However, although I often raise questions from all possible perspectives, then draw conclusions based on what the (all too rare) high-quality research shows, those at both ends of any given spectrum consider my positions to be wrong, while apparently not considering their own to be extreme or even mistaken. Thus, when I have raised questions about some of what goes on in much of the mental health system, influential psychiatrists and psychologists have accused me of being wildly radical, even shrill (well, I am a feminist, so by definition that is supposed to make me shrill - oh, yes, and humorless!). At the other end of the spectrum, although the Scientologists have quoted some of my work on their websites, I do not, of course, recommend that instead of ever seeking psychotherapy, suffering people should instead join Scientology and hand money over to them. So for them, I do not go far enough and damn all psychotherapists. In fact, wrote an article for Counterpunch about how the United States Supreme Court had relied in a decision in part on an amicus brief by a Scientology arm in which some of my work was not misquoted but rather misapplied or mischaracterized[1] in a way that had disastrous results regarding the rights of the criminal defendant. At another extreme are some psychiatrists and psychologists who oppose all uses of psychotropic drugs for everyone, no matter the conditions and no matter how carefully monitored; more than one of them has become furious when I stuck to my view that a suffering individual should be able to try anything that might help, as long as anyone who ever recommends anything for them discloses fully (1) everything that is known about the positive and negative effects of what they are recommending and (2) a variety of other possible ways to help, as well as their pros and cons.

So I have been thought variously to go too far and not far enough. From this I conclude that radical and extremist are words often applied by those who wish you wouldn't say what you are saying. And I have learned that it's common for those in the helping professions to accuse those who don't see eye-to-eye with them as uncaring in the face of patients' pain.

Since this is only my second Psychology Today blog essay, for those of you who might want to know a bit more about me before you decide whether to return to this blog another time, I'd like to describe another middle-of-the-road matter with which I struggle. It's about trying to figure out where and when to come down between, on the one side, the rose-colored-glasses approach that certainly women of my generation (I'm 63) and many women even today are taught to adopt, and, on the other side, fortressing oneself, becoming tough and cynical.

If you don the rose-colored glasses, overlook, excuse, try to be patient with, or even try to understand someone who hurts you, you may be called a masochist, as though what you were drawn to from the start of the relationship was the loved one's capacity for coldness and cruelty rather than the care, joy, and respect they offered at the beginning. If, in contrast, you plump for wariness, reserve, and flight at early signs of trouble, then if you are a woman, you are likely to be called unwomanly and selfish, and even if you are a man, you may be condemned for not giving enough. The real-life difficulty of trying to figure out the most reasonable - even the most emotionally-warranted - approach to relationships is maddeningly hard. And as I wrote in The Myth of Women's Masochism, if a relationship if 90% good, of course you stay in it, and the same no doubt if it is 80% good. When that percentage gets down to 70 or 60, how do you decide? It depends partly on how good the good part is, how bad is the bad, and in which arenas are they manifested? But in trying to make these decisions, you know that whatever bad you endure or are willing to try to fix, you risk being thought to enjoy the suffering or to ignore danger signals, while if you leave because of the bad, you risk being condemned for demanding too much.

In light of this middle of the road matter as it applies to work, I suppose that the following is not surprising. When I checked to see if my attempt to place my first blog essay on this page had worked, what did I see? A page packed with advertisements. Had the Psychology Today editors told me there would be ads? Yes. Will I earn some unknown about of money based on the number of hits my blog receives? Yes, but that's not why I accepted the invitation to write the blog. It was because of being offered the freedom to write about a huge range of subjects. What a great opportunity!

I'd been told that advertisements appear on Psychology Today blog entries with related material, but one of the ads next to my first essay was for something about "B_polar Disorder," although (1) I did not mention that term in my essay, and (2) I have spent more than a quarter of a century writing about the unscientific nature of, and the frequent harm that results from, psychiatric labels. Furthermore, Dr. Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who headed the DSM-IV Work Group and who now writes a blog for Psychology Today, is among the many people who have written about how vastly overused this category is. I have been concerned since it first came into use, because I saw how freely and variably it was applied. It's disturbing enough that there is nothing to keep therapists from making highly subjective judgments about whether or not the term applies to people who experience intense mood changes or even, as I have seen, mood changes that by no means be considered pathological; but it is nothing less than alarming the way a few powerful psychiatrists worked with Big Pharma to push what they market as "anti-psychotic" drugs (which, as you may know, can actually cause hallucinations and delusions and which are known to have serious and often permanent, negative effects) for people who are given this label. And I realized while writing this current paragraph that because I used the term here, that might bring up more ads related to it when this essay appears online; that is why I left out a letter above, hoping that will keep it from happening. (I'm guessing that people who know how these things work will laugh when they read that.)