We're All Crazy, For Why Else Would We Have To Have To See A Shrink?

[Guest guest]

I'm not crazy; I'm just fat.

Why the waste of good money seeing psychologists and

psychiatrists before baryatric surgery? If a woman

gets plastic surgery for a face lift or her boobs, she

doesn't have to see a shrink beforehand. If a man gets

lung cancer from smoking too many cigarettes, does he

have to see a shrink before he has the surgery? Does

the chronic child bed-wetter see a shrink before he

has corrective surgery for, say, a weak urethra? Yet,

when an obese person has corrective gastric surgery,

many baryatric surgeons require that they see a

shrink. Of course, it's easy to explain it away as the

surgeon's covering their abnormally slender buttocks,

but is that really the root of this wasteful and

stupid practice?

The inability to push away from the table and the

inactivity that accompany chronic obesity may be

nothing more than bad habits reinforced by

hypothalamic and other feedback mechanisms. Some have

said that the excess fats cells in us fatties make

untoward demands on our gullets. Mine cry out too

regularly; moreover, they are helped along by the

doxepin antidepressant I take that allows me to sleep.

That there is a genetic underpinning to the tendency

to get fat is probable, too.

One of the allied problems with having the psych

people involved in this obesity business is that they

may steal some of the credit for the outcome from the

surgeon as well as the patient. This ain't right. On

the other hand, I see no reason not to speak with a

shrink to have them on our team to deal with any

depression or sleep disorder or whatever that we may

end up with post BPD/DS.

In no instance, then, should the surgeon perceive that

their role is to evaluate fat people as insane for

overeating and, hence, not a good candidate for

obesity surgery. This is a foolish idea. The medical

insurance companies, too, have played a role in this

idiotic psychologization of what amounts to at bottom

a mere behavioral problem. Perhaps a wrong analogy is

operating here based upon anorexia nervosa patients

who often show marked psychpathologies. I think it is

about time that the baryatric surgeons stopped

treating us like a subclass of anorexics and realized

that eating too much ain't all that much different

than, say, promiscuous sex or drinking too much

alcohol or smoking to excess.

These problems of the obese do not reflect insanity so

much as imprudence or lack of self-control. Problems

of self control are tough problems to deal with, as

every social engineer must recognize. None of these

excesses makes the satyromane or alcoholic or

3-pack-a-day person mentally ill. We are a little

better than the above three types in so far as each of

us is a morbidly fat person desirous of being a

slender one, aye, crying out for skinniness. In short,

normal people can fall victim to bad eating habits and

get dangerously fat, without being mental cases. Sex

and alcohol and smoking are relatively easy to give

up, because they can be given up. Eating, on the other

hand, is hard to give up, unless that is, one has,

say, Crohn's Disease, and can only feed intravenously.

The baryatric surgeons need to confront their

Medieval attitude like the gender reassignment

surgeons have lately had to confront the fact that

their reassignments have done much more harm than good

to the children they have operated on. It is

discriminatory to have us get shrink clearances

preoperatively. This is a baryatric surgeon practice

that needs to be halted at once. In reality, there is

no group of people in this country that face more

discrimination on a daily basis than us fatties except

for, maybe, the disabled. Please give your physician a

copy of this letter. You can even do it anonymously if

you want. The important thing is let him or her know

in some way that you don't go along with this nutty

idea.

Best wishes, lcp

PS. Thanks Beth for getting me to think along these

lines.

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