TRANSCRIPT
Oh thank god you’re here! I just feel the need to share about my experience in the psychiatrist’s office today. I mean, I guess it’s normal for me to have apprehension about going to yet another dog for treatment, but this dog was particularly aggressive to me from the beginning.
I mean, I felt so anxious with him staring at me with that hungry, sloppy, drooling look on his face that I couldn’t manage even to meow. And what does he do? He diagnoses me with catatonia. I mean, that’s a stigmatizing diagnosis, especially when coming from a canine.
And then when I asked him if he could write me a prescription for catnip to help ease my nerves, he labels me drug seeking. Well, that made me so mad that I hissed at him like this, and I told him that I thought he was just another stinking mental health mutt.
At which point, he barks at me that I needed to take a medication called dogmatil, which I learned when I looked it up afterward is an antipsychotic. Well, let’s just put it this way: I wouldn’t even give that pill to a dirty rat.
But instead of scratching out his eyes like he deserved, I held myself together and told him that I was afraid that this dogmatil might take away one of my nine lives, to which he replied that I was catastrophizing, which I found to be both stigmatizing and stereotyping.
So then I went back to saying nothing, at which point he labeled me as being catty. So I called him dogmatic, turned around, lifted up my tail to let him know what I really think of him and his kind, and I left. And I’m never going back. Meow!