That doesn’t mean that’s what she said, what she meant, or what it’s logically possible for her to have meant. “People who are not depressed do not respond to antidepressants” does not mean “People who do not respond to antidepressants aren’t depressed”, any more than “Pregnant people are women” means “Women are all pregnant”. Jumping on someone for a perfectly reasonable statement and saying “fuck you” for something they didn’t mean and couldn’t reasonably have meant, because something horrible that happened to you caused you to misconstrue their words, deserves an apology, not a “Fuck you even more, how dare you act like you have the right to say something without running it past people who will feel hurt by their misunderstanding of it!”

The behavior is so irrational I can see why Cara assumed you were sock puppeting. That doesn’t mean you are, but it does mean that maybe you ought to step back, take a deep breath, and recognize that if you misunderstood something because of your own suffering, maybe it doesn’t mean they should have been more sensitive and you were justified in jumping their shit; if everyone else thought they were being perfectly clear, maybe the problem is that you just misunderstood. And if someone guessed you were a sock puppet because you were coming in to defend someone who said “fuck you”: to another poster for what seemed to be absolutely no discernable reason, maybe screaming how offended you are that you were mistaken for a sock puppet, instead of apologizing to the person who didn’t remotely say what you thought they were saying for your rudeness and viciousness to them over what you misunderstood them to be saying (or getting your friend who actually said it to apologize instead of them continuing to act like the two of you are perfectly justified in your rudeness), possibly just makes you look even nastier and less worth having dialogue with than if you *were* a sock puppet.

What happened to you is fucking awful and in general I would like to beat any doctors who dare say “You don’t respond to the drugs, therefore you’re not sick”, with a baseball bat. But “People who are not sick don’t respond to the drugs” does NOT mean the same thing as “People who don’t respond to the drugs are not sick”. Not even close. She couldn’t have been clearer about it. You made a mistake, own it. Cara already owned hers and apologized for calling you a sock. Your pain does not justify you lashing out at innocent people for your misunderstanding.

Don’t fuck with my familia, Cara. Just don’t.

I would mark that ip addy if I were you. and treat anything that comes from it wit the utmost respect.

That said, I left the particulars in another thread.

If you have a disability yourself (I have no idea), and feel that you are qualified to comment on CBT as a part of your own experiences . . . well you are qualified to comment on it as a part of your own experiences. But you’re not qualified to make sweeping statements that are effectively an insult and belittling of other people’s treatment plans.

Just poking my head in here as a professional (and full disclosure, I fall on the other end of the theoretical spectrum from CBT/DBT so I’ll own my bias up front). While I can’t be sure what exactly RD was getting at when s/he made the comment about brainwashing, there are some pretty serious concerns about CBT practice that are in that vein. CBT can do a lot of damage and serve as a means of silencing clients (more so than other orientations) when in the hands of poor or inexperienced clinicians. Theres the compounding problem that CBT is pretty much all thats available to many people who have limited means and is often treated as something of an all-purpose method of getting disenfranchised types to sit down, shut up, and focus on how they have created their own “errors” which lead to their own suffering. Thats not how CBT has to be, but that is the experience that a lot of people (both clients and clinicians) have encountered.

I know that there are people who have had enriching experiences with CBT, that CBT is especially good at dealing with certain kinds of behavior, and that there are some very good CBT clinicians out there, but in a discussion about people disbelieving the lived experiences of people with complex and hard to define problems calling out CBT isn’t unfair or out of line. Thats especially true when the reason that patients are being told something is “all in their head” is because it cannot be proven with a blood test or an x-ray. Many physicians would (and do) see a problem like that and send the client out for a bit of CBT work to “correct” the “errors” that are leading to these symptoms. Its the use of a narrow and aggressively objective view of science to silence patients.

These are the kinds of discussions that a big deal in the clinical community right now and words like “brainwashing” are certainly on the table even when the participants are mature, intelligent, experts. The APA is facing a potential schism over essentially this issue, the professional schools are becoming increasingly hostile towards one another over it, and I can say from first hand experience that discussions about CBT and ethics are among the most volatile one is likely to encounter. CBT might work well for some people, but its a cultural construct that comes with it’s own baggage and is a political issue in itself.