law and order: ssri

dick wolf did it again

May 02, 2024

someone get drake a niggatine patch so he don’t gotta quit the n-word cold turkey
out: “anxiety is my superpower” in: “i’m a hypervigilante”
you ever see someone out in public and be like “i just know the zoloft bottle talking to you like the green goblin mask”
detectives john benzodiazapini, marcy o'klonopin, and ice-t as odafin tutuola
felonciaga (fashion…for felons)
to my biracials who got caught in the drake/kendrick tete-a-tete: my thoughts are with…half of you. i’ll let you pick the half.
some of these diagnoses feeling like scout badges. can i get some cookies at least? therapy tagalongs? ssri samoas? anxiety adventurefuls? depression do-si-dos?
knicks in the playoffs got me at my most diabolical ngl
my favorite caucasianism: knowing the exact inventory of diverse friends they have in their lives like it’s an amazon warehouse
kendrick lamar said y’all are fake haters, real haters stand up
“don’t tell a lie about me and i won’t tell the truth about you…” then kdot flamed the boy for 5 straight minutes…we’re so back

hold up — are you telling me the generation who grew up amidst school shootings, unchecked public health crises, rampant police violence, the veil being lifted on their educational indoctrination, and like 6 recessions is dissatisfied with their past, present, and future so they’re acting out by *checks notes* sitting down in encampments and protesting *squints* arms dealing with a foreign nation by peacefully demanding divestment?

free them out the cage. the kids are right.

the mental health medal of freedom

one thing a lot of people who date men in my life gotta ask before they hop into dates or conversations with prospects is

“are you in therapy?”

after that, it’s slim pickings. i mean, as a man, admitting something might be wrong with you? and you need professional intervention? sounds pretty scrumptious, sweet, delectable, carmelized, glazed — okay, it’s gay, you get it, we all went to middle school (some of us never left). getting help is antithetical to being a man (you’ve heard hack jokes from the 90s?) for a lot of men even though the opposite is true.

men, go to therapy. even if it’s to get through something small and for a little while. whether therapy is gay or not, you gotta learn little something about yourself, king! unless learning is gay too…damn i’m losing track of the plight of straight dudes —

BUT! look, i’m with my shorties (gender neutral) on this one — a lot of men are not out here taking care of the mental in any way shape or form and that’s a real problem, even if therapy feels like shorty is locking you in on a treadmill, hanging love on a stick with a string and saying “keep going.” i assume we’ve all seen looney tunes?

like, simply statistically, dating a man comes with mad risks. if ol’ boy with a big ass trout in his hinge ain’t working on themselves, are they worth it? how do you know you won’t get disappeared on that fishing trip? will my friends be safe? when will the other shoe drop?

i hear it, i see y’all but what i found interesting is that some of the folks who need therapy as a prereq to pound town weren’t in therapy themselves. when i’d ask more questions, i’d get their own alternatives to therapy:

intuition
*hits spliff* this my therapy right here
tarot
microdosing shrooms
“there’s nothing wrong with me, pussy — you tryna fight?”
the ancestors
religion (strangely always buddhism)
dancing
astrology/crystals
macrodosing shrooms
12-hour yap sessions
the voices
club overshares
getting their back blown izzout/blowing someone’s back izzout
delulu

it felt like a double standard at first, asking specifically for therapy for a partner but you get to do fuck all, but, in my approximation, women generally have more opportunities to build emotionally vulnerable relationships so i shrugged it off — we all heal in our own ways, gotta get it how you live. but a question lingered:

how did therapy become the catch-all for if someone’s “a good person”

a trend i’ve noticed: therapy is treated as a moral badge of honor, a nobel prize in normalcy, a psychological purple heart, a preface for any conversation about good or bad ideas, deeds, behaviors, etc, or a mask to dress up trauma to function. which is it for you? *dora the explorer pause*

“get this mf to the loony bin!”

