Before going to Dr. Beck, I had already been diagnosed with Major Depression Disorder, with a recomendation to look into testing for LD's and pervasive developmental. (Which admittedly is tough to find: I'm in my fifties.)
Beck informed me, after 12 minutes and 30 seconds, that there was no such thing as clinical depression. Major Depression, he blythely maintained, was a social conceit, an urban myth, like UFO abductions or Elvis sightings.
He said all classes of anti-depressant meds were placebos. Yet he still wrote a refill for my anti-depressant scrip because, he said, "people like them."
Dr. Beck concluded our session with a bizarre story about what happens to rock lobsters when their dominant claw is surgically removed. Was this some sort of metaphor? I never got that out of him. He stared at the wall behind me when he spoke, with an avid, starry-eyed gaze. He looked like he was ready to march into Austria.
He told me my headaches were psychosomatic. All I needed to do was hold my head under the hot shower in the morning, and take a couple of tylenols. Several weeks later, a CNP diagnosed me with high blood pressure, put me on an ACE inhibitor that didn't interact with my psych meds, and the headaches went away.
Even though I was indigent and living at a homeless shelter, my case manager agreed to do the paperwork for a transfer to another agency. What a nightmare. I empathize with missesxxx. Dr. Beck lives in a world of his own.
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