The mental health community likes to avoid labels in my experience. I remember my first sessions with a psychotherapist:

“We try to avoid labeling people here,” he said, when I asked him about my illness. I had sought treatment at the office of university mental health services for suicidal thoughts, depression, and social anxiety. I had avoided contact with people (which was easy in an absolutely huge university), and I had shut myself away in my lonliness. On the one hand, minimizing contact with peers had been a relief. On the other, the isolation allowed my thoughts and feelings to cycle around in my head until they had finally coalesced into a fearsome burden.

He continued: “We want patients to not focus on formal labels, but to work through their issues to get better.” During my first visit, after explaining my plight to a concerned staff member, she immediately gave me a prescription for Prozac and Lithium. A few weeks later, a psychiatrist explained he thought I was cyclothymic. Bewildered by the strange-sounding diagnosis, I looked it up. Somehow it had to do with bipolar disorder, only not so extreme.

Over the following months and years they would reluctantly tell me what I had, but only when asked. They seemed to change their assessment regularly until, in the end, they just replied that my outlook was simply a need for “long-term psychotherapy.”

I managed nonetheless to graduate from college and ended up moving to Europe. There, after feeling social anxiety at work with resulting depression, I again sought the services of a psychiatrist. She gave me Prozac and Lorezapam, and after a year I asked about my illness but didn’t get a firm diagnosis.

Leverage or copping out?

I spent a few years seeing the psychiatrist and then moved to another European country. And thus began the final phase of my treatment, this time with a Jungian psychoanalyst. Upon telling my father (a medical doctor) about it, he scoffed and said that Freudian/Jungian analysts used outdated concepts and processes.

Nevertheless, by that time I had tried almost everything. I’d had weekly psychotherapy for years, and although talk therapy yielded some relief, it didn’t really seem to address my root issues. By the way what were my real issues? Was it just anxiety, or was there something behind it? I remember my earlier treatment, when I’d been told that long-term psychotherapy was for me. I’d also bought books on psychology like Feeling Good that focus on cognitive therapy with action-oriented outcomes. I read such books and faithfully followed all the steps, but my anxiety was overwhelming and in the end such directions were ineffective.

I could also relate to some of the reluctance for a firm diagnosis. Mental health disorders tend to lie in a spectrum and can be notoriously hard to pin down. And also, in the 90s, literature and research on avoidant personality disorder were not as widespread as today.

But the reluctance of mental health professionals to provide full information to their clients is damaging because it prevents the sick from understanding their illness. Personally, this has compounded my suffering and has led me to waste energy and years on false leads, with high financial costs.

I spent nearly nearly six years with the Jungian analyst. From my perspective she had novel but ineffective ways of treating me. For example, I had to come to her office four days a week. I worked in another city and the total time this took out of my workday was two hours (travel plus fifty minute sessions).

She also had strange customs. For example, I could only pay in cash (because she wanted me to be “personally involved” in the sessions, what I would call “skin in the game”). She said the frequency with which I had to come was in order to establish a bond between us so that I could relive my childhood. I had to give two weeks’ advance notice of not being able to attend a session (I was involved in corporate training and there were a few times I had to pay this penalty when the employer suddenly announced my travel).

Over time I also noticed a negative bias in her statements. While I consider myself an objective guy (or at least try my best to be), she would often choose the most negative way of stating things. For example, if I were 27 years old she would express this as “late twenties.” She pointed out a few times how much of a failure I was in life by stating, “you often fail at what you try.” I had the impression that, beyond trying to motivate me to stay in her treatment, she felt a kind of enjoyment in putting me down.

Strangest of all was her relationship to money. The monthly cost to me was around $3500. She spoke several times of being able to extend a personal loan to continue the therapy as long as needed (I would have to sign a binding contract between us). She mentioned it a few times, which I found strange as I hadn’t indicated a need for financial help. Another time I noticed her personal address on an invoice and saw that she lived in the most tax-optimized city in the land. At that point I began to suspect something besides professional requirements lay behind her customs and statements.

I would attend the sessions and talk openly about anything that came to mind. My parents and childhood naturally came up more often. Of all the therapists I ever met, she was by far the most reluctant to reveal her thoughts on my dilemma. She stated that if she gave away her diagnosis I would be reluctant to work through my problems to move forward. At the same time she always insisted I “put my cards on the table” and express fully my own thoughts and feelings.

Along the way I managed to learn a few things about my condition from hints she dropped. She mentioned my issue was long lasting (even using this as a bargaining chip when I tried to leave). She stated I had some narcissistic characteristics and pointed out examples. Later in life, when looking at lists of AvPD symptoms, I could identify some of her other hints (though at the time her tips were practically useless as I didn’t have any perspective to judge what she was talking about - mainly from her lack of attempts to provide perspective or frame my issues).

Over time I began to lose trust in her methods and seriously contemplated leaving. I had left twice before in previous years but found my anxiety too strong for me alone to handle. This time however was different. I was in my mid-thirties by then, and started equating leaving with childhood maturity and independence (she often spoke of our bond as mother-child, so why not keep the analogy). Two weeks before our last session, I announced my departure. She was reluctant for me to go, and over the next sessions emphasized the work we needed to do and how I would suffer lifelong consequences if I didn’t stay. At the end of the last session, I simply said goodbye and exited.

This all brings me to a television program I once watched. It was a debate between two therapists, one a psychiatrist who provided once-a-week talk sessions to patients, and the other an analyst. Their appearance and statements were strikingly different.

The analyst dressed in bright red and had long blonde hair. She spoke of hope and of her quest to solve patients’ problems. The psychiatrist wasn’t as attractive and wore drab clothing, and stated that if she could pretend to solve all her clients’ issues she couldn’t sleep at night. She also relied on psychopharmaceuticals in her treatments. But the analyst’s constant message of “hope” made her more pleasing to listen to.

The fraud was easy to spot. Beside the down-to-earth psychiatrist, the analyst appeared as a showwoman. I had actually watched this before ending my own analysis, and fully realized what I was doing to myself by staying in this kind of therapy. Once I figured out the game it was easy it leave.

A word against analysts

It’s been more than ten years since ending the treatment but I’m still of the same conclusions about her. In fact she’s fortunate I don’t try to sue her (mainly because of the stigma I would endure if my case got out). I can only imagine what she does to those in a weaker position.

This experience has also influenced my general opinion about analysts. While many mean well, I’m sure there are more than a few who try to build a solid financial position in taking advantage of the weak. Their methods are actually tools for manipulation rather than healing. I’ve read about how other analysts work and the format is often similar to the one I experienced. I would never trust a Freudian or Jungian analyst, no matter their credentials, and would counsel anyone suffering from any type of mental illness to avoid them.

But the worst she did to me was withholding my diagnosis in the interest of lining her pocket. Her obsession with money revealed her own fraudulent motivations and I only regret my condition made me so desperate to continue her “treatment” for so long. Over ten years later, had I not stumbled upon a YouTube video about narcissim, I would never have learned what my condition truly is, and would have continued stumbling through life.