Consumption, 8

The volume I have of Consumption comprises two books. Today, I read from chapter 19 to the end of the first book: the narrative of what happened to Benjamin at the age of seventeen, when, alarmed by what I quoted in the previous instalment of this series, he was admitted to Brookside, a psychiatric unit for adolescents.

It is vital to understand the real cause of the psychosis, as it is very rare to find someone who knows that psychiatry is as pseudoscientific as, say, parapsychology or ufology. For example, it is curious that Ben’s father, the person most responsible for his son’s mental catastrophe, was as clueless about his role as my mother was when she destroyed my life, also at the age of seventeen. Ben’s father even gave his son a book to read during the year he was hospitalised in the Brookside clinic, The Noonday Demon: a book that promotes the accepted pseudoscience (and about which I wrote a review that can serve as an introduction to debunking the medical model in favour of the trauma model).

But back to the final chapters of the first book of Consumption. It is very impressive to read, in Benjamin’s prose, that some of the other teenagers who were admitted to Brookside also told terrible stories about their pasts that would easily validate the trauma model for anyone with a minimum degree of empathy. But that’s not what the orthodox psychiatrist sells us to understand these young self-harmers committed in Brookside, some even in their early or middle teens. In the words of Ben’s father:

“See, you might think that,” my Dad said, “but no, the science is clear. You see, there are such things in the brain as monoamine neurotransmitters. Little grouped rings of amino acids which control the regulation of emotions, for example, dopamine and serotonin. In your case, you were born with the genes that put you at risk of producing too little serotonin, which in turn leads to your adolescent Depression, which is where your tablets come in. You take daily SSRIs, which stands for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. The medications in the tablets increase the amount of serotonin in your brain by limiting its reabsorption, thus keeping your mood stable. It’s important that you keep taking them, as the doctor says. They’ve studied this area and are professionals, and they know what’s best for you.”

One of the things Benjamin recounts in these chapters is that, after he left Brookside at the age of eighteen, he kept in touch with the teenage friends he made there and, to his dismay, even though they used to take their psychiatric meds several of them committed suicide, one as late as 2005.

As had happened to me on the other side of the Atlantic, no one had wanted to listen to them: something that results in a devastating panic of the inner self that sometimes leads to dire consequences. I have said it before and it is worth repeating ad infinitum and ad nauseam: the psychological havoc that abusive parents cause to their offspring is the greatest taboo of the human species. We can already imagine why a profession that shares this universal taboo can only be iatrogenic, in that its “treatments”—drugs, electroshock or even lobotomy—only victimise the victim again. This absolute lack of empathy, even to listen, prompted Benjamin to write retrospectively about his seventeen years: “…the new world I was gradually being exposed to proving far darker and more horrific than I had ever realised, far from the idyllic countryside of my early years”.

Making friends at Brookside and, in a way, recognising himself in them began to serve Ben as a form of therapy, although not in the sense that the professionals expected (the doctors made him take antidepressants) but because of the similarities with these teenagers’ family tragedies. Alas, this healthy coexistence with other teens was brutally interrupted when his parents visited him at Brookside bringing with them… the Pakistani lad who had molested Ben! Although his parents’ intentions in bringing Tariq weren’t malicious, their lack of empathy reminded me of an anecdote related to a school where I was tormented. Although it was not sexual abuse in my case, what is striking is the absolute disconnect between both families in terms of the most basic communication with the affected person.

The visit proved fateful. Not long after, in a psychotic episode triggered by Benjamin feeling betrayed for having brought Tariq along, instead of hating the perpetrators, in Brookside he re-directed the rage towards himself inflicting terrible self-harm. The ultimate cause of such pathological transference is that society doesn’t allow the victim to speak out his or her emotions (i.e., blame the guilty parties) and the rage is redirected.

In front of his father during one of his visits, Benjamin collapsed because of the horrific things he had done to his body. I will refrain from detailing them, but it was something like a pressure cooker that society, with its Fourth Commandment to honour one’s father, puts a lid on. If that pressure cooker had an escape valve instead of the horrendous repression that caused the psychoses of the Brookside teenagers, we would have common neuroses. But since it is the most potent taboo of the human mind, society insists on its lid until the pressure cooker explodes, dirtying the entire kitchen and even leaving a hole in the ceiling due to the tremendous force with which the metal lid was thrown.

Ben’s self-harm was this time so severe that he had to be taken from Brookside to an emergency hospital, where, in the operating theatre and under general anaesthesia, the surgeons had to remove flesh from one of his legs in a desperate attempt to avoid amputating an arm that had become gangrenous due to his self-harm. The curious thing is that right before the operation, when the doctors told him he could lose his arm, Benjamin didn’t care at all about it: he only cared about the (paranoid) guilt that his family and the System had instilled in his mind (cf. the final words on page 136 of the March 2025 edition). That sense of abysmal guilt is why he had self-harmed.

