OH WELL, THANKS FOR GIVING ME THE OPPORTUNITY TO COMMENT HERE. BYE, BYE, BYE !!

I lost my job due to absence and I am currently in the phase of rebuilding my life.

No psychiatric hospital is about the space. It is about the people. If you choose as a patient to be ruthlessly honest about what is going on inside of you, then you can get the help you need. If, however, you only tell them half-truths and part of the story, you won’t get much out of it. That is bullshitting.

At Menninger, only one of my providers seemed to lack empathy. The rest, my personal psychologist, social worker, psychiatrist and my personal RN truly cared and worked hard with me to help me get through my extremely severe suicidal depression. Without Menninger and the people there, I am certain that I would not be here today.

In particular, Dr. Tom Ellis, Dr. Jon Allen, Dr. Kayatekin, Eric Cool, RN and Jennifer, LISW were crucial in my healing.

REgarding mentalizing, in my first class with Dr. Allen, I called the word mentalizing an abomination of the English language. I learned that this horrendous word is actually in the dictionary. DBT has it’s own version of the word. In DBT it is being mindful of what you and others say in order to be able to validate each other and communicate in a equitable way. Mentalizing takes it one step further. Mentalizing literally means getting our of your own body and watching the interaction from a detached gently curious point of view and using that view to help us be aware of what we are thinking and feeling and helps us to communicate with others.

Mentalizing and writing stories about others’ fictional lives in that context was very helpful.

Mentalizing turned my past experience of therapy which was psychobabble that got me nowhere into a healing experience. Most of all learning about CBT with my psychologist did literally save my life.

I’m saddened by your post. It sounds like your experience at Menninger ended with you being worse off than when you began. I hope your life has improved since then!

“Mentalizing”/”Psychobabble”
It’s not the name we give to a concept that’s important. It’s understanding what it means and how to apply it that counts. It’s much more productive to explore the use and application of the concept than it is to rant about its name or its misapplication.

Why give the concept of “mentalizing” a name in the first place? We humans need a name or word for everything. It creates vocabulary. We come to understand things through education. Education is nothing more than expanding our vocabulary with concentrated attention to the meaning of certain words.

Want to become an engineer? Study things that allow you to understand words like hydrology, adiabatic process, bending moment, shear, physics, calculus, etc. With the right mix of expanded vocabulary you will succeed in becoming an engineer.

“Release from prison”
Your comparison of a patient to a criminal after release fails to recognize at least one important difference between each one’s lot in life after release. The Menninger patient has the benefit of a program that includes the patient’s personal support group such as family and friends. This group is included from the beginning of treatment until release. They’re educated and coached in how to help the patient adjust after release. They’re encouraged to grasp the concept of “mentalizing”. They’re also encouraged to practice it for themselves. After release, this support group, plus ongoing sessions of therapy, is there to help the patient navigate their way back into everyday life.

I’m not sure what they named the concepts that were used on me 18 years ago. BUT THAT “PSYCHOBABBLE” SAVED MY LIFE!

Yes, people do often fool themselves in the depth of a psychological illness. I would theorize that this is rather inherent in many illnesses, especially in those like schizophrenia, personality disorders, PTSD, and eating disorders. Nobody wants to face all the horrible demons they carry inside themselves. Which is why it’s the therapist’s job to be able to see through layers, or masks (which I would call it rather than ‘bullshit’, as calling them ‘bullshit’ is very pejorative and negative), or schemas, or whatever other non-derogatory name you’d like to put on it. And it’s the therapist’s job to try and make the patient aware of such schemas, by communicating in a way that actually gets through to each particular patient.

I personally experienced three months of Menninger, from the other side of the locked door as the writer. In my experience, there was very little actual empathy for patients; there was a total unwillingness on the part of most of the staff to participate in a dialogue with patients. Empathy cannot exist if you are not even willing to listen.

You want to talk about not bullshitting as treaters, about not wanting to engage in psychobabble–but your post uses a common bit of Menninger psychobabble, “mentalizing.” Even if you link to another post that attempts to define it, it’s still your own invented psychobabble. It’s even a post that the writer himself also authored. This is an excellent example of the hamster-wheel logic pervasively used at Menninger: you run around and around and around, but you never get anywhere.

“Safety” is another example of the psychobabble Menninger employs. Patients are heavily restricted and told it’s “for everyone’s safety.” On the surface, this seems to make sense–but scratch beneath the surface of that thin Menninger veneer and it becomes nonsensical. If you take away from patients anything with which they could possibly harm themselves or others, how are they going to learn to regulate the emotional states that cause those harmful behaviors? It’s similar to the problem faced by many people upon release from prison: they’ve been controlled, not rehabilitated, so once they’re free again, in an environment where many potential weapons are available, they tend to repeat the harmful behaviors because external regulation has not taught them internal regulation.

But if a patient dares to question why they are not allowed to have, say, a Q-tip (and yes, these were actually taken away because they were classified as “sharps”), the only answer they’ll get is “We’ve had a problem with it in the past. It’s a safety concern.” This seems to make sense at first, but one must examine it beneath the surface level.

Part of Merriam-Webster’s definition of “safe” is “not likely to be harmed or lost.” What are patients losing when the people they look to for help treat them like children and criminals? What are patients losing when they’re locked in an insular, Orwellian world where they must constantly watch every word and motion because doing the “wrong” thing brings infantilizing punishment?

I lost a lot at Menninger. I lost being treated as a competent adult. I lost the decision to make any meaningful decisions about my daily life. I lost faith in the people I’d expected to help and support me in my efforts to put my life back together. Most importantly, I lost hope.

That, to me, is the very opposite of “safe.”

My diagnosis: Menninger’s “empathy” is bullshit, and their writing about combating their internal psychobabble is bullshit.