For many years, I mocked my parents for working in what I called the “soft sciences.”  Psychology, I argued, was a shameful pseudoscience, the main requirement of its practitioners the ability to nod thoughtfully as some loser blathered away on an expensive leather couch they were in the process of paying for.  Why my parents never reminded me that their dumb, pointless jobs put a roof over my head, I know not.  As it was, perhaps it’s best this equation was never forced upon me, as the ridiculousness of my mockery became apparent over the course of several disturbing affairs.

From these incidents, I took the following life lessons, which I have chosen to share:

Life Lesson Number 1: Shrinks are badass.

Life Lesson Number 2: Don’t fuck with a shrink’s stuff.

The first lesson was taught when I was barely ten years old.  I began to realize that having psychologists as parents was awesome when one of my father’s patients inexplicably began bringing my father pornography he had recorded from his then-state-of-the-art satellite.  At each therapy session, this quaint nutjob would bring hand-labeled tapes of Ass Pundit and Midget Orgy 43 as a sort of supplemental payment, which my father would then bring home, ostensibly to peruse and/or destroy.  While this material was rarely passed along to me outright, certain things did (upcoming pun definitely intended) slip through the cracks now and then. 

Learning that your father has the ability to make others voluntarily bring him pornography raised him to demigod status in my young eyes.  However, this new level of respect was undone several years later when the patient in question underwent a rather dramatic transformation of personality and became ultra-religious.  Literally overnight, video offerings of lascivious sexual acts were replaced with taped marathons of The 700 Club; equally depraved, perhaps, but far less titillating.  I blamed this regression on my father’s treatment strategy.  After all, I argued, a world free of pornography is, to a ten-year-old, a cruel place indeed.  This difference of opinion created a deep rift in our relationship, which was only partially healed when I met an acquaintance of my father who restored my faith in the working therapist.

If you ever meet a psychologist at a party, plant yourself in front of them and get them drunk.  You’ll hear at least one good story, guaranteed.  This particular therapist, when exposed to the aforementioned conditions, told me what I consider to be the definitive example of self-control:

On this particular occasion, the tale’s teller (a respected clinical psychologist) was in a session with an twelve-year-old client who suffered from severe depression stemming from an accident that had left him a paraplegic.  As the session went on, the depressed patient revealed he had attempted to end his own life the previous week.  Obviously, the fact that he was telling his therapist about it precluded any chance of his tale ending in tragedy, but that was no great surprise: Failed suicide attempts are common, the therapist explained; usually, they represent a cry for help rather than a sincere attempt to end it all.  My therapist friend prepared himself for the usual course of consolation and counseling, when the kid began to describe the attempt:

“I got so depressed, being in this wheelchair,” he said.  “I decided to just… end it.  I thought about how to do it.  I was afraid to cut my wrists, and I didn’t know he combination to my dad’s gun locker, so all that was left was strangling myself.”

“You mean hanging yourself, right?” the therapist asked.  At this point, he notices there aren’t any ligature marks on the kid’s neck from a rope or a belt, nor could he figure out how a kid in a wheelchair could reach a high enough fixture from which to hang. 

“No, I decided to strangle myself,” the patient said, “you know, manually.  I just wanted to end it fast, without thinking about it too much.  So I just reached up and choked myself; I grabbed my throat with both hands and started squeezing until I couldn’t breath.  I started to see spots, and I didn’t stop.  I wondered what God looked like, and all I could think about was apologizing to Him for my entire life.  Then everything went black.” 

At this point, the kid begins to cry.  The therapist, however, was also in tears… tears of laughter.  Picturing the kid sitting there, then suddenly attacking himself like an actor in a bad horror film was too much.  In his words: “I was about to lose my shit.”

“I’ll give the kid credit,” the therapist told us, “he may not have thought his plan out, but he did have some balls to actually knock himself out.  But seriously, what did he think was going to happen to his hands after he blacked out?  Naturally, they fall away and he started breathing again, right?  So I’m sitting there in the therapy session, picturing an unconscious kid in a wheelchair, and I’m wondering if he’s even serious; I mean, c’mon, it’s the lamest attempt ever.  I’m fighting not to chuckle; all the tendons in my neck were tight, and I was fighting a smile, but I was determined to get through the session without cracking up.  But then the little bastard keeps going.  He tells me that, after he woke up, he choked himself out again before he realized it wasn’t going to work!  At this point, the mental image of him waking up and immediately strangling himself again was too much.  My face was screwed up into this terrible expression and my shoulder are spasming helplessly.  It’s a losing battle though: I’m gonna start laughing in front of this poor kid, who’s just started crying again, by the way, and once I do, I’m not gonna be able to stop.” 

“What did you do?” we asked the therapist, who was grinning even now, as he recounted the tale.

“I jabbed my pen into my leg,” he replied, “hard enough to draw blood.  While I’m doing this, I was saying to myself Oh my God, am I really stabbing myself with a ballpoint pen just to not laugh at a poor kid who’s depressed enough to try to kill himself? It still wasn’t enough to stop a few hiccupping giggles from coming out.  I told the kid I got emotional too sometimes, when I hear something really touching.  Technically, that’s probably true.”

