Doctors, Therapists, Psychiatrists Are Murderers, Too

A Diatribe of The Medical Health Industry

Jared Sexton describes libidinal economy as “the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious.” Needless to say, libidinal economy functions variously across scales and is as “objective” as political economy. It is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption. Sexton emphasizes that it is “the whole structure of psychic and emotional life,” something more than, but inclusive of or traversed by, what Antonio Gramsci and other Marxists call a “structure of feeling”; it is “a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation. —  Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and The Structure of U.S. Antagonisms

A mutual of mine once said empathy falls on the color line. That statement could not be more true. Whether it is through the mode of mutual aid, talk-therapy, and treatment, libidinal economy determines all experiential outcomes.

Unless you are white or light-skinned, empathy is not far removed from the medical professionals’ bandwidth to tend to your wounds, their ontological grammars, be they internal or external. Among many things, the question is a matter of when the medical professional will kill me and the darker-skinned Black person next to me.

I read Nate Bear’s 2024 piece, “Do Max Harm: The Grave Ethics Problem In Healthcare” not too long ago. The piece inspired me to further elucidate on my own festering vexations towards the medical health industry.

Highlighting a number of cases where doctors sexually assaulted their patients, healthcare workers refused to take any safety precautions to mask to protect themselves and others, chronicles of Nazi physicians who contrived to create an Aryan race, and a listed record of medical serial killers, I was disquieted.

Summarily, I arrived at the fact that Bear raises important observations that compel us to call into question the modus operandi of the doctor, the therapist, the psychiatrist, and the nurse, not only as individuals but more specifically, agents of the state. A veiled message, a major takeaway that invites us to broach the ethics of all medical professions, is the inarguable truth of A.M.P.B: all medical professionals are bastards, too.

The inception of this phenomena is unclear, though it can be argued that the onto-epistemological logics that foreground its existence. To put it differently, the medical health industry has ethico-libidinal investments in slavery that can be traced to The Enlightenment.

I won’t recapitulate its inception, although it is crucial to indicate that The Enlightenment, a European 18th century movement catalyzed by Reason, scientific advancement, and rationalism, sutures contemporary, fixed notions of race and gender.

Why haven’t enough people in the United States reached a national consensus bridging a connection between the police as an institution and the medical health industry as coterminous aspects of white civil society?

What is it about the profession of the doctor, the therapist, psychiatrist, the nurse — that convinces people to overlook the modus operandi of medical professionals and characterizes them as benevolent — more or less inconspicuous than the police? I cannot entertain the illusory satisfaction of an answer because answers connote conclusions — thought-terminating clichés so to speak.

It is no wonder then, that all medical so-called “professionals” are employed. Their prerogative to provide answers to any warranted refutations are held up by a fragile ego that is safeguarded by an assumptive infallibility of exactitude and correctness — no matter how well-intentioned they profess themselves to be.

There is no wonder why we preemptively prepare ourselves for failed appointments. There is no wonder why there is avoidance to speak and to listen — to be talked at — to leave with a compounded sense of dread, of bewilderment, active and passive nihilism. The only thing that compels us are their vapid invitations of false hope, returning to these rituals of somatic death.

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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.