Dr. Gonzo

By deb hoag

Dr. Gonzo: A series of loosely related essays on equality, visibility, and modern mental health, or, How the Mental Health System Drove Me Crazy, details Dr. Deb Hoag's efforts to provide effective psychotherapy in a nation of apathetic lawmakers and actively hostile insurance companies. It discusses the twin history of addiction therapy and psychotherapy, and the ways in which a profit-motivated insurance industry has corrupted each. Cover art by Gabriel Vrooman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unlikely Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476038230

Book preview

Dr. Gonzo

A series of loosely related essays on equality, visibility, and modern mental health

or

How the Mental Health System Drove Me Crazy

by Deb Hoag

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Published by Unlikely Books

http://www.unlikelystories.org/unlikely_books/

A series of loosely related essays on equality, visibility, and modern mental health, or, How the Mental Health System Drove Me Crazy © 2010-2012 Deb Hoag

Author’s Request for the Electronic Edition

Scintillating prose, like bread alone, is sometimes not enough for a writer, much less a publisher, to live on. The grim reality is, we all need a little cash from time to time to keep body and soul together. Even with day jobs. Although I would love to be able to write purely for the accolades and sense of satisfaction that comes from putting ‘the end’ on a simply mahvelous piece of fiction, ultimately, printers need feeding too. Laurels are nice, but rough on the palate and generally too much fiber for me. Therefore, it becomes necessary for me to entreat you to honor my beloved publisher’s request that you pay—cash money—for this book. Honestly, you’ll get your money’s worth. Incredible but true, you may actually find that it scratches the itch that more mainstream manuscripts cannot. Simple fact: our books have more fingers than other books. Because of this, and a plethora of other benefits as well, we simply urge you: be honest, be fair, and God, please be affluent enough to cross our palms with silver. Ours is not a simple life. Ordinary, neither. Knowledge, good karma and possibly a spare set of kidneys could be yours, but only if you buy this book first.

Author’s Note

The characters in Dr. Gonzo are fictionalized representations of events that have occurred in a lengthy and varied practice over several decades, dressed up in party clothes, including the doctor, herself. Please note that while I share many of the good doctor’s opinions, I have, to date, never been Tased in the practice of psychotherapy. One never knows, however, about the future.

Without my good friends and co-conspirators Jonathan Penton, Adam Lowe, Bill Highsmith, Donna Snyder and Tom Bradley, I’d still be writing, but couldn’t imagine having nearly so much fun doing it. I’d also like to acknowledge the fabulous crew at Flash Fiction Online and all the crazy writing fanatics at Hatrack River for the experience, the crits and the band-aids as needed.

As always, this book is dedicated to my fabulous husband Chuck, whose encouragement, grace under fire and sense of humor make it all doable. Plus, he put up with a boatload of really loud John Mellencamp to get me through this.

Damn! another book my kids won’t be allowed to read till they’re thirty!

Chapter One: the Doctor is In

Or

How I developed a guerrilla attitude

in a therapeutic setting

Introductions

Tap, tap, tap with the pen, and waiting to hear footsteps down the hall. That last-minute check, do I need to pee? Can’t leave once the client gets here, so peeing is important. Don’t want to be stuck for an hour while the pressure builds up, like a panicked kid stuck on a church pew between a sanctimonious mother and stern father. Should I turn the thermostat up, down? Is that gas building in my stomach? Horrible, to be inside a small room and get gas, watching the client’s face for signs he or she smells it, not acceptable to simply say excuse me, mind if I fart?

Tabula Rasa, blank slate. Freud wasn’t the proponent of tabula rasa that people think he was. He saw patients in his home. He knew them socially. According to at least one patient, he knew them Biblically as well. He ate herring with them and shared his beloved schnapps, a little alcohol to lubricate the dream machine.

There are several different meanings to the phrase tabula rasa and the term is employed in a number of different fields; the meaning I refer to here is the one that is used to justify the cool distant cut-off between therapist and patient. A therapist who is a blank slate to the client thereby becomes a screen on which the patient’s beliefs about self and others are projected, allowing the therapist greater insight into the inner mechanisms of the patient’s psyche. This works great with patients who have a borderline personality disorder (BPD), by the way. In fact, it works so great that you don’t really need to maintain a blank slate at all, because: A) patients with Borderline Personality Disorder find out everything about you anyway, and B) even when someone with BPD knows everything there is to know about you, they project like hell regardless.

