Shrink on the Loose

L Zieman PhD G.

Description

Ride shotgun with Dr. Z and enter a psychologist's world far beyond the stereotypical. You'll discover culturally diverse and often precarious treatment sessions and evaluations in home kitchens, a Navajo hogan, an Army dining hall, and psych hospitals deep in the tropics. There's even the risky examination of a homicidal redneck in a cowboy bar, during Happy Hour.This itinerant shrink doesn't travel with a therapy couch-but you will attend therapy in India, Hong Kong, Germany, dusty New Mexico villages, a hospital obstetrics ward, and on American Indian reservations. Come along to meet an Apache girl with the Evil Eye, a raging and hallucinating jungle dweller, a Native American healer in a trance, and a Chinese cook whose wife worries that his shriveling penis will kill him.Learn from these extraordinary adventures of helping real people in places you'd never expect. Join Dr. Z, on the road, for psychotherapy and a bundle of psychiatric "irregularities."

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Abnormal psychology
• Memoir
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Untreed Reads
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611873689
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Copyright
Shrink on the Loose
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: Toss the Therapy Couch
Notes to the Reader
PART I - CHASING ROADRUNNERS
Introduction: Opening Act
Chapter 1: Spam for Breakfast Reveals the Evil Eye
Chapter 2: The Navajo Hand Trembler
Chapter 3: Horse-Phobic Cowboy
Chapter 4: Just Two Rorschach Inkblots
Chapter 5: Strutting Miniskirt in the Antipodes
PART II - SHRINK UNDER THE COCONUT PALM
Introduction: Mosquitoes Twelve Months a Year
Chapter 6: Forays into East Indian Medicine
Chapter 7: “Bula” from the Fiji Islands
Chapter 8: Shriveling in Hong Kong
Chapter 9: Papua New Guinea: Taming Amok
PART III - PSYCH 24/7
Introduction: The 3 a.m. Potpourri
Chapter 10: Fishing for Baby Booties
Chapter 11: Weekend of the Bs: Bipolar, Borderline, and BBS
Chapter 12: Consent to Die
Chapter 13: Sending a Secret Saturday Specimen
PART IV - DON’T BE ARMY GREEN
Introduction: Hey Soldier, Counseling with That Burger?
Chapter 14: Ticker, Relax and Go to War
Chapter 15: Battlefield Iraq: Frontlines to Home Front
Chapter 16: Needing a Bad Hair Day
PART V - POST B. S.
Introduction: Two Moons in the Window
Chapter 17: Therapeutic Barber (In Training)
Shrink on the Loose: Therapy in Unexpected Locations
By G. L. Zieman

