Pledge Tones Counseling (Client Two, Session One, Part I)

Pledge Tones Counseling (Client Two, Session One, Part I)

Client: They did not want him to live. We had to keep him convinced that we weren’t they. That was the hardest obstacle in his way. Trusting us despite their professional spite. And mental health professionals don’t even attempt to spare the patients and families the indignities that result from the standards and codes to which they must adhere. The standards and codes must be rewritten for the new millennium. Family reunification is critical and foremost and I am certain the standards and codes were broken often and callously by the doctors, nurses, psychologists, and counselors because of the horrors my son shared in his moments of clarity and stability.

Pledge Tones: Despite such an obstacle as mental health professionals adhering to strict standards and codes of practice, which made the experience of hospitalization horrific for your son, there were, as you said, moments of clarity and stability?

Client: Lithium wasn’t the cure all as promised by the initial psychiatrist and left my son agitated. Risperdal was the beginning of a breakthrough with my son reporting a surge in energy and a sense of a purposeful optimism like he could take on the world if need be.

Geodon had too many side effects, culminating in its’ eventual discontinuation and my son taking matters into his own hands and contacting other psychiatrists in and around the DFW area who would collaborate with him and me. There was a superb one amongst the ones sought after by my son, an older gentleman who was willing to listen thoroughly but did not make hospital visits unfortunately. My son’s medication schedule was too intense and would definitely require hospitalization to adjust.

Pledge Tones: How did the initial psychiatrist take the news of your son’s switching over to another doctor at the time? I see here that the psychiatrist who prescribed the Lithium, Risperdal, and Geodon also facilitated subsequent treatment plans with another psychiatrist, including actions that led to our meeting here today.

Client: My son was sensitive and by far incredibly intelligent to have the foresight to break the news to the initial psychiatrist via a handwritten letter informing her of his decision to continue his treatment with another psychiatrist well before embarking on the journey to the other physicians’ offices. I just wish he had directed the same sensitivity onto himself. I always kept reminding him of just how much we cherished him each and every day. He knew he was our life and joy. Life and joy are dead. Through no fault of his own, I know, I know. I’m crying hiccups, I know. Much to my own surprise because I promised myself I could get through our meeting without breaking down. I’m breaking down in hiccups, Pledge! Hiccups! God! This is certainly the result of my son’s sense of humor having manifested upon Him! He is with me everywhere, Pledge. But I’m afraid.

Pledge Tones: Of what?

Client: The scent disappearing from his closet as time continues. I had my husband bring home gift boxes from one of the major department stores at the local mall so I could pack his shirts and sweaters in tissue wrap and then store them away in one of those huge plastic containers in the hopes of being able to hold on just one more day and through another night to his presence. My husband, God bless him, even bought all the colognes our son selected through the thirty-two years we got to enjoy his personality. Whenever I feel alone, I allow myself to spray one of the five selections he had chosen with such great care and consideration as his first, second, third, fourth, and fifth acts of serious identification since late junior high school.

Pledge Tones: You refer to your husband affectionately and smilingly. Earlier, you mentioned your son’s sense of humor still sustaining you through the incomprehensible. What impressions do you hold of yourself?             

Client: I don’t hold any, Pledge. I am a mother. Yes, that’s my triumph. I had the privilege of my son’s presence for thirty-two inerasable years. But Cowboy Dick Cheney and his Posse Roundup in the United States Congress are at it again, and the American Media is declaring another military campaign abroad with boots on the ground. That’s what makes me lose sleep and remain restless throughout the day, my heart skipping a beat upon the hour, hour after hour, because, like my son, there is a service member dying every fifty-six minutes in the United States of America as a result of suicide. Throughout my son’s hospitalizations and changes in medications, I pleaded with the doctors, nurses, and staffers to allow me to overstay visiting hours so I could assist in my son’s care. I pleaded with God to allow me to take on my son’s suffering and anguish and spare him the emotional scars of constant psychological warfare. Antidepressants and antipsychotics leave too much scar tissue upon the human soul and that resultant scar tissue holds worse memory than any of our musculature.

Pledge Tones: As in the concept of muscle memory?

Client: Yes. I was reading Walter Isaacson’s latest bestseller The Innovators and it got me through some of the sleepless nights as of late. Walter Isaacson shares a statistic about the human brain that blew me away with unexpected hope. Apparently, computers and humans have collaborated successfully to discover just how many neurons and synapses are involved in human brain circuitry. The human brain has 86 billion neurons and up to 150 trillion synapses. Visions without execution are hallucinations. If we could just map out these neurological bases of ingenuity!

