TRANSCRIPT
By and large, in an ideal world, I’d love to see psychiatry just go away. I’d like to see the mental health system, by and large, go away. And how would this happen? Well, I’ve certainly made a lot of videos about good mental health programs, about good therapists, even good psychiatrists. But they don’t really address the basic way I see to get rid of psychiatry and to get rid of the mental health industry.
The way that I see is very simple, and that is if you get rid of childhood trauma. If children are raised without being traumatized, there will be no psychiatry. There will be no mental health system. There’ll be no need for anyone to come in and try to take away someone’s personal agency, to practice force on them. There’ll be no excuse for it.
Psychiatry and the mental health system is fed by the river of traumatized people. People who, by and large, were traumatized in their childhoods. Yes, lots of different areas of life outside the family can traumatize people, and I hear people often say that most trauma happens outside the family system. Well, they’re wrong. What happens is trauma starts in the family system. And yes, people do get traumatized later on in all sorts of other different ways: in abusive relationships, in schools, in war, in violence, and wherever crime. But it really starts in the family system.
What I’ve seen is if parents don’t traumatize their children, then the children don’t end up in the mental health system. But that’s more a theoretical statement because I think every parent, to some degree or other, traumatizes their children. So what I’ll say is if parents traumatize their children less, their children grow up healthier. Their children grow up having more of a sense of healthy self. They know who they are. They know what their boundaries are. They know what they like. They know what they feel.
They’re less likely to be bullied. They’re less likely to end up in abusive relationships. They’re less likely to end up in harmful situations. They’re less likely to be self-destructive. They’re less likely to become addicts. They’re less likely to have things that are called mental disorders. They’re less likely to end up in mental hospitals—much, much, much less likely.
Sometimes what I think, actually, from what I’ve observed—what I’ve observed by witnessing people in therapy with me, who sat with me for years and told me their life stories—when I got to compare people who ended up in psychiatry, in mental hospitals, especially when they went many, many times, ended up on a lot of psychiatric drugs versus people who were in therapy, who told me their life stories, who didn’t end up going into psychiatry. What I heard is the people who ended up in psychiatry, the people who became mental patients, psychiatric patients, whatever you want to call them, they comparatively had much more horrible, horrible childhoods.
Yes, there were exceptions. Sometimes people who had horrible childhoods didn’t end up in psychiatry. But by and large, what I heard is people who ended up in the mental health system, forcibly hospitalized, especially forcibly medicated—horrible childhoods.
Now, what’s very interesting is I’ve met a lot of people who say that’s not true. I ended up in the mental health system. I ended up forcibly hospitalized. I ended up forcibly drugged—all sorts of terrible things like this—and I didn’t have a difficult childhood. It wasn’t even that bad. My parents loved me. Well, I really don’t agree. That’s not my experience.
Even though I’m contradicting what they’re saying, I’m going to contradict what they’re saying because what I heard in therapy, especially once I got to listen to people who really unfolded their stories, because I had people who came who were psychiatric patients who said, “No, my childhood wasn’t so bad.” But as time went on and they unpacked it and they started breaking their dissociation, regaining their memories, it actually wasn’t so nice.
So I think—and I’m also an example of this—someone who really thought I came out of a great childhood and told everyone my parents are awesome, wonderful family, great family, loving family, really lucky, really privileged—until I started unpacking who I was really on the inside and realizing, actually, no, there was a lot of abuse. There was a lot of neglect. There was a lot of violation.
And the funny thing was, even when I said it was good and I even had memories of things that were not good, I could kind of cancel out those memories. Oh, there was so much love that that really didn’t count—that abuse, that perversity, that violence, that addiction, my parents had, their horrible screaming and fighting.
Well, the more I unpacked it and really returned to my feelings, who I really am, the more I really integrated what had happened to me and how screwed up it was. Actually, incidentally, the more that I did this, the less I had any need for therapy or any desire for therapy. Once I was able to take the helm of my own healing process, I didn’t want to pay anyone else to do it.
I didn’t want some person—I was going to use a bad word—some person who is an unethical, unhealed therapist going to take a lot of money from me to probably not help me at all and maybe even screw me up more. Because that’s what I felt a lot of therapists unconsciously were still agents of traumatizing parents. They sided with my parents, who they’d never even met, more than they sided with me. They sided with my parents even though I was paying them. My parents weren’t paying for my therapy. I was.
Well, so I’m going to say it again: you want to dry up psychiatry? Dry up childhood trauma. And if you want to dry up childhood trauma, one has to heal one’s own self. And then when people have children, they will traumatize them less. And the people who are less traumatized traumatize their children less.
And if there is such a thing as a hypothetical ideal of a completely healed person—I don’t know anybody now that’s that way in my world experience—but in the future, I believe it may be possible. I believe those will be the people who will raise children who are not traumatized, and those will be the people who will be actually inoculated against ever needing to go into psychiatry or the mental health system.
And to extrapolate it one step further, imagine a world where there is no trauma from parents to children. I think there will be no more psychiatry, no more mental health system. There will be friendships. There will be people who help each other work through whatever pains of life come up. Yeah, we’re all going to die. That’s going to be stressful for all of us. We all are going to suffer loss. We all do suffer loss. That is how life works. But I don’t think we’re going to need a mental health system for that, and we certainly won’t need psychiatry.