Travels Through Psychiatry

  Please note that this piece is available on another site, as a guest post, at this link: Guest Post: A Psychiatric Survivor Comes to a Place of Understanding

You might wonder, if you’ve read much of my blog, if I support psychiatry, if I believe in its pursuits. I do. But I reserve my hopes in psychiatry for those clinicians who undertake the trust each individual puts before them in good faith. I admire psychiatrists with interest in the full scope and picture of each in their care. They see and hear, even feel, what each person tells before administering treatments for symptoms, treatments they recognize as limited in many ways, and so they apply them with care and great regard for effects both positive and negative. When I’m watching documentaries about discovering the universe, over time how people have sought to understand the sun, moon, stars, and Earth’s place, ranging from assigning them godlike qualities, through gradually realizing in committed, repetitive observation that all these rotate, then that Earth is not the center, risking heresy to say so, yet maintaining their course of further learning, I think of psychiatry. I ev