last summer, jonah hill was exposed to be misusing therapy language to manipulate his then partner talking about his expectations of her, how he felt when she was out in surf gear, etc. what looked to me at first like basic insecurity (if you can’t handle a bad bitch, don’t date a bad bitch) turned into a lot of conversations about what men talk about in therapy — whether men were in there to become better people or better manipulators. i mean “man” is in the name, yeah? amirite?

of course, both of those options are possible but a secret third thing emerged: could it be possible to be in therapy and be a flawed, insecure, work-in-progress person?

a fourth thing: does therapy automatically mean you’re a good person now? like you can go to therapy and be a “born-again maniac?”

and a fifth: why is therapy even a thing if we weaponized both what is said there and the act of going?

jonah hill, of course is a lightning rod of the moment, the most visible, and a singular case but we all know some people who are in therapy and…still move insane? like we were on eggshells before they got help and now that they’ve been in therapy, they’ve added bear traps and a laser grid to the eggshells? tf?

i’d be lying if i said i didn’t know that therapy could make someone banal into the worst person i know. i mean, they’re getting help! and healing is non-linear! everyone does it differently! but I guess, if they’re in therapy so, does that mean they can keep being bad?

rewind: why are people going to therapy? like i know why i’m in therapy but why do we go?

as a last resort? as a first resort?
because we’re bullied into going? to fit in?
because people won’t date you if you’re in therapy?
as a response to the general and specific shittiness of the world?
because we’re on a slow drip learning the horrors of the universe and need to process somewhere, somehow?
because we want to be better or better than someone else?
to get some pushback on our perceptions?
to analyze our patterns? someone else’s?
to be agreed with? to confirm a bias?
to work on ourselves?
all of the above? none of it?

whatever the reason, i just don’t think that people should be shamed into getting help; help should be to a) get healthier, b) process difficult emotions and put words to them, and c) navigate community better. i think therapy shouldn’t be used as a cudgel and a soft pillow by people who see it as a one size fits all response to everything — it’s giving Western medicine, lazy pathologizing, and individualizing suffering.

i was scared the first time i talked to a counselor in college: admitting feelings that you don’t even have the words for is difficult for a number of reasons. add a cultural and masculine predisposition to “keep things to yourself” and to “thug it out” and there i was shook for even thinking those hard to describe feelings mattered in the first place

people are scared to go to therapy for valid reasons: knowledge of self, prodding the exposed nerve through the years of emotional scar tissue, journeying to self-acceptance — it’s a lot and it can be arduous, time intensive, and nonlinear.

bell hooks said it in “the will to change:” if we want a safer world for women, we gotta heal men, too. some corners of feminism would say “booooo tomato tomato” but do we want men to heal or do we want to keep the shame and blame game up? all that is to me is an investment in dysfunction so we can rage against the machine like always, never doing our own part to dismantle the machine that allows men to need help or for women to feel safe (more in another newsletter).

this isn’t just gendered — it’s racialized, queered tf up, and biased by age, class, religion, and nationality. therapy is fantastic but inviting someone to therapy hits way harder than beating people senseless with moralizing about how not therapy is a red flag — ESPECIALLY if you aren’t walking the same walk or talk therapying the same talk…therapy. almost lost it, got it back—

…do we need a loonier bin?

hoping you on the “we want things to be better” tip. let’s dig in a little more. cultural tribalism and hack heteronormative joke structures aside, what’s going on in that room? some of the online and irl behavior i see makes me say “what the fuck be going on in their sessions because dis tew much” and shit is only getting more insane given a genocide (pick your flavor at this point, my god), more shootings, an upcoming election in the U.S., and like 20 other things i’ll remember another day.

if what my therapist and therapist friends have been telling me is true, lately a lot of people are in the session:

trying to impress them
minimizing their roles in situations to rewrite history
self-diagnoses from tiktok and ig
arriving to therapy with chat gpt diagnoses for irl corroborations (i’m so deadass)
looking for validation only

let’s tackle that shit one at a time:

impressing your therapist ain’t it

it’s a process, it’s a journey, all of that but most importantly it’s yours. if you feel a grand need to impress the one person who by law can’t chat your shit, that’s a you thing. why do you feel the need to be impressive all the time? now that question is both internal and external…

revisionist history

as far as i'm concerned, we're all walking around as main characters, trying to make sure our show gets another episode, hopefully another season (and a bigger budget).

