Psychiatry 101: How to Ruin a Person’s Life

     First thing you have to do is convince a person that you know more about their mind than they do. That’s pretty easy. Just point to all those certificates on your wall. They show you’re not only a psychiatrist, you’re a medical doctor, too. Your patient can’t compete with that.

     Next you have to label them. Something erudite, but catchy. Generalized Anxiety Disorder is good. So is Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia). Both of those cover most emotional responses anybody has to life’s ups and downs. Better yet, they justify your writing that prescription for Xanax or Zoloft so their insurance will cover it.

     Who knows? Maybe Pfizer, the manufacturer of both drugs, will send you on another one of those three day weekend junkets, all expenses paid, to Las Vegas next spring. Of course, once you hear that after a year or so your patient is actually doing worse, not better, from their daily regimen of 50 milligrams of chemical lobotomy, you can then add another drug to their prescriptions.

     When you then hear that that one is making them feel even worse, you can add another. And another, and another, until they’re on a whole cocktail of them. Certainly by then Pfizer’s going to send you to Cancun for one of their expense paid “seminars.”

     The best part here? You don’t even have to see any patients for more than five or ten minutes at a time. Just long enough to listen to their woes, shake you head sympathetically, and write another prescription. No grueling, emotional, hour long sessions when you have to listen to all the worries a patient has and actually involve yourself in their emotions.

     Finally, after a couple years, you’re going to hear from the patient that they are still getting worse, much worse, in fact, from this toxic chemical cocktail overload. It’s time for you to pull out the big guns. Use the best label you’ve got. Major Treatment-resistant Depressive Disorder.

     Then write the final prescription, the one for electroshock therapy. When you find out that after six months that didn’t work either, you just order another twelve or twenty jolts of electricity for them. No problem.

     After a couple years of that, and you find out the patient can no longer hold a job because of permanent memory loss and cognitive failure, you just sign the paperwork that authorizes the state to put the patient on disability. Some group home or some family member can take care of them from now on. Nothing to do with you. You never even had to concern yourself with that poor soul’s troubles at all.

     You just had to open your door and say, “Next patient, please.”

     And sign up for that next Pfizer junket in Miami.