How psychological disorders are used to control you

Traditional psychology begins with the assumption that everyone should feel the same way about everything because we are all humans, aka. members of the same species. If we do not feel the same way about stuff as “everyone else” there’s something wrong with you, right? the Swans* psychology has moved away from this view A BIT, but it is still far from being as liberated as it will be in… Say, 50, 100 years from now, when hopefully we’ve put this silliness of “normalcy” completely behind us.

For example… We are made to believe that if you want to feel complete devotion to and from your romantic partner, you have a condition called the narcissistic personality disorder; and in this case, it means that you want to completely own and devour a person for your own gratification… Now, I understand what this diagnosis is going for, it is about someone who doesn’t CARE if you actually love them or not, but who simply insists you display all the symptoms of devoted love, real or not. However, if you confess to wishing for such devotion and reject relationships that do not give you that authentic devoted love, that too can, in some people’s minds, make you a narcissist.

Remember, every time you hear the label “narcissist” the difference between a real diagnosis and a misdiagnosis is this: Is it real? Does this person care if it is real or fake? If they want the real thing… Not a narcissist, but this whole disorder is about as misunderstood and complicated as disorders get, even by professionals, so we’ll leave that until a later date. The irony is, that sometimes the narcissist labels YOU as a narcissist because you don’t settle for the fake stuff but insist on everything being real, which, in his/her mind, makes you unreasonable and difficult to deal with.

In the Victorian times, there was this craze over a disorder labeled “female hysteria”. What was characteristic to this disorder was that essentially everything that a woman could do, that was SLIGHTLY off the normal; display of emotion, lack of emotion, display of sexual desires, lack of sexual desires, etc was all labelled a symptom of female hysteria, a condition that the list of symptoms alone was 75 pages long. Essentially every woman with a rational mind was thus, a hysteric. Now… There is a certain point to be made about finding balance, but that need to find a balance can turn into a bit of an obsession in itself – and I am no stranger to that particular obsession myself – but… people are people, and we are all a bit wonky, and that is healthy… To an extent.

The point being, that everyone can be given some diagnosis of a mental disorder, and the quirkiest of us can be given several. Johnny Depp said in an interview with Dr. Lawrence Kraus, and I am paraphrasing, that when he was a teen, he read a book about psychological disorders, and, at the end of it, concluded that he was “screwed”. There’s a guy who is among the sanest of people, with all his quirks and bizarre antics, he is actually pretty damned well clued in, by the looks of things, even accounting the business with his ex-wife… We all have a breaking point, and if we do not, that makes us a psychopath. If someone keeps irritating us, pushing and prodding, we HAVE to react eventually, because you’d have to be insane not to. Losing one’s temper when provoked is NOT a sign of mental imbalance, but it is often made out to be such.

It is about time we understand that people are animals and animals… Animals are… Hmm, I was going to say unpredictable, but no. Animals are very much predictable: treat them right, and they’ll treat you right. (Trust me.) Treat them wrong, they’ll let you have it. If they’re hungry, they’ll eat you (depending on their species). If you understand an animal, you can make a lion into a friend, a bear into a pet, and a gorilla into a rational conversationalist, all without a whip nor a prod. And… Mind you… Very often we treat the opposite gender as if they were a member of a different species that we have no means of understanding, you know? But no. People are animals, and both men and women are of the same species, with very similar emotions – but… I have a sneaking suspicion there are two different human species living side by side prior to the genetic differentiation… Not men and women, but two different types of thinkers, because one half of us behaves like a pack animal species, and another one… does not. But that… for another post.

The fear of being labeled a lunatic can be used to harness you, to make you do things the way “the norm” dictates. The sad truth is that the people who have the need to do this have a not so sane fear of other people, and a paranoid mistrust of people, the belief that if you don’t control a human being, they will instantly try and take you under their own control… “Control or be controlled” in other words… But even though there are people with a need to control others, there are people who will do anything to ensure the freedom of all individuals, and those are the people who I wish to reach with this site.

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