Dealing with arrogant psychiatrists has been one of the most disheartening parts of my mental-health journey. There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from sitting across from someone who is supposed to help you—someone who has the training, the credentials, the authority—and realizing they’re not actually listening. Instead, they act as though they understand my inner world better than I do, as if their degrees grant them automatic access to my experiences, my history, and the complex layers of my mind.
What hurts most is the rudeness that often comes wrapped in clinical detachment. It’s subtle sometimes, outright dismissive at others: the sighs, the interruptions, the disbelief in my symptoms, the way they reduce dissociative identity disorder to a movie stereotype or oversimplify complex PTSD into “stress.” They speak about anxiety and depression as if they’re generic conditions with one-size-fits-all solutions—never acknowledging the years I’ve spent learning the rhythms of my own mental state, the triggers I’ve worked hard to identify, or the coping strategies I’ve built myself.
When a psychiatrist refuses to understand DID, or even consider the possibility that my lived experiences have value, it creates this invisible wall between us. I’m expected to tear myself open while they barely meet me halfway. Their arrogance makes me feel small, invalidated, even invisible at times. And it’s exhausting—emotionally, mentally, spiritually—to keep trying to explain what it’s like when someone has already decided they know better.
But I’m learning, slowly, that their lack of understanding does not define my truth. Their skepticism doesn’t erase my symptoms, my trauma, my resilience, or the work I’ve done to survive. I know my mind intimately because I live in it every day. I’m the one navigating dissociation, flashbacks, panic spikes, depressive fogs—not them.
My reflection now is this: I deserve care that is compassionate, curious, and humble. I deserve to be heard, not talked over. And while I can’t control the arrogance of certain practitioners, I can choose to seek out the ones who listen—those willing to admit what they don’t know, who approach me as a partner in healing rather than a puzzle to be solved. Those are the professionals who make the journey bearable, and sometimes even hopeful.
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