I joined the club

I joined the club

By David Verveer

Finally it is official, I now belong to the group of people who went to visit a psychiatrist, true, aged 67 year old, I am late for our modern society, as regular visits to a brain doctor starts today, most times with first day at high school, when adolescent youths starts showing signs of independence from their parents, through growing hair, staying out late, or worse, trying out forbidden stuff, like cigarettes or God forbid, drugs.

Today, people who have no psychotic problem of some sort are either people who are totally un-informed or their psychotic problem is that they do not realize they are just like us, modern human beings, filled with un-explainable bull shit, which the professional name “psychological disturbances”.

Gone good old days, hating postmen”, the medical term is today “a postman complex” due to an traumatic experience in your early youth, when a postman accidentally broke your spectacles, pushing the front door in your face. Until now I was primitive, as I hated Germans, because they killed my father, made me to go into hiding from the ripe age of 3 years and one day old, etc., my new psychiatrist advisor told me I am suffering from a (excuse me not using the correct term, as this would be breaking the hypocrite oath, or what ever, between patient and doctor) complex, today, when I learned what complex I have, and realize that I have been irrational and harmful to my own mental constitution, instead of holding everything inside, I should have provided the psychiatrists, the fees which were truly theirs, but when I was young, nobody knew to deal with traumas, we all tried to recover from the war and tried to built up a new life with the pieces we had, there was no time and no money to deal with our psycho. Nobody, especially Jewish people in Western Europe survived those horrible days without damaging their psychological well being, but I don’t think, the psychiatrists of those days would have coped with our problems.

Only now I realize how terrible cruel we (the society) reacted to those people who could not cope with the traumatic experiences they suffered in their war days, and showed it with irrational behavior, impatience with children, or selfish actions, unfair at the moment, but understandable, realizing what those people had suffered. People, desperately looking for un-available treatment and guidance, were called by us, psychos, madmen or simply fools. I was seven years old, my mother had accepted the job of director of an Jewish old age home,which functioned as a reception home for people, returning from the concentration camps, and old lady, suffering from the last stage of diabetes, started eating paper, we found it funny, she died some days later. The children of these ex-camp people were terribly cruel, stole food etc., today I know why, at that time, they made me terribly angry and frightened. I do not what happened to them, but if they are still living, I am sure they need mental treatment, more than I do.

My intention for this essay was to make jokes about me going to the Psycho-doctor, but all jokes I attempted to write, came over, not funny and rather stupid, as in actual fact, our mental health is not something to make fun about. We do not know enough about how our brain operates, what types of self defense we have installed in order to overcome traumas, and how we control our behavior, even when inside, conscious or un-conscious storms are blowing, which without our inner defense would show our loss of control, including my trying to make fun of everything, by writing my silly comments.

Is it not un-explainable, how cruel is the Israeli society is, by not providing automatically the few poor survivors of the Holocaust, with a pension, allowing to end their days, without the need to worry from where to get money for medicines, roof on their head and food on the table? Don’t we realize that their days are counted, as they are all over the 65 years old? We have enough money to pay a generous pension to an ex-president rapist and sexual sadist, but payment to our own survivors, (at least 20 people could live comfortable on katsav’s pension) is still being discussed at the various committees of the Knesset, waiting until all survivors to die out from natural causes. Showing the television audience in a short reportage, suffering old people, doesn’t help as much as getting the politicians and the officials, responsible for the financial distribution of our wealth, to act immediately and free those funds to those surviving poor human beings, who arrived to this situation, due to being Jews.

I am of course not talking about my own situation, even though, the irresponsible and unfair pension laws invented by Netanyahu, fighting the Histadruth pension funds, made my life (and many others) after retirement, insecure.