TRANSCRIPT
Hello everyone, this is Dr. Pig, the psychiatrist. Today, by special request, I am going to explore the meaning of love, which is arguably the most important concept to master in the whole mental health profession.
Let me start by saying that most people have no clue whatsoever what they mean when they use the word love. So, I am going to break it down for them.
For starters, the first and perhaps most common meaning of love is to very strongly like doing something or to get great pleasure from it. For instance, in my line of work, I might say, “I love to inject a defiant patient with Haldol,” or “I love to diagnose confrontational women with borderline personality disorder.” You see what I mean? Doing those things, those actions, gives my brain a feeling of great pleasure. It’s a cause and effect relationship—very scientific, a very good thing.
But sometimes love isn’t always a good thing. For example, sometimes when people say that they love something, what they’re really saying is that they have a delusional attraction to it, and this is a sign of mental illness. For instance, when I hear a patient say that they love Peter Breggin’s book “Toxic Psychiatry,” or Robert Whittaker’s book “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” or Jim Gottstein’s book “The Zyprexa Papers,” what they really mean is that they have fallen under the delusional sway of these anti-psychiatry charlatans and that they need to be medicated. Thus, to bring it full cycle, it is these people whom I most love to inject with Haldol. It brings me great pleasure. It makes my whole body feel warm and alive inside and pink.
But let me give one final example now of a meaning of love that is so often unexplored in our modern psychiatric vocabulary. Love here means that a person is gaining insight into their psychiatric condition and becoming ready for discharge from the hospital. Some phrases encapsulating this might be, “I love the polypharmacy regimen that you’re prescribing me, Dr. Pig,” “I love my diagnosis, Dr. Pig,” or perhaps even, “I love your brilliance, Dr. Pig.”