While stabbing oneself just to keep is strait face in a 10/10 on the scale of manliness, what completely galvanized my respect for mental healthcare workers was an incident of my own doing.  Being one of the owner’s kids meant that I had free run of the clinic.  Well, almost free: There was one door that was always locked.  It was deep inside the building, down an out-of-the-way corridor on the other side of the bathroom.  Unlike the other doors that bore placards with the name of the doctor occupying the office, this door’s signboard discreetly announced the room as being the “Plethysmograph Lab.”  I had no idea what plethysmograph meant.  This was 1991; I was eleven years old and Google did not exist.

It was actually my curiosity over the unknown that made me determined to get into the room and see what lay behind the barred door.  One day, I got my wish: It was late on a Friday night, and my mother and I were waiting for my father to finish up one last appointment before we all went to dinner.  I was prowling the halls, up to no good, when I noticed the forbidden door had been left ajar.  Like a cat pouncing on a piece of discarded fried chicken, I was instantly there, bulling in blindly.  The inside of the room was dark; there was no overhead light-switch on the wall.  The room’s only furniture was a chair and tray table in the middle of the room.  On the wall opposite the chair was a largish projector screen.  It looked like a one-person movie theater.

I moved in for a closer look, squinting in the dim light.  There was a projector built into the wall nearest the door.  A slew of cables attached it to a VHS player (still 1991, remember?).  One or two tapes sat by the machine, which – upon cursory examination – were labeled “Diagnostic One” and “Diagnostic Two”; training videos of some sort, I suspected. 

I moved on to the chair in the center of the room.  It was slick, synthetic leather probably, and looked comfortable.  Were I not here illicitly, I would probably have plunked down and watched a bit of “Diagnostic One” (the idea being that sequels are rarely as appealing as the original).  Now, however, I turned my attention to the small table next to the table.  There was no remote control for the projector, but the table was still quite cluttered with a number of unfamiliar objects.  There largest was a metal box, slightly larger than a toaster oven, with a power cord that snaked away into a wall socket.  A large number of finer, more delicate wires issue from a different port on the box, ending in a number of white discs.  I picked one up, and recognized it to be one of the little suction cups that was used to attach leads from a heart rate machine.  Why would anyone have that here? I wondered.  Next to the machine, there was a tube of something called “KY Jelly.”  I have no idea what this was, but I was fond of potable jellies.  Based on how empty the tube looked, whoever sat in this chair was as well.  I considered sampling the jelly, but – once again – I was here covertly, and did not wish to leave tracks. 

As I snooped, I tried to paint a picture of what goes on in this room.  My best guess is that this was some sort of break room for the psychologists, where they sat in a comfortable chair, watching movies and eating fashionable European tube jelly.  Perhaps the machine was some sort of biological alarm clock to alert the user if they fall asleep?  While ruminating, I noticed that one of the leads doesn’t end in a suction cup.  This one led into a little cuff that looked like a slightly larger version of a Chinese handcuff. 

     Chinese handcuff                Mystery Machine “handcuff”

I held up the cuff, intrigued by the new wrinkle it added to the equation.  Immediately, I noticed that it was somewhat slippery, almost moist.  Unaware I was demonstrating a low-double-digit IQ, I thoughtfully rolled the cuff between thumb and forefinger as my mind raced (perhaps trotted) to insert this new discovery into the picture I have drawn.  I made the first move to bring the cuff to my nose for a sniff when a voice rang out that froze me with its authority.

“Drop it son!”

My father’s voice cut through the still air with the flat, commanding affect of Robocop.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked. 

“The door was open to the movie lounge, and I thought-“

“Movie lounge?” dad interrupted, looking at me with a mixture of amusement and pity over what he had sired.  “Son… do you know what a plethysmograph is?” 

I said I didn’t. 

“A plethysmograph is a special machine that measures blood pressure and heart rate to determine how aroused someone becomes from various… stimulating material.”

“Uh huh,” I said, still not quite following.

“Yeah.  Umm… we use the plethysmograph here to measure how turned on sex offenders get when they watch child pornography that that projector plays on this screen.”  

“That’s so gross!” I said, genuinely repelled by the visual imagery dad’s description summoned. 

“I’ll say,” my father agreed.  “Speaking of which, what do you think that little blood pressure cuff you’re holding is for?”

If a sex offender’s aroused genitalia had been in the cuff at that moment, I wouldn’t have dropped it any faster.  The horrific knowledge that my father could even function knowing this machine was in the building galvanized my adulation for him and his job.  After an extended hand-washing visit to the bathroom, we were heading out when I said “Dad, don’t tell anyone I’m a dumbass.”

Dad looked at me, choosing not to state that this fact would eventually become evident without his help.  “I won’t son, as long as you don’t tell your mother I raised one.”