By then, Benjamin was allowed by the Brookside staff to visit his parents on weekends. If mental health professionals were run by proponents of the trauma model that would never, ever be allowed because his parents would go back to their old ways and that would ensure a relapse (think of something similar to taking Tariq to Brookside but every weekend)! And although I won’t recount the anecdote that was exactly what happened. To boot, after his father abused his son again the iatrogenic profession re-victimised him in the most humiliating and hurtful way:

“Thank you for arranging this [meeting]. Well, it’s my Dad; he’s been making my life really difficult at home. He keeps patronising me and getting at me like he doesn’t like me very much, and my Mum’s not stopping him…”

“Stop right there”, the doctor said with an incredulous expression, interrupting me, “So are you saying to me that you think your father is responsible for your selfinjuring behaviour recently?” to which I replied, “Um, yes, to a degree, I mean, it’s other stuff I’m sad about, but he’s not helping, and he keeps shouting at me and bossing me about, and he bins my stuff” […].

“You see, Benjamin. Listen to your father and mother. They know what’s best for you, and try not to be difficult at home, ok? Sometimes, when we get ill, we can think people are persecuting us, when they really aren’t, and it can feel very real at times.”

Remember what I said not long ago, that according to Tom Szasz psychiatry is a kind of pediatrics because it treats adults as if they were children? What the doctor did is precisely what Alice Miller called “poisonous pedagogy”.

To which, horrified, I responded with “but… but… I’m not lying to you, doctor. It’s true; he does bully me in the house. Please, Mum, Mum, say something!” The doctor appeared put out at this point and a little flustered. Evidently, he had not been expecting my interruption. “Benjamin, keep your voice down, please. Don’t get excited!”

My mother spoke up at this point, in surprising solidarity, “Well, sometimes, you know what it’s like with two men in the house; they come to loggerheads with each other, and Benjamin’s Dad isn’t always the most patient with him…” to which my father gave the sharp retort, “Mary!” and the doctor himself, keen to get on with the meeting, brushed this new response aside, as if he hadn’t heard, and did not pause to write it down as he had done with my own responses.

He went on, “Ok, let’s keep on the point now, as it’s easy to drift off topic. I think what we’re going to do is re-evaluate Benjamin’s diagnosis from now on. It seems Borderline Personality Disorder may not be the whole picture. Just as a preliminary hypothesis, I suggest a co-morbidity of Paranoid Personality Disorder. It’s clear from what Benjamin’s saying about his father that he’s suffering from at least some paranoid symptoms.”

Note that the shrink doctor never witnessed what was happening at home. Only by living with them would he have seen the family dynamics! He’s diagnosing paranoia simply because he sides with the father, like a lawyer with his corrupt client. This is what happened to me at seventeen on the other side of the Atlantic.

He turned to specifically address me. “What we’re going to do now is keep you on your 60mg of Citalopram daily, but in addition to that we’re starting you on a course of Olanzapine, it’s one of the newer atypical antipsychotic mood stabilisers. We’ve had very good results from the clinical trials, and we think it’ll help sort out your paranoid delusions. You take one tablet a day, at 10mg, just as a starting dose, and we’ll see if we should increase it from there.”

“But why are you doing this?!” I called to the psychiatrist, “I’m telling you the truth!” Momentarily, he paused again, taken aback, then turned, as if personally insulted, and motioned to the nurse next to him, saying, “Nurse, it seems Benjamin is becoming agitated; please could you ask him to leave the meeting room” and, before I could say anything else to defend myself, or to contest the decision, and in front of both my parents, I was motioned again to my feet, and boldly escorted out of the room, back to my bedroom to “calm down”.

It was as if a rug had been pulled out from under me. How could my Dad lie like that, right in front of my face? Why couldn’t he just acknowledge it and be more patient around me? After all, my room was hardly untidy [his father’s claim to constantly intrude in his room—Ed.], and, if anything, he was just finding something to do since retiring, himself the obsessive one. And why did the doctor side with him when I told him Dad had been hurting my feelings and side with him from the get-go, really? Why wasn’t I allowed to say my piece? Why was it his word over mine, automatically?! And was I really paranoid?

I didn’t think so, pleased a little that at least my Mum had come to a partial defence of me, impotent though it was. And curse that doctor for not listening to me, the arrogant swine! I hated him. I hated all of the staff. And, more than anything, a deep humiliation settled over me, peaked and incensed, insulted to my core…

Benjamin’s reaction was brutal. Not long after, he began biting his arm like a rabid dog, tearing off pieces of living tissue that had not yet healed from the operation, in such a horrible way that “an experienced surgeon… vomited on the floor, excusing himself from the scene in panic”.

One might think that after such volcanic outbursts of psychosis, a sane father might begin to become a little more humble and listen to his son for the first time in his life.

But that doesn’t happen with narcissistic parents: a form of self-righteousness to the nth degree (the unforgivable sin of pride in Christian terms!). That’s why these parents are so destructive. In fact, if my trilogy were ever to be published under a single cover, I would love for the publisher to use the title of the first volume, Hojas Susurrantes, as I explain there that the title refers to a dream I had in which, at last, the adolescent I once was was able to communicate with his dearest dad…