So I went to have a flu jab.
We all went and grabbed some pizza on the way back home. Halfway back I'd developed a huge headache, when we got home and I finished eating pizza I went to bed and promptly collapsed.
I was expecting to have a bad reaction but not one that quickly. For some bizarre reason it just seems to have gone straight to my head, and made me feel light-headed and weak. I basically lay there for three or four hours and now my head is feeling better, but unfortunately my arm now really hurts. Ugh.
On the upside I was just playing Tropico 4, and amidst all the other comments of it's painfully ridiculous caricature world I heard this on the radio:
<presenter says something I don't catch>
American ambassador: For the last time, I did not have - with that woman.
Penultimo: ... What did you just say?
24 hour later response time!
Last time I went, they wasted my time telling me how smart I am. At length. Also about how I seem to speak a foreign language, and how fascinating it is. I really don't want to have to sit through that again, as it mostly made me feel miserable.
I like it that people here treat me like a person. Psychologists treat me like an experiment, and I can feel them trying to exert control, which drives me nuts because they don't tend to be very good at it. Not looking like they're controlling people, I mean. Not that I'm good at it. I don't like the blunt psychical force method, though.
Yay psychology! Let's do some psychoanalysis.
Last time I went, they wasted my time telling me how smart I am. At length.
This I'm very familiar with. The most common psychiatric tool is positive reinforcement. Generally taking the form of complementing their good aspects and good decisions. Usually people that come to them are used to having the psychological crap beaten out of them by themselves and people around them. A lot of people benefit a lot from having someone to listen to them talk about everything that they feel is wrong with them and have them say, "No, you don't suck as much as you think you do."
This also has the effect of making the patient like them more, except I usually see it plain as day and I don't actually like having my ego puffed up. Even if it needs it.
... Also about how I seem to speak a foreign language, and how fascinating it is.
Ok, saying you seem to speak a foreign language sounds like a bad move to me. It sounds tantamount to saying, "I don't understand you at all." Which is not something I'd personally want to hear.
As for saying it's fascinating... Well for a psychiatrist every person is a puzzle. They have to figure out how they work in order to understand how to help them.
You are unfortunately an interesting person. I can empathise with someone wanting to sit down and gain a complex understanding of you. But somehow I get the feeling they won't have much success.
Psychologists treat me like an experiment, and I can feel them trying to exert control, which drives me nuts because they don't tend to be very good at it. Not looking like they're controlling people, I mean. Not that I'm good at it. I don't like the blunt psychical force method, though.
Yes, this.
I actually do consider myself somewhat good at controlling people, at least about as much as a person can be good at controlling people. I try very hard not to, but it seems to be an inevitable fact that if you have the power to manipulate sooner or later you'll try to use it.
It irritates me no end to watch people try to manipulate me when they're bad at it.
The two big things that always irritated me with psychiatrists is when they try to lead you into your own arguments, and when they drop a series of increasingly unsubtle hints trying to get you to have a particular revelation or touch on a particular subject.
Usually it's not even something I haven't already gone over before.
From what I can tell it seems to be a psychiatrist's job to manipulate people. But yeesh, have some tact!
Anyway. That's my analysis of your psychoanalyst.
And for the record, in my experience
psychologists tend to treat you like an experiment. Psychologists tend to be focused on the medicine side of things, whereas
psychiatrists don't do drugs.
Psychologists do therapy, but since they're in high demand and usually have little time for individual patients, that's usually done mostly by psychiatrists since they haven't undergone the extremely extensive education needed to dish out medicine. Since a lot of guesswork goes into the use of psychoactive drugs. Psychologists do a lot of probing.
Then there's counsellors that don't have the full psychology degree, but since most therapy is fairly simple this isn't a big deal.
In my experience, counsellors, psychiatrists, and psychologists are increasingly empirical as you go up the ladder.
They often get mixed up. It's good to know the difference though.