It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
— H.L. Mencken
Having achieved quasi-celebrity status on the internet, I occasionally receive emails, messages, etc. in response to my writings here and elsewhere.
Usually it’s positive, sometimes it’s a profanity-laden tirade, and every now and then, it’s just perplexing.
The majority of such feedback comes from MAHA conspiracy freaks (I mean that sympathetically, being a MAHA conspiracy freak myself), evangelicals encouraging me to seek Christ, or Social Justice™ people encouraging me to die, usually painfully, with gypsy curses.
Sometimes, though, you get one from left field.
Like this unsolicited email, titled “Why do you hate psychiatry?” from a psychiatrist — using his official business email — who works for a major healthcare institution you’ve almost definitely heard of, one that was at the forefront of the COVID-19 biomedical totalitarianism regime (emphasis added):
You regulary [sic] sh*t-talk psychiatry, my profession (I am a psychiatrist with opposable frontal lobes). I do not care, nor do I have any intention of trying to sway your opinion. I am a bit of an academic (you can see where I work by my email address)…. I do some writing of my own (papers, and of late, books)… The topic most on my mind is anti-psychiatry, which has a long and interesting history. Which brings me to you – what is the source of your contempt for psychiatry? I have three guesses: 1) it is simply part of your all-round contempt for pretty much everything; 2) you took a class in college from one of those brain-dead historians or sociologists who love Thomas Szasz and think they know what they are talking about; 3) (most likely) there is a personal experience, either yourself or someone close to you, that went bad and you think the psychiatrist was all to blame.
Related: Ousted Director Francis Collins Demands Americans Pay ‘Utmost Respect’ to NIH
My initial reactions:
- I have no idea who Thomas Szasz is. I could look him up, I guess, but I don’t really care enough to invest the thirty seconds of time.
- I have, I think, sound reasons for disdaining the psychiatric profession
- Do I really have “all-round contempt for pretty much everything”?
- Has this guy accurately diagnosed me from afar?
- Do I need psychiatric medication?
Related: Canadian Government Pushes Psychiatric Medication for 'Vaccine-Hesitant'
On the third score, my “contempt for pretty much everything” — again, with the caveat that there’s ample reason to not endorse psychiatry as an institutionalized form of medicine, which is often based on pseudoscience with the apparent ultimate goal of the maximal prescription of psychotropic medicines for the benefit of multinational drug corporations — I think the MD might have a fair point.
I don’t think or write very often — not as often as I should, for sure — about what I appreciate, or treasure, or champion.
Positivity doesn’t seem to come naturally to me, and, in a business that relies on clicks, it certainly doesn’t compel them the same way that outrage porn does.
Maybe I ought to request a Zoom session with the good doctor and sort this whole thing out.
