I am a woman in her 30s and last year (2022) I went through an emotional trauma caused to me by my collaboration with Dr. David Healy, with whom I have been in contact since 2014 for the problem of Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD).
Based on my case and some precedents I learned about, I think Dr. Healy is still in a position to harm the vulnerable people he surrounds himself with by flattering them as his collaborators, the best researchers, and instead in his heart they are his “slaves”.
When in the name of noble principles, or, rather, in the name of opportunism, career and “mission”, even patients, for whom care is supposedly intended, are hoarded and exploited, leveraging their emotions and hopes, and then lacking any form of recognition, respect and compassion after hurting them, there is something serious, devious and wrong going on.
I hope this account will be found by people like me up to a year ago, who support him confident of his good humanity, invest their time and resources, and risk putting themselves in danger and wasting themselves for someone who may be very different from what they believe.
The people who end up working with Dr. Healy / Rxisk.org are often people suffering from dramatic iatrogenic consequences that are little recognized by the clinical world and currently untreatable. They can find a figurehead in Dr. Healy, who appears to be among the few in the world to listen to their voice, to courageously acknowledge and expose the responsibility of the drug / pharmaceutical companies / institutions, and to offer hope with the prospect of finding a cure. Dr. Healy has done many things that have been important and helpful to many people. In his work, on his blogs and in seminars, he talks about injustices, abuses and conspiracy of silence in the pharmaceutical and health care system and spurs people to assert their rights. Therefore, as a public figure, he can become a kind of champion, a savior, a representative of noble values such as justice, truth, courage.
The same people may, in addition, be psychologically fragile personalities, with histories of abuse, bereavement, depression, low self-esteem… Dr. Healy gives voice to the suffering of many people, for example by posting their stories on his blogs, encourages them to take action, extols the value of wounded people, claiming that they are the best researchers and teachers. Even by email he spurs those who engage in research, outreach, and bring him useful ideas and hypotheses. All this can easily cause some people to develop an attachment, since they feel considered, appreciated by someone they esteem and are grateful to, and they can see in him a special doctor, a good and wise man, a father figure who points the right way and offers a chance to help do good. There are easy premises for the development of transference feelings.
With this in mind, one might expect from a psychiatrist against the tide, from a “paladin”, that he would act wisely and with the best of intentions, that his encouragements would demonstrate his benevolence, and that he would have a knowledge of the psyche and emotions that allows him to be prescient and attentive to what is going on in communication. One might think that if Dr. Healy lets a person connect with him with romantic feelings expressed perhaps with concern and emotion, he is safeguarding and respecting that person, their dignity and sensitivity. All these expectations and trust turn out to be terribly misplaced. What is revealed is far less noble: Dr. Healy gladly hoards others’ compliments, feelings and emotions even when he realizes that they are projections, illusions, idealizations. But not only that: he can feed them with crumbs and encouragement for his own narcissistic gratification and utilitarian benefit, exploiting others’ hopes, esteem, gratitude and desire for approval to motivate them to be useful in various ways to his work: research, tasks, favors, word of mouth, donations…
The shock, confusion and suffering for those who have relied on him so much so that they feel they are in a relationship of special complicity comes when suddenly his attitude changes and his real carelessness, unexpected insensitivity, deception, devious manipulation, blind opportunism emerge: either he was at some point “forced” to tell that woman that he was not interested after he had kept her in delusion for a long time because she “was doing a great work for the mission”, or he severed the relationship abruptly without explanation, leaving behind, with total disregard, a person to come to terms with feelings of abandonment, or he ignored again and again the increasingly desperate appeals of someone who just needed to clear her head because she was really suffering from the situation that had arisen. Thus pushing such a person into an increasingly serious and dangerous malaise, to which he watched impassively. Leaving her at the mercy of opposing ideas, between that he might be in distress, that he might have health problems, that he might have been disappointed, that he might be sadistic, or conversely that he was enacting a mysterious loving lesson — just as he had seemed loving just a few weeks before.
A key factor here seems to be a staggering lack of affective empathy, care and respect. From the research and comparisons, what I have found is that I am one of a number of women, other women in the past have had devastating consequences. Similar approach to the grooming online: crumbs and encouragement, but one-way traffic and ambiguity to give plausible deniability, often then used in tasks, e.g., translations. And about the suffering caused by abrupt estrangements, he does not feel responsible or guilty. As a narcissist, he rationalizes: it’s up to the other person; sometimes the only form of love they have experienced in their lives is being able to express those feelings; he calls them “master-slave relationships”.