Copyright 2012 by Gayle. L. Zieman
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
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Shrink on the Loose
Therapy in Unexpected Locations
By G. L. Zieman, Ph.D.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Numerous individuals assisted me in the conceptualization and development of this book. Most notable are four esteemed colleagues to whom I am deeply grateful: Robert Klein, Ph.D., Rene Silleroy, Ph.D., Rob Horowitz, Ph.D., and Allen Daniels, Ed.D.
From my first thoughts of this manuscript until the last sentence was written, Rene Silleroy was a constant source of energy, motivation, and encouragement. When the writing coupled with the duties of daily psychological practice became stressful, she always offered hugs and words of support. Most memorable are the times when I complained and then later found that she had left me small chocolates in my office mailbox or sitting on my keyboard.
Bob Klein and Rob Horowitz both provided immeasurable guidance on writing, publishing, and perseverance. I greatly value their experience and counsel. Bob Klein took the project under his wing early and helped shape the content by editorially advising on the early chapters and the broader book goals. He is a true friend and steward of this text.
From the minutest manuscript details to broadly steering me in defining why write this book in the first place, Allen Daniels embraced the undertaking wholeheartedly and with incredible energy and encouragement. He schlepped the ever-changing manuscript with him on his mental health consultant travels, sending inspirational dispatches and a multitude of thoughtful suggestions from coast to coast. I am most grateful for his friendship, professional expertise, keen insight, and creative ideas on how to make the text both more entertaining and educational.
Introduction
Toss the Therapy Couch
In the movies, psychologists sit on their asses in cushy chairs, nodding their heads up and down through hourly sessions. Real life isn’t a whole lot different.
Most shrinks have sedately-decorated consulting rooms in which they administer talk therapy to carefully scheduled patients, whom they lead from the waiting room to a comfy therapy couch. For fifty-minute hours, the clients sink into the sofa while the counselor analyzes their emotional conflicts and misguided behaviors.
The Hollywood images are justified. We are a profession of head-nodding, Sigmund Freud reincarnations. The big change in the icons of Shrinkdom, my term for the world of psychologists and psychotherapists, seems to be that now we’re accurately portrayed as allowing our patients to sit up on the therapy couch-rather than having them lie down, as Freud did a hundred years ago. We, the shrinks, however, are still in the posh office chair taking notes about who’s on the couch.
The stereotypes drive me crazy.
For the record, I’ve never had an office loveseat, overstuffed chair, or therapy couch. Nope. My patients have often sat with me on folding chairs, in hospital rooms, next to a gurgling radiator, in a cafe booth, or at their kitchen table.
Counseling, and being a psychologist, don’t require a soothing office or a stylish sofa. I learned this reality when I had only a college degree in psychology. Back then I counseled, and lived with, incarcerated thugs. Those street teens would have stormed out, flipped me off with both hands, and screamed creative cursing if I had asked them to sit on a loveseat. Treatment with those hooligans, who by the way I became quite fond of, was done through innocuous chats over grilled cheese sandwiches in the dining hall, when standing next to their bunk after checking their morning chores, and, if they had really screwed up, while I was barbering-giving them a Required Haircut (details on that later in the book).
Then I went to graduate school for six years. There I was formally instructed in the use of a “proper” office, with a therapy couch. I learned well how to sit in a comfy office chair across from a couch-seated patient, tilt my head to show that I was listening, and nod often.
But when I came out, officially Doctor and a Psychologist, the absolute first job interview I got was to be an “air shrink”-literally, a counselor flying between villages in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. Since I’m a wimp who hates cold weather, I turned down the Alaskan flying job. My wife still says I should’ve taken it. Rather, I moved her to the desert so I could “Chase Roadrunners”-be an itinerant shrink crisscrossing New Mexico, a circuit-riding doc to distant villages and massive Indian reservations. My “office” shifted daily between trailers, my car, portable buildings, the school nurse’s desk, sagging home sofas, and even once a bar at Happy Hour. Consultations done while leaning into pickup truck windows were routine. And out of necessity, my therapy methods often “deviated” from what I’d been taught in Ph.D. classes and as a hospital intern.
Toss the therapy couch and the posh therapist’s chair. Dispensable stereotypes of Shrinkdom.
After several years of chasing roadrunners around the back roads of New Mexico, I took a few professional walkabouts. In the Australian Outback, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and palm-dotted islands around the South Pacific I became the visiting and consulting shrink. Numerous head-turning, jaw-dropping symptoms and culturally-unique disorders greeted me, as well as warm, unforgettable patients and several think-of-something-fast treatment predicaments-experiences which expand the perception of what is mental health and therapy.
Back home in Albuquerque, I dove into running a hospital psychiatric unit and a mental health team serving emergency rooms, but couldn’t resist skipping out again. This time I signed up with the U.S. Army in Germany to counsel combat soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the military I encountered really weird stuff; they needed a roving shrink.
Overall it’s been a restless calling, passionately steering away from an office with a therapy couch; not wanting to be one of the stereotypes. At parties, and in the chair when getting my hair cut-both places where I don’t want to “get into it,” explaining what I do that is-I tell people that I’m an engineer (my original college major) designing mundane irrigation projects. If I reveal that I’m a psychologist, they assume I walk back and forth every hour to the waiting room retrieving neurotics to sit on my therapy couch. I’d rather be known as a boring engineer! Like I said, the shrink stereotypes drive me crazy.
Broadcasting that Psychologist is not necessarily an office job and that mental health care need not always mean “having a therapy appointment” are goals of this book.
These are the tales where mental health care skipped “the office”-tales of assessing suicide over a plate of Spam, ordering another beer for the patient so he won’t have a seizure and die, pinning a raging jungle native to the concrete floor, learning diagnostic methods in a remote Navajo family hogan, and conducting treatment sessions side by side with colleagues from Hong Kong to India.
You will also read about therapy failures, personal oddities (mine), and sticky ethical issues-for example, my scrambling attempt to treat an obsessive-compulsive soldier with hypnosis, the debate over whether to lie about my evaluation of a woman on life support, and why I run from Bulimics (binge eaters who vomit) and even the slightest hint of Borderline Person