Pledge Tones: Wow!

Client: Yes! Isn’t it awesome? The two sentences occur eight pages away from each other, but they are in the same concluding chapter nevertheless. Sounds like the United States Presidencies since Lyndon Johnson ceded the White House to Richard Nixon in exchange for civil rights legislation. The Democrats and Republicans have been swinging a dangerous pendulum of injustice in the face of burgeoning diversity. Democratic Presidencies come in periodically to clean up the mess and get the country out of the socioeconomic disasters created by the outgoing Republican Presidencies. But we mustn’t allow that pattern to stick in 2016 because my son did not die for any more of his brothers and sisters in uniform to enter the killing fields in the Middle East once again with yet another Cowboy Dick Cheney-led neoconservative Bush Presidency and an even more biased United States Press Corps, including the Quinnipiac University pollsters and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website’s slanted analyses.

Pledge Tones: As Isaacson says, Visions without execution are hallucinations?

Client: Yes. The neoconservatives’ refusal to produce alternatives to the laws and policies already in place that they want to infringe upon frightens me. The United States Press Corps sudden distractive obsession with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails concerns me greatly. Rodham Clinton is the premier intellectual of her generation and differentiating between the genders is nonsense propaganda brought on by the insecurities of the despotic ruling classes who remain convinced they are infallible and charitable enough to bypass all systems of government. Top down trickle down charitable private sector dependency upon oligarchs is the same as chauvinism, sectarianism, and ought to be flipped to where everything is bottom up for the people and by the people once and for all times sake. Interestingly, the neoconservatives’ arguments are verbose and equally packed with such heinously obscene hilarity of habitually progressive promises that never are kept that ushering into the White House Jeb Bush will entail the shredding of millions of ballots and registration forms state by state legislature.

Pledge Tones: I agree and am just as concerned about Hillary Clinton as you. The neoconservatives and their accomplices in the United States Press Corps are attempting to discredit Hillary Rodham Clinton by making it impossible for her to campaign for the United States Presidency in 2016, being bogged down by nonsense allegations and congressional hearings, which are just another way to try to cause irreparable harm to her where it really would hurt any and all of us, that being our children and spouses becoming the targets for the congressional neoconservatives to tear apart.

Client: I’m certain too that Chelsea Clinton and her husband Mark and former President Bill Clinton’s private emails to and from Hillary Rodham Clinton are being targeted. The congressional neoconservatives want Rodham Clinton to speak on behalf of herself, but as you said, that would be a disservice to all Americans and all humanity if Hillary were unable to run for President of the United States in 2016. She is our last fighting chance for reinstating a government that represents the interests and dreams of the many, not just the elite, and breaking the cycle of that pendulum swinging back into the hands of the Republicans after all the socioeconomic advances and progress of the Administration in which then-Secretary of State Rodham Clinton played such a vital part to get the world to trust the United States once again. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel and the neoconservatives snicker that Rodham Clinton only accrued millions of miles in travel. However, if they cared to read her most recent book, they would probably be too inept to comprehend the hard evidence of the smart power regimen of renegotiations that Rodham Clinton and her team embraced and oversaw in those tough business travels across continents.

Pledge Tones: War seems to be the only foreign policy computation of the neoconservatives in this new century?

Client: I watch a lot of news channels in order to catch the cutthroat wisdom of Colonel Wilkerson from the College of William and Mary. He said something last Wednesday [March 4, 2015] about the pollsters at Quinnipiac to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, specifically addressing a statistic in which 62% of those polled aligned themselves with the argument that there ought to be American service member boots on the ground fighting the terrorist networks in the Middle East. Colonel Wilkerson responded, “Draft those 62% to lead the way.”

Pledge Tones: Colonel Wilkerson’s heartfelt directness is a jolt of rationality?

Client: Yes. And the second memorable quote of the week came after Colonel Wilkerson had spoken and Chris Hayes was handing over the television broadcast to Rachel Maddow who was visibly shaken like he by the prospect of the United States becoming reengaged with legions of American boots on the ground in a volatile region such as the Middle East. Chris Hayes responded to Maddow’s moment of heartfelt angst like so, “Answering that poll is cheap. Right? It’s what comes after it that costs.” (To be continued…)