Every other shrink in Pakistan is an auntie: it’s more lucrative than becoming a designer. For six hours a day, she sits on her plush couch in a glass-paneled office built into a sprawling villa.
Letter from karachi...
Every other shrink in Pakistan is an auntie: it’s more lucrative than becoming a designer. For six hours a day, she sits on her plush couch in a glass-paneled office built into a sprawling villa. For Rs 2 to 5,000 an hour she will nod maternally, adjusting her diamond rings, and listen to you talk about your broken home and memories of childhood molestation.
It’s a relaxed environment, cigarettes and chai, and just when you start getting comfortable, she becomes uncomfortably frank with you about your specific love drug of choice: caffeine, nicotine, speed, weed, birth control? You feel like you are talking to someone’s really cool mother as you divulge the dirty details of your chemical nose job.
Problem is, your shrink is someone’s really cool mother, auntie, best friend...and patient confidentiality gets lost somewhere between high tea and drinks after dinner. In an incestuous country like Pakistan, where every member of the media is six degrees of sex, work, and drugs, away from the elite, your kinky fantasies soon become part of everyone’s kinky fantasy about you: the collective conscious at its best.
A shiny eyed friend recommended the shrink to me,assuring me that everyone from short, botox-ically adjusted supermodels to aging pop stars also go to her. Between being overworked and underlaid, I had been moving on an emotional tsunami of seismic proportions. The escape artist of the century, I had recently discovered the sweet, dead sleep of sleeping pills but I did not want to spend my first vacation in rehab.
The manicured garden soothed me. The fees made me choke on my tea. And then she gives me an MMPI (Minnesota Multi-Something Inventory?) for Rs 3,000, offering to get it genuinely checked in Minnesota for a mere Rs. 5,000.
I had horrible flashbacks of my SAT days as I sweated through 575 inane True and False questions, along with a handful of multiple choice. Every twenty or so questions, a trick question appeared like “When I set fire to paper it turns me on” or “I count all the tiles in the road”, which test whether you are telling the truth or not.
One very expensive hour later, I was told that I suffered from “bizarre-mentia”...An emotional and cognitive fear of losing control. But doesn’t everyone, to some degree? “You are depressed”, she decided at the end of our sitting. I already knew that. She handed me a prescription for Prozac and several mild anti-depressants. And here I was, trying to break up with my chemical romance.
(Umbreen works with a TV channel in Karachi)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}