my dosage of medication. In my view this is a chemical straight jacket. It is more cost effective to prescribe a tablet that costs a penny such as Stelazine to keep you quiet than it is to be counselled for a hour by a doctor who's salary is probably more than sixty pounds an hour. Perhaps it would burden the health service too much to counsel everyone with a mental health problem. The bottom line is that the doctors were less interested in listening than in managing a chemical regime.
Perhaps delusion is too strong a word but I believe that a lot of doctors in their privileged position in life think that life is totally benign and nothing untoward or difficult ever happens. Again perhaps it is not their fault that something is not within the confines of their experience. Jeffrey Masson in his book called final analysis gives an account of being a psychoanalyst after having been psychoanalysed himself as part of his training. He said that when women told their analyst they had been raped , the analyst believed that the patient had fantasies about sex and when they felt guilty or ashamed they blamed somebody for rape so they did not have to accept responsibility for their feelings. Masson spoke out about this saying that these women had been raped. The response he had was to be sacked from the Anna Freud library and the psychoanalytical institutions he was a member of. The in crowd psychoanalysis circles considered him politically incorrect.
The end result after years of psychiatry has left me doubting myself and lacking in self belief. I even doubt my memories, memories which I use to keep the world in abeyance and to mitigate how I am feeling. So if I cannot depend on my memories then this means I get even more intrusive thoughts and I feel even more guilt and and shame as I lose my identity. I would go even further to say that as my grip on my memories weaken I also get false memory syndrome on occasions where I start to imagine or remember things that did not take place.
Helplessness also is learned by participating in psychiatry. You believe you are weak because you are having to see a doctor which affirms to you that you are ill. You can feel that you are more ill and paranoid than you really are. Plus one gets benefits and sickness benefits from being a psychiatric patient and this is a form of operant conditioning. The operant, that is money, is where you get benefits for being ill. It is teaching you to be dependant on the state.
Labelling is another aspect of being a mental health patient. When the doctor uses labels such as depression or schizophrenia, he could be over diagnosing and giving a label to a natural reaction to loss or stress or some other pressure of life.
As an after thought labelling means that they genaralise about you meaning it results in a loss of individuality where you are pigeon holed into a blanket term or illness. On the other side of the coin is the fact that you do need a label for appropriate treatment of some conditions.