Witchcraft as psychotherapy

CW FISHER
She talks to her doctor, as they say on TV, because she feels like that sad little cartoon ball all the time. What's happening to her, she wonders, and her doctor says depression--a treatable medical illness--then prescribes a mysterious and tricky combination of pills from his colorful palette.

Antidepressants, a.k.a. deez, dem and doze, are administered carefully so as to create in the patient a feeling of one false move, explode-a-voo. Which is justified, since they might. The wrong dose of deez in a teenager, for example, actually causes suicide--one more time: causes suicide--when its purpose is to prevent suicide. (Curious. Let's not look at it. )

Back to the woman with her doctor, right before the part where she's riding her bike with J. Crew on a bumpy road without a bra. This is where the doctor says, "Oh, and Shelley. One more thing." He explains that depression can't be cured with just a pill, it takes soul searching, and for that you need a guide. He writes her another script for counseling at a hospital-affiliated psychiatric and social services center. Not only is this good doctoring, it's smart risk management. Because when something goes wrong, and it will, he wants to know that someone will be there to blame.

The purpose of the licensed clinical social worker is to, first and foremost, listen, and second of all to remember what they said in those classes they had to take at that crappy community college, and third of all on and on and so forth--it doesn't matter once the door's closed. Sit down, sit down, let's get to know you. Life as an LCSW must be fascinating.

Yesterday the national press reported on a local story involving my old hometown hospital where a depressed patient filed a lawsuit claiming her therapist deepened her depression. The patient received treatment from the same therapist, who happens to be a witch, over the course of four years without complaint (although the patient did attempt suicide three times).

Witchcraft, of course, wasn't part of the hospital's treatment plan for depression. It was just something the LCSW happened to practice, and something her depressed client also happened to become. Nothing wrong with that, except that the patient began to feel haunted by some of the rituals and spells, the self-mutilations, the sex with strangers chosen by the therapist, who watched.

Some people believe a suicide attempt is a cry for help. Others see it for what it is: something to be swept under the rug and never mentioned again. All you need is a nice heavy rug and a good solid door, and you've got a room that nothing happens inside of.

It doesn't pay much but the job has appeal to certain people, especially those who find power even remotely intoxicating. While I cannot support the following statement with hard data, I can advise you with the fervor of a dying Gunga Din that all counselors are lunatics.

The idea, therefore, of a therapist/witch doesn't shock me in the slightest; it merely frightens me in the extreme.

The patient seeks one millions dollars. Now that's shocking!