The Unworried Psychotic

Jackie spent a good deal of her time listening to people talk about their troubles, their challenges, their childhood’s of abuse and neglect and violence. Consequently, she welcomed the occasion when she would encounter a client who had enjoyed a happy childhood and, despite what they thought, a pretty decent adult life. She welcomed a chance—too rare for her tastes--- to treat the “worried well,” the client who only thought she had problems, but didn’t really. These clients were the ones that gave Jackie a moment of rest, amid a clinical day otherwise filled with mental ice picks and the engulfed psyches of her more disturbed clients. Paradoxically, Jackie sometimes found that her most disturbed clients, the ones who were most troubled, were those who most felt that they lived pretty “normal’ lives--the “unworried psychotic.”