Chapter 5: Stock, Solicitors and Prostitutes

...

No one knows how to use words on Planet Psychotherapy. That is, everyone certainly knows how to use words. Words are the currency of the planet. Apart from a few hicks on the margins, down in the outlaw lands of the weird and the doings. No sorry, actually no one knows really how to use words. There are so many words on the Planet that everyone knows how to use them but not at all. There are more words on the Planet that rest unused than words that are unrested.

There are people on the planet that appear utterly mute. Highly skilled mutes, they grunt, nod and exercise their verbal ticks without passing a single word. Oral constipation rules. But in the inhabitants’ heads, what whirligigs of incandescent phrase exist. Catherine wheels of lexicon. Roman fountains of pulsing thesauri bouncing off solid walls of bone, never finding the exit, building up behind bulging eyes and ringing tinnitus.

Words enter the Planet from outside. Visitors seeking succour and enlightenment deposit their words to be sucked up by the inhabitants as gunpowder for their personal firework displays. Experimental hypotheses connect these words to imagined events. Projected onto internal movie screens, the inhabitants of the Planet interpret words, connect them together and build towers of elaborate displays. They use the displays to explain what they hear. As the touch paper is lit, flames leap from word to word, igniting each in turn, lighting the cranial landscape of the inhabitants.

Rarely is the show a shared one. The display is secret, a place only for the initiates. The inhabitants of the Planet are wary of sharing with each other and almost totally averse to opening the doors of the display to visitors. Each of the inhabitants is an expert wordsmith but only the occasional traitor lets the visitor stay for the display. So although everyone on the Planet is bound by their words, few actually know how to use words on Planet Psychotherapy.

The planet has no word for either its inhabitants or its visitors. Nor does it have a word for what it does. Vicious turf wars simmer perpetually and frequently break out into outright feuding. Counsellors, talking therapists, psychiatrists, psychological therapists, psychologists, psychotherapists, personal enlightenment coaches all vie for descriptive dominance. To construct a list of names of activities would be pointless and so time-consuming that the story of Big M’s experiment would be rapidly buried beneath a slag heap of scrap terms, constantly being replaced by new metal.

Big M’s lieutenant, Cap’n Old calls the visitors to the Planet, ‘stock’. Crumbly white haired psychiatric circus performers and their bright eyed thrusting acrobat acolytes call them ‘patients’. The faceless, unimaginative, burrowing bureaucrats of the state who rule entry to the Planet call them ‘service users’. Most curious of all, the resolutely unregulated counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists refer to each visitor as a ‘client’. On other planets, only two types of people do business with clients – solicitors and prostitutes. Both solicitors and prostitutes relieve their clients of considerable amounts of money for dubious or short term gain. The similarities are obvious.

Welcome to Planet Psychotherapy.

...