November 25, 2016
When you take medication, other people stop hassling you to take it. That doesn't mean that how they think about you changes; before you take it, you're refusing to do something that they want you to do, and when you take it, they feel better. What helps you to feel better is that they stop hassling you as much as they hassle you when you're not taking medication.
Unfortunately, if they get mad enough, then they'll decide that you need more medication, and they'll hassle you until you take that.
Also unfortunately, mental health care providers who are not as intelligent as the troubled children and teenagers whom they're trying to treat fail more often than they succeed. Sometimes they fail because they are deceived by their clients. Sometimes they fail because they aren't nice people and they hate their jobs. Frequently, they fail because they get frustrated with their inability to understand or help their clients, and diagnosing and medicating the clients absolves the practitioners of their feelings of failure; that's how they go from feeling like they're bad at their jobs to being bad at their jobs.
Sometimes even intelligent practioners fail because they get tired of the work that it takes to help someone move toward health. To say that someone is going to be sick for the rest of his or her life, and that all that anyone can do is monitor the person while the person copes with the "illness," is a relief that practioners shouldn't be able to have, but they do, and pharmaceutical companies profit from it.
It can be a treacherous path from being a smart kid to being a productive and responsible adult. Fortunately, being smart often helps to keep people out of trouble that they would not know was trouble if they weren't smart, and even when they do decide that they like trouble, they don't do as many stupid things as people who aren't that smart do. What also can happen for smart people who decide at a young age that they prefer trouble to their clumsy or evil therapists and to feeling like they can never get anything right anyway is that, 10 or 20 years later, they decide that they don't like trouble and its consequences and they want to do something else.
What's really sad is when the smart kids get too damaged, or their lives get too damaged, for them to have good lives when they're adults. I have met them in hospitals and group homes. You can't always know exactly what happened to them, but it's a fact of life that there aren't a lot of people who want to hear truths about themselves told to them by anyone, particularly not by children and teenagers who, as smart as they are, don't yet know the self-preserving power of tact.
What's a kid in counseling supposed to think, that all the "truth-telling" is only going to be one way? Why would a kid think that? What's fair about it, from a kid's perspective, especially if the kid wasn't the one who asked for help for the kid?
It's appropriate for therapists not to talk too much about themselves to their clients, but what about when the kid reads the therapist like a first-grade book and the therapist subsequently hates the kid?
If you answered:
and
you're correct.
Getting into or near the last two a few times often convinces people that the first one is preferable.
Copyright L. Kochman, November 25, 2016 @ 3:23 p.m.