Probably if an outside person read the email exchanges between him and me they would be struck in particular by Dr. Healy’s “inappropriate” unbalance on the sexual side. This was not the problem for me, since it was desirable to me and I trusted it was based on genuine complicity. I had definitely idealized him, but he, in receiving my messages, including some romantic poems and erotic stories, never held back or gave a reality tip. On the contrary, he fueled my delusion by encouraging me with appreciation and polite and exciting manners. I was always honest with Dr. Healy, expressed to him my frailties and insecurities, the traumas of PSSD and my past, my isolation, my desires for tenderness, my fantasies about him, my fears of being out of place with certain messages, the potential that my emotionality still had to make me feel something remarkable despite PSSD. Somehow, even though he did not show interest in my private life, and it also felt right, I felt welcomed again each time. I felt that he could be the meaning I was looking for, that he could heal my ancient wounds and be the only good thing that something as horrible as PSSD had brought into my life.
I also talked with Dr. Healy about the abusive behaviors of doctors in the world, and he was urging me to stand up for myself, seemed to show me a way. He encouraged and flattered me, “You have a bunch of researchers in the palm of your hand,” “You are an extraordinary woman,” “There is no idea of yours that I don’t like,” “I would love to meet you someday,” etc. For a few months, communication with him had become a playful mix of research and eroticism, fantasies and apparent complicity. Even when I went so far as to ask him if there would be a way for us to meet in an erotic/romantic sense his answer was a mix of play and seriousness. He would ask me for favors, share things with me about research and various initiatives making me feel that he trusted me, and I was proud to deserve and respect his trust. He would introduce me to other people as one of his most important contributors regarding PSSD, praising me and telling them what I could offer. Although this bothered me a little because it seemed exaggerated and made me feel that I had to meet his high expectations, I saw in it a loving intent to arouse in me a kind of Pygmalion effect.
Parallel to the intensification of my affective involvement, my feelings of frustration and confusion due to his ambiguous communication became less and less bearable. That there was something very wrong underneath began to become evident to me only at the moment I expressed to him my need for clarity: he refused to give it to me, telling me that we had to stay in ambiguity longer and then only provided me with non-answers for months, keeping alive in me even the possibility that he reciprocated my feelings. In this way my anguish was further aggravated and I had my mind tossed between opposing ideas about him, about myself, and what was between us. How could he behave like that, if he had even an ounce of affection for me? On the one hand I was blaming myself for losing my mind in such a strange and exaggerated way, and for fantasizing too much also because of my isolation at that time. But it would have been enough for me to receive a few comprehensible and sincere words, whatever the truth was, to face it and put myself back in my place. For example, he could have told me that he had just had some fun, but that he was sorry to see me in such pain and that we needed to take a step back…
Instead, he continued to ignore my appeals, responding only to emails about research and outreach. His behavior appeared absurd and gratuitously unfair. On the one hand he seemed sadistic, on the other I was worried that he was in trouble. After I also expressed my anger and disappointment to him and continued to receive his indifference, I decided to betray his trust and made the shocking discoveries reported above. Reprocessing everything that had happened with Dr. Healy was harrowing and frightening. My trust that he was respecting me, that we were in complicity, was shattered. He had manipulated me with who knows what intentions and thoughts in reality. I lost so much, all at once. I also got scared, wondering what kind of person I was actually dealing with, whether perverted or not. I also found that the definition of trauma from narcissistic abuse fit like a glove to explain all the confusion and suffering I was experiencing, and words I didn’t even know before like breadcrumbing, love bombing, ghosting described the way he had behaved with me.
It was only after I had cornered him more that Dr. Healy deigned to send me a reply in which, in a tone that was formal and altogether different from the usual communication between us, he informed me that he had failed to maintain boundaries, that he had not cared enough to make it clear that his interest in the sexual descriptions was scientific and not romantic, that is, to understand whether the problem of PSSD lies in the brain or in the genitals. To justify ghosting, he said he did not want to stop all the work I was doing on PSSD. So, in other words, I was his lab rat, and he had seen very well that his “love bombing” had increased, along with my erotic feelings I was telling him about, my motivation to get busy and support him in various ways. He added that he is now aware of how he can prevent something similar from happening again.
Oddly enough, this collaboration with me really led him, in its latter stages, to establish a research direction for the PSSD, involving a researcher whom I mentioned to him somewhat casually between erotic messages.
Still in mid-February 2023, on his blogs and seminars Dr. Healy continues to adulate “his researchers”, to note how patients even without any scientific background are the best researchers because of their greater motivation, and that encouraging patients to do