Rorschach Fail

I took a Rorschach test once while in the hospital. I asked the tester a lot of questions about the test and how it's scored. He was very coy, and he kept trying to get me to focus on the inkblots, which I found to be rather silly. I remember this inkblot in particular, and I said that I saw two tribesmen beating on a drumb. According to what I found on the internet, the test is controversial. There isn't a standarized way of measuring the responses. But I also found out that the test is more complicated than I realized. What you identify in the inkblots is only part of what they look at. They're interested in just about everything you say and do during the process, and these days the test is often given to people who are reluctant to share their thought processes. In other words, they use it to try to get inside the heads of people who don't completely trust their doctors. And when I took the test I questioned the tester about what he was doing and what he expected to find. LOL If they had asked, I would have just told them that I don't trust very easily and I'm by nature a skeptic. :P

I didn’t see the psychiatrist and psychologist that I went to every week while in the hospital. The doctors in the hospital were strangers. And they didn’t exactly earn my trust. I was deeply depressed and had suicidal tendencies, but the underlying problem was post traumatic stress and social phobia. Those things were caused in part by the fact that my mother, my primary caregiver as a kid, suffered from schizophrenia which went untreated until after I became an adult. They knew this, and they addressed it. They were all interested in that. They put me in a special ward for adult survivors of childhood abuse. But the other thing that had caused me to mistrust people and to become socially isolated was extreme homophobia. They knew about this, too, because it was in my file, but they didn’t want to talk about that. Not that. I was a depressed, suicidal young man, and none of them asked me if I had a boyfriend, or if I wanted one, or if I had been bullied or abused because I am gay. They all carefully avoided that topic…except for one intern. One day he claimed that the reason I was gay was because I was a failed heterosexual. It was his opinion that I turned to boys because I was a flop with the girls.

Why should I have trusted these people? They were the experts, and just like most other people I had encountered in my life, they lived in their own fantasy world, and they couldn’t handle the truth. I felt like I had to treat them like I treated everyone else until they proved they were trustworthy, like they were stupid and crazy and possibly dangerous.