In the Private Sphere

The story is long and detailed and over the years I saw so many dysfunctions related to how the mental health field was constructed. In private practice later I had to confront the insurance industry. In the end they were successful in virtually destroying much of the “mental health” field. They required ever more serious diagnoses if they were to grant payment. Often my decisions as a doctoral level psychologist were at the mercy of someone with a two year general college degree.

Stepfamilies at Risk

In work with stepfamilies we recognized that they weren’t pathological but were stressed family units in flux. Families in deep crisis were coming into our practice and we learned that it was essential to stabilize the stepcouple. Insurance would pay for therapy for the stepmother (to them it seemed women were usually the focus if not the origin of the problem), or they would pay for therapy for a child. We saw the need to stabilize the couple and when they were out of crisis the children realized this was their new family and went from crisis to return to their friends and schoolwork. Using a couple’s focused episodic model we were able to stabilize these families in an average of just seven sessions. They weren’t pathological. They were suffering stress from a major life change and needed management help.

The insurance companies were willing to waste money on individual therapy for women and children if we would declare them “sick” enough but weren’t interested in functional work. Their number one goal was obstruction in the interest of profit.

Corporate Dysfunction

People in the field have to face inappropriate “mental health” and diagnosis problems along with a health care industry which is not highly functional. 

And so we come back to the myriad of issues in something like the attack in Orlando. A political system failed to help protect the citizens and we cannot know what the course of the perpetrator was. He probably began with much less serious concerns or impulses and moved on to an ever deepening and more complex crisis. If we had detailed information all along the way we would seen a series of effects and crises that would not lend themselves to a firm diagnosis. And therein lies the problem. We need a wholesale revision of our thinking, description and approach not to mention the system for availability of help for our citizens and dealing with corporate obstruction in the interest of profit.

Coping Versus Disease

As I’ve said before, emotional and cognitive disturbances were moved over to medicine so that we could remove the influence of the church. We no longer believe in demonic possession although at times it is tempting to believe there are demons in human affairs such as in this election.

It was good to remove the demons from our thinking but defining our mental and emotional variations as illnesses was also a mistake. Over time I’ve seen the fads and the missteps. When I was in graduate school I saw not one child who was termed autistic. I had heard they existed but never saw one. Now we have an “epidemic”.  And now we learn it may be related to the use of chemicals which find they way into our food. That makes it an environmental issue and not a mental health issue at all. We have a lot of sorting out to do.

To be continued.

Gaia’s Majesty-Mission Called: Women in Power by Roger B. Burt

Roger B. Burt’s Amazon home page

Creating Characters and Plots by Roger B. Burt

Stepfamilies: Professionals and Stepcouples in Partnership

Whatever Happened to Community Mental Health by Roger B. Burt