My people don’t do psychotherapy. We have friends. We have families. We have pharmacies. Paying strangers to listen to our problems isn’t our style.
I’m Persian, made in Iran pre-revolution, born in America mid-revolution, bred in Ohio post-revolution. I place trust in signs, in duty, in divinity — things that psychotherapists often dismiss as incidental, if not superstitious or worse yet, symptomatic. The couch is not the place for me.
But I had little choice. My first hallucinations appeared in college, which would have been unremarkable had it not been for the dearth of drugs in my system. As a (relatively) good Muslim girl who didn’t even drink alcohol, let alone experiment with hallucinogens, I knew something was wrong. It had been easy to chalk up many of my earliest manic and depressive symptoms to adolescent moodiness or too much Morrissey or an artistic spirit — but not the hallucinations. They freaked me out.
Worse, I was already suffering from another illness. A few years before, a tumor had taken up residence in my pancreas and was busy wreaking its own havoc. I had lost count of all the emergency room visits and hospitalizations. Doctors insisted that I maintain a brutally low-fat diet and that ignoring their advice could cause extreme pain, pancreatitis and even death. I used to joke that I could commit suicide by eating a jar of peanut butter, though eventually this idea became less comic relief and more morbid obsession.
[For more of this story, written by Melody Moezzi, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...-persian-in-therapy/]
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