monetizing munchausen by proxy

how the mental health industry was eaten by adverse selection

this is an interesting insight that i’d like to amplify

LINK

around basic issues of mental well being, being told “you are ill, it’s not your fault” is worse than a wubbie or a crutch, it’s actual harm. it tells you there is something wrong with you and increasingly vilifies and stigmatizes the absolutely totally normal. it makes you into a mark. worse, it makes you into a “repeat customer” and you want to be seriously circumspect on that one.

let’s look.

past a certain point, “psychologists” (and even worse, psychiatrists who want to treat this with some truly unpleasant and dangerous drugs) are the scientology hucksters standing on the sidewalk looking for broken people to invite inside by asking questions like “do you ever feel sad or lonely for no reason?”

i used to watch this in san francisco as team l ron hubbard had a mother ship downtown near my one time office. “would you like a free audit to talk about why maybe you feel bad sometimes?”

it’s tempting stuff for the desperately alone. just having someone take an interest, someone to talk to is seductive stuff.

and past a point, it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of telling normal people with normal childhood angst and uncertainly that “zomigod, you’re the first adolescent ever to feel confused about their identity! you need help! now!”

this constitutes a severely pernicious process that pathologizes the literal act of growing up.

instead of “yeah, you’re an adolescent, it’s confusing as hell and messy and disorienting and that’s all normal and you’ll get through it, it’s part of life” we say “depression. anxiety. ADD. spectrum. mood disorder. gender dysphoria.” or one of another 30 mostly nonsense and trashcan diagnoses of badgering and projection.

maybe we concuss them with aderall or SSRI’s, xanax or MAOI’s.

and this does NOT help young people. it hurts them.

and watching the same people who so incessantly warn of the dangers of stigmatization bend their entire career focuses to stigmatizing the normal as “you need my help” is like reading a business plan to monetize munchausen by proxy.

this has a really nasty darwinistic/market selector aspect. health care professionals who say “this is normal, you are normal. you don’t need me,” do not grow their practices. patients either go home and get better or they go shopping for someone who will take their money, time, and tell them they are sick.

those practitioners who say “ooh, broken, wow, we need some serious work and probably medication, maybe surgery here!” keep their customers. it’s client retention via a really nasty form of perverse incentive and adverse selection. the more broken the practitioner the more their practice grows.

and that is the railroad tracks to railroadings.

because the doctor is sick.

the claims of “munchausen by proxy” (MBP) are very real and the longstanding stereotype of “they went into psychology because they wanted the free psychotherapy for their own unhandled issues” exist for a reason.

and this reason is reason to worry.

and this has happened before.

back in the 80’s and 90’s there was a horrendous school of psychology and therapy that became fixated upon and deranged by the ideas of “recovered memories” and that children were all repressing memories and “hiding their trauma” in ways that prevented them from “knowing it.” it was pure freudian claptrap, but seductive to a certain sort of mind.

mostly, this focused on “sexual abuse.” in praxis, this was teachers and school administrators and psychologists pushing vulnerable kids into extended, high pressure interviews to “help them” recover these memories. it was nothing short of abuse and brainwashing. 1000’s of kids were convinced to “remember” being sexually assaulted by parents and loved ones despite none of this actually happening.

kids were taken from families. parents who had done nothing were branded sex predators and even jailed. popinjay school functionaries grossly unqualified to render such judgements ran struggle sessions and wielded absurd, unaccountable authority to wreak utter havoc.

and anyone who thinks this cannot happen again may really wish to check their priors. because things are far worse now that they ever were then.

“In 2005 a Harvard psychology professor, Richard McNally, called the recovered memory movement “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”

anyone else a little worried that “oh yeah, hold my beer and watch this!” is pretty much the current state of youth mental health in america?

children are impressionable, vulnerable, and tend to want to please authority figures. with enough pressure, their mindscapes can be dramatically shifted and they may well believe the new reality sincerely. this seeming shift serves to validate the hero complex MBP of the “adults” seeking to validate themselves by rescuing others and so obsessed with the idea that they can no longer see that inventing or causing the peril themselves so they can play at savior is evil.

at a certain point, you’re flat out throwing kids into the river so you can dive in and save them from drowning. this is not a metaphor. MBP actually manifests this way. parents break kids’ arms so they can take them to the hospital and then care for them. it’s a severe psychological malady and wow is it NOT something you want to base a mental health system upon.

they can be easily molded, broken, indoctrinated, trained, and inducted into cults. this is why marxists and communists and fascists and alike are always so obsessed with “youth movements.” it’s why cults want to keep their kids away from outside influence and why breaking family and any other community and vilifying it as “unawakened” or untrustworthy or evil is so vital to such enterprises.

and if you think the state is coming to stop this, think again.

why would they?

this group of alienated, self doubting, deracinated kids who think they are all ill and feel alone and broken are perfect fodder for statists to swoop in and say “nobody loves you but us, but the movement. we’re your family, your support.”

the donors to these politicians sell the drugs these kids get put on and often addicted to.

everyone is getting what they want. it does not need to be a plot, it’s just a confluence of perverse incentives among amoral actors who benefit from low identity, confused, and desperate humans who lack connection.

this seems like a joke, but is it?

there are an awful lot of lonely people. 8% of americans report having “no close friends” and surveys like this always tend toward over-reporting happiness.

humans cannot stand being alone. it drives them mad. solitary confinement is feared even in the worst of prisons.

is an active and activist leviathan a form of proxy friend for such people? is it the friendly cult that invited you in for kool aid and a bit of a chat?

is all the sudden explosive and desperate need to be enraged and activist about some topic you just learned about 5 minutes ago just a desperate cry for community and fellowship from the kids who did not get invited to parties and who collected psychological malady diagnoses from therapists like merit badges because it was nice to have someone to talk to and once they were told they were “abnormal” it was sort of a relief to hear it and know where they stood and they could just sort of slouch into the prison of low expectations, stop working on themselves, and accept that normal kids would not like them and the shrinks were their only friend, clinging like sad baby monkeys to abusive and frightening mother surrogates in an experiment run by (witting or unwitting) sadists?

are we feeding children into the maw of this mental health mulching machine because everyone is too busy to talk to them and because having your kid “diagnosed” excuses lacks of parenting?

are we handing them off to broken, validation seeking faux adults who are helping them “recover” identities and aliments by stigmatizing them in the name of supporting them?

it sure seems like it.

and awful lot of this system appears to have once more been bent around the perverse incentives of broken adults breaking children in their attempts to make themselves feel whole by creating and inflicting ailments and stigma upon the youth in their charge that they might play the hero as they “save them.”

“everyone gets a mental health diagnosis, lots of you get drugs, and some of you get the really dangerous stuff like surgery” is not a basis for child care. and this is just plain nonsense. it’s the diagnostic equivalent of grade inflation if getting an A harmed your mental health.

this is not advocacy, it’s the infliction of alienation and induction into a prison of low expectations and low self-regard.

the state and schools are not going to help here.

this is cultural. we need to change it. we need to stop accepting and standing for this abuse by claptrap. all the rest of this is downstream of culture.

tell it straight to the kids including the doubt, including the confusion. when i was an adolescent, we all knew adolescence was supposed it be a mess. so, we got what we expected and we worked through it.

there’s nothing wrong with that.

but telling kids there is something wrong breaks this.

give them the confidence to push back when people try to lead them astray.

ground them in themselves.

normalize being normal.

there is really no other way to turn this around.