“It all started when I made that phone call. ...& “29 years old, postdoc in biochem, recent relationship trouble…mmmm…you did the right thing.”
“In coming here?”
“No, in considering suicide. After getting rejected from a tenure-track position, your life is pretty much over.”
“WHAT?”
“I mean, here you are, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, with only one area of expertise, and now you’ve been rejected from it. I can totally see why you might think it’s worth ending it all.”
& “Industry! A bunch of bloodsuckers. Do you realize how bad work in the private sector is these days? They’ll abuse you and then spit you out, and once you’ve been out of university too long nobody else will want you.”
& “Dark side psychiatry? Really?”
“We’re a... well, some people say sect, but I like to think of it as more of a guild... dedicated to improving negative mental health. Think of it this way. When you’re a hijacked murder-monkey hurtling toward your inevitable death, sanity is a completely ridiculous thing to have. And when the universe is fifteen billion light-years across and almost entirely freezing void, the idea that people should have ‘coping skills’ boggles the imagination. An emotionally healthy person is a person who isn’t paying attention, and our job is to cure them.”
& “Wait. There’s a technique in therapy called paradoxical intention. Where you take a patient’s irrational thought, and then defend and amplify it. And then when the patient hears it from someone else, she realizes how silly it sounds and starts arguing against it, and then it’s really hard to keep believing it after you’ve shot it down yourself.”
& “Can you think of any alternate explanations for that?”
... Before returning the directory to the front desk, I took my own pen and added «DO NOT REFER» in big letters underneath.”
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