Recklessness is popping pills instead of communicating

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What is more reckless to us modern humans ?

- shoving chemical pills into our bodies and that of our children , pills produced for profit (therefore with no real motivation for effectiveness in actual recovery) prescribed by legitimised drug vendors who are routinely being wined and dined and offered sweetners by global drug companies. Drug companies who buy scientific studies to support their pills effeciacy… a bit like buying a forensic coroner from Australia in a certain murder trial…money can give you the answers you want and destroy the side effects evidence you don’t. Erin Brocovitch discovered that.

OR is it considered reckless to talk to each other face to face to hear the issues, to reveal our vulnerabilities and to maybe reach novel solutions such as changing schools, going rafting as a family, exposing secrets that have driven us apart through misunderstandings.

In modern society, the ability to relate to other people and communicate effectively has become severely compromised with the reliance of technology and not having to see the effect on someone’s face of your communication such as in the spread of viscious rumours on social media. It’s made it easier to be cruel publically and to discredit someone especially when you hide your identity. And so I suppose for those kind of people, authentic conversations with the potential for emotion have come to feel like reckless endeavours. Easier just to walk on to the next this or that, than to have to continue in a difficult conversation with someone with a view to repair. It is the culture where passive aggressive silent treatment shines forth as the tool of choice for the fearful.

I realise people in general are extremely avoidant of any kind of conflict or complaint because mostly when they have experienced conflict before, they have been met with blame and angry derision. However when groups are well run by experienced practitioners they can move with flexibility and don’t require the rigid structures of a psycho education group model; that shuts down any conflict that arises. The conflict has the great potential for change if managed with care and skill and indeed if we want satisfying relationships, they are impossible to sustain without being able to repair any ruptures with respect and good communication.

Lets be clear that I am not just talking through a hole in my head as the commenters of the last post appear to be suggesting. Groupwork skills are not time limited with a best buy date nor have human beings fundamentally changed in 10 years in what they want from relationships . For that matter Corrections was happy to trust in my skills and knowledge when it suited them. Corrections was quite OK with me, on my own, running a high risk violent offenders group with 9 men from different gangs for 3 weeks whilst my colleague had shingles.

Corrections were also quite happy for me to write psychological reports and do most of the psychometric testing. However strangely unhappy to pay me the $50,000 extra that my registered psychologist colleagues earned for doing the same tasks. So if it is Corrections who are paying K Arnold et al to run my arguments down by discrediting my professional expertise then they might ask themselves how on earth they could justify their misuse of me.

So although you never exactly know what effects people talking in groups will have and you do the very best you can to ensure that the process is contained, it is in no way anywhere near the level of recklessness that Corrections and Mental Health Services routinely engages in with people’s lives. The 6.5 hour wait to evacuate staff and prisoners from smoke filled cells perhaps one of the most public inhumane acts of recklessness that has remained fairly unnoticed by the public and unaccounted for in any criminal damages sense.

In my view our recklessness as a society lies in our readiness to believe in organisations who stand to benefit financially from people NOT getting better. Corrections, Mental Health, WINZ, Pharmaceutical companies all need people to remain in the systems and they need people to keep taking drugs for the rest of their lives even if it damages their brains and has side effects of suicide and extreme violence. In fact if they are violent, all to the better for Corrections and Mental Health.

We have swallowed the narrative because we have been frightened about violence and behaviour that we don’t understand but we also have to ask, how much of the fear has been manufactured as part of the entire corrupt business model. How much have the police been involved in supporting this narrative ?

We also don’t really have staff who can work in this way with people even though it would be a fraction of the cost of what we are spending on medication and incarceration. But probably the main thing is that as a society, it is easier for us to believe in the existing bullshit that these kids are the problem and drugs are the way to fix it. We don’t have to expose our shortcomings as parents, we don’t have to experience guilt or deal with the underlying issues of our own childhoods. It’s a lazy alternative in some way to turn the focus on the kids being the problem. The corrupt system financially dependent on you believing their “paid for” studies, makes it so easy to stay in the rut, not to question what we have come to believe as “the best and only option”.

Pharmaceutical companies can only dominate if we choose that option over genuine relationships of repair with our kids. Over family therapy sessions where we accept that our kids may have misinterpreted our behaviour or have been genuinely damaged by our actions. Where we accept that part of the responsibility of being a parent, is to accept that we are imperfect and have our own issues. If we choose pills over genuine repair, we are actually all about protecting ourselves from that discomfort. That does not fit my definition of what love is.

Photo by adrianna geo on Unsplash