The client’s getting closer as I flip through my available game-faces, so to speak. Matron, patron, therapist, geek. Advisor, counselor, fix-it chick, chief.

So many things to think of, so many things to do before the client comes stepping softly down the hall, stomping down, sashaying down. Where the hell is the schnapps when I need some?

More tapping as I wait, and then he comes, secret center of my world for a little while, for a short while, for that brief slice of my life, a single hour, like a drop of crystal that shimmers and drops from the branch. The most precious thing I have in life is my time. It’s all mine, and all I really have to give. What’s money except the physical manifestation of time I have given away? Isn’t that the crux of slavery, of school, of taxes—having our time forcibly taken from us?

Tap, tap, tap and I wait, as preoccupied with my bodily fluids and gasses and processes as any anal-retentive, excrescence-obsessed, certifiable lunatic. Flatulence, let me have none, I pray to the God of Disgusting Body Functions. With each client I accept, I am forced further and further into a childlike state of my own making, the lofty doctor who plays in the mud. I went to school with people who were in love with the idea of being a doctor and all that the position implied—nobility, wisdom, culture, wealth. Now they spend eight hours a day—eight forty-five minute hours a day—with people they never would have willingly let take out their trash in any other circumstance. Does the irony strike them? Do they become humble, more kindly, more Christlike in their practice? Or do they bury the dichotomy in dreams of social climbing and pretend it doesn’t exist?

My fingers drum madly as I contemplate the frozen faces of colleagues past, nostrils pinched in distaste at the undergrad students rushing through the hallways. Do they sit and mimic compassion now as a stinking bundle of insanity sits on their tasteful furniture and talks shit? Talks shit about shit, while they try not to hear and pretend to listen. I had a co-worker who kept a couch cover especially for schizophrenic company, slipping it clean over her furniture before the most offensive clients came in, and then peeling it off immediately following the session to be washed, so that no putrid, crazy ass-cheeks could contaminate her lovely wing-back sofa.

There is a timid sound at my door, knuckles brushing softly on the wood, and I call ‘come in.’ The door opens slowly—just a few inches—enough to admit the face of this morning’s patient. His eyes are serious, frightened that the Holy Roman Doctor is going to find fault, is going to reject, humiliate, crush him for his failures. He’s been to counselors before, plenty. But the PhD throws him.

I stop tapping. I smile. I say, come in and make yourself comfortable. I need to step out for just a minute.

He shuffles in, cautious, in case this is a trick, and gingerly sits on the edge of the chair facing mine. I stand and smooth my trousers, then make for the door. I have to piss like a racehorse, and I sprint down the hallway for the john.

Behind me, I can feel the questions rising up like proverbial crows, flapping around the client’s head. "Is it me? Is it me? Is it me?"

Reality Is . . . Equality

I am a firm believer in equality. Talk to any crazy person for more than two seconds and the theme of the better/worse merry-go-round will emerge. It was the subject of my dissertation, although, disappointingly, the results were inconclusive. I got screwed by my advisor, my dissertation ‘chair,’ although not literally. Put it all in the hands of my assigned authority figure, counting on him to care one-tenth as much as I did. One of my last great personal hurrahs in the greater-lesser dance.

Equality is the principle of being equal. I used to divide everyone I met into two groups: better and worse. So do most other crazy people. It was a distinction around which my life centered, and which resulted in the intestinal elevator drop more than once, when my ranking system turned out to be flawed on this occasion or that. Is there anything worse than to be an arrogant, self-serving, supercilious bitch and find out that the person you thought was beneath contempt—and treated accordingly—had been given power over you? Worse yet, and more confusing, was when the fuck-head in question didn’t twist the knife. Worse because it was incomprehensible to me at the time that someone would just be kind, or forgiving because it was the right thing to do. I lived and breathed fear of retaliation, of revenge anticipated but infrequently delivered. I can honestly state that I have rarely run in to anyone who was more of a bitch than I. Good for me, I suppose, not so much for anyone I came in contact with and determined was out to harm me, with my pathetic, flawed, paranoid, angry, demented malevolent psyche.

The funny thing was, when I quit drinking, and doing cocaine, and smoking pot and hashish and taking speed, it was presented to me that I needed to go around and apologize for all that shit. I’ve come to highly recommend apologizing as a tool to maintain a clear conscience, but at the time, was just getting used to the idea that a conscience was a desirable accoutrement; apologizing was about as high on my list as puking in public.

Which is okay—doing the right thing, even though you don’t feel like doing it, builds character, character-building currently being a skill that is greatly underrated