Tag Archives: therapy

“The wealthy are people too”

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The Daily Show had a report the other night on “Sudden Wealth Syndrome” (SWS), a newly-minted disorder afflicting the wealthiest of the wealthy, or about “1% of the 1%,” as Jason Jones puts it:

I am a big fan of the saying attributed to T.H. Thompson and John Watson:

Be kinder than necessary,
for everyone you meet is fighting
some kind of battle.

Everyone has emotional problems. Anyone can suffer from depression, anxiety, and any number of other mental illnesses. There should be no stigma attached to it, and there should be help and support for those afflicted by it. By that, I mean everyone afflicted by it.

My first reaction is this: It is going to be very hard to get a typical paycheck-to-paycheck 47-percenter to care about the emotional malaise of a beleaguered billionaire. If a millionaire or billionaire is having difficulties coping emotionally, how the *%$#&*!@$# hard do you think it is for someone who has to work 2-3 jobs just to keep the kids fed and clothed?

That is not the best response, though. This is not a competition to see who is more beleaguered, beat-down, or grizzled. Each individual sees the world from a unique perspective, and anyone can, as I said, be struck by depression, etc. The thought that other people have it worse does very little to lift any one person’s spirits (and when you think about it, that is a very good thing.) Here is a redacted anecdote, and then I will tell you what I think the correct reaction to SWS would be. Continue reading →

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When therapists don’t want to do their jobs

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Julea Ward and Jennifer Keeton want to be therapists, but they don’t want to help icky gay people because Jesus.

State legislators, purporting to know more about the ethics of these professions than the professionals themselves, want to make it legal to discriminate based on “sincerely-held religious beliefs.” One suspects that it has not occurred to most of them that this could apply to people who don’t think just like them.

If someone who wants to enter into a profession with a duty to help people, but just can’t seem to let go of certain Bronze Age superstitions, I hardly see how that is their patients’ problem, but that is exactly what they want to do. Some of them want to foist their ideology onto patients, but I rather doubt they’d entertain attempts by those patients to present their side of things.

Now, being a good American, I support the right of people to believe whatever crazy crap they want, so long as they don’t hurt other people. And that’s the problem here.

This hurts people.

This really, really hurts people.

So I have a compromise.

If a doctor, therapist, dentist, etc. just can’t get over the fact that the patient in front of them has a sexual orientation that is different from theirs (or some other perfectly-legal activity they just can’t keep from meddling in), they don’t have to treat them.

But the patient doesn’t have to pay them.

And because this rejection is highly likely to hurt the patient, the devout professional has to recommend an alternate professional that they know will treat the patient.

One more thing: in consideration of the fact that the devout professional has clearly wasted the patient’s time, the professional has to pay for the first session with the new professional. Because you have the right to believe what you want, but you cannot foist that upon a person in need who is relying on your professional skill–and if you just have to try anyway, it will cost you. Your professional license is a privilege, not a right.

(Preferably, devout professionals should disclose their prejudices in their marketing materials, but let’s see how you handle this responsibility first.)

If everyone can agree on that, then the Juleas and Jennifers of the world can let their freak flags fly, and the rest of us won’t be quite as bothered.

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