but even characters on real deal shows have flaws, they make decisions that affect the whole show. revisionist history often makes people a protagonist who can do no wrong but the real real? you can be a protagonist in one episode and an antagonist in the next. you might not even be in that other person you’ve made your big bad’s story and that’s life. changing up the narrative so we were right, fair, and perfect feels reclamatory, but don’t go crying to your mama — we ain’t watching that show in the real world — stand on it, don’t remix it.

instead of revisionist history, contextualize all experiences, turn that main character energy into an ensemble, watch your dividends never end.

internet self-diagnosis

i almost left it at this photo but that’s not fair. ig and tiktok are perfectly fine first steps into a curious journey into the self but coming in having already defined what you have (mind you, from wingdings online) and getting a co-sign/high five from a therapist ain’t the wave.

look, chat-gpt is cheap but it ain’t human — maybe in parallel to help from a professional. AI could be helpful but it shouldn’t replace but be a tool — it can’t pickup on social cues, nonverbals, cultural differences — all things that a therapist also reads as signs to give appropriate care. like what if AI tell you “nah, son kill yourself.” you doing that? you giving your mento illness to skynet that easy? do your googles.

validation hunter-gatherers

relatable. no honestly. our culture oscillates between go girl give us nothing to doing too much almost every hour. everything in our brains has been wired to validation from others for like 20 years (social media adding fuel to the fire). a therapist should validate your feelings but isn’t there to always agree with everything. a therapist is also a human being and not just a trauma receptacle — they are healthcare workers who are there to serve your mental health needs not glaze you without question.

we all wanna be liked, wanna be loved, want to be right, want to be admired but that’s not the a therapist’s lane. sometimes we don’t hear what we wanna hear and that’s part of life I guess. personally, i think this is a confluence of the “therapy is like dating” adage, disposability politics, and a cushioned culture of indirect conflict — we gotta get better at sitting with discomfort — as good, at least, as telling people to.

i’d be lying if i said i didn’t feel a rush of noxious validation when my therapist laughs at a joke or tells me she’s proud of some progress i’ve made. that shit is straight dopamine. nothing feels better, I stg — but that’s not why we should be there. i’ve said it before — comedy is a coping mechanism and an art form and in therapy, i had to learn to move through the art and the coping and get to the heart of my issues or the jokes wouldn’t joke and the art wouldn’t art.
it’s the difference to me between a person who was raised playing soccer vs someone who played when they were 8 and are just trying to get some cardio —both are valid but when the game gets real, one will be able to handle it a little better than the other even though we all gotta play and there’s no subs.
i want to live my life not just in wait for that one hour where i can do no wrong and i’ll be agreed with — i can’t tell anyone how they should do therapy but it’s real work.

therapy shouldn’t be a badge of honor to be wielded as an authority on anything but yourself and how you fit into your world.

if we in the therapy out here barely doing therapy, just to get a badge that says" “i went to therapy,” are we really engaging with our role in preserving and building community, leaving dysfunctional relationships in the past, and handling life’s punches like a pro?

or are we patroling others’ lives with a badge of moral purity we made ourselves in ms paint with a forged note from our therapist?

the looniest bin of all

i guess growing up is seeing former punk kids conform and become the cops themselves — i guess that radical politic is only skin deep. neurodiversity, much like regular diversity, is about embracing difference not conforming it to a “norm.” i don’t care who you are; trying to establish a “norm” that centers a very western practice with no intersectional vision re: race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, neurodivergence is not inclusion but self-indulgent exclusion. but that’s what we have normalized.

the older i get, the more i see, the more i hear, the more i learn that mfs have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about with confidence. a lot of unhealed children, cosplaying as adults, grown-up playground antics. it’s natural to exclude, to push away, to not know how to “sit with discomfort.” that’s how we’re raised — to either wait for authority or become it. and our models for authority? cops. no matter how radical or leftist, some people dislike the cops and some dislike that they aren’t the cops. some want to move with impunity and use their diagnosis (self or professional) to be both sword and shield against any sort of accountability. sound familiar?

some of us gotta work harder to kill the cop in our heads. i’m sorry gang — pretend i’m reginald veljohnson. “you off the force turn in your therapy badge and your actual gun (speaking mostly about americans here).” therapy treats everyone as an individual case, to be treated with care, but the way that it’s used to get people “in line” by non-professionals is giving police state of mind.

nothing gets me more hot than when someone uses a diagnosis to continue to either a) manipulate people or b) keep doing the same bad behavior as if being “clinically a dickhead” is a pass. a diagnosis is empowering, giving us the information to make a change in our lives and hopefully have loved ones who support us.

that power gets abused when it’s used as an excuse rather than context for behavior and that’s what i’m really on about here — it’s a tough line to walk but hopefully, with more open and vulnerable relationships, that line can be erased and we can make space for each other rather than excommunicate each other to heal alone and call it “rehabilition.” is that not the same logic of prison, a famously (i’ll say it) bad system?

therapy isn’t a weapon. it isn’t a shield. it isn’t a badge of honor. it shouldn’t be the captcha to get back into polit society. it’s not one size fits all. it’s what we make of it but hopefully what we make of it is constructive and conducive to both personal and community growth.

therapy helps us understand ourselves and helps others understand us as well — can we just not wield it against each other? like it’s fucking horrible out in the world right now for a myriad of reasons. can we respect everyone’s journey, find a cultural pattern and critique it, and make space outside of therapy to fit back into the world?

therapy can’t be the end all be all. everyone has their practice, their safe space, their happy place, and the goal should be trying to make all places as happy as can be, right? or is it toxic positivity we just blow up each other’s asses?

to take some heat off the therapists and feed the streets with some positivity, i wanna share some short anecdotes of little community ways that have made the world more tenable:

community should validate each other

i had a friend tell me recently that i’m one of the few people who tells her i’m proud of her and now imma triple up. tell your friends you’re proud of them of them and often — healing is hard and when you see someone doing their best, remind them that you see the moves.
a few autumns back, a friend of mine and i went on a long walk and out of nowhere, she told me that she could see that my boundaries were getting stronger and…well, i forgot i was being perceived growing by someone who cares. this is one of my most valued friendships and all we do is make sure we hold space for highs and lows and remind the homies you see them.
another night, another walk. i wanted smoke — the homie was being annoying online and i had a plan to talk to him. but i thought about him — was this online behavior about me? no, i was just experiencing it and it was also out of character. so i asked how he was doing and learned that he was really going through it. no one asks men how they’re doing and then wonder why they self-destruct.
- while men are primarily responsible for everything bad in the multiverse blah blah we get it BUT the only way to help us get in touch with them is to admit that man have feelings and the capacity to tap into more.
i got asked to be part of an intervention — i declined. i knew him but i wasn’t close to him. but, curious, i wanted to hear what their plan was and it sounded like a surprise party where everyone called him an annoying little bitch with no care plan, patted themselves on the back, and kept it pushing. i don’t know if it’s tv or what — that’s a horrible idea without a professional interventionist and the lack of plan told me that while the seeds of care were there, there was no soil to grow in, the appropriate light, and no watering of those seeds for the dude to grow out of the state he was in and into a plant with roots interconnected with the people around him. before we call out/intervene, we gotta think about how much bandwidth we have to support them
in taking a peer mental health course. i have to re-up my certificate myself but it helps us all become better at seeing the signs of a myriad of basic interventions with mental health first aid. this is that public health community care pack we should be puffing on instead of circlejerking therapy speak online. even with a degree in neuro, that course taught me more about the smaller behaviors that someone in crisis might exhibit that an ig infographic couldn’t get to us. it’s not all explosive, obvious, or big reactions — sometimes it’s quiet, how someone holds their body, how they hold eye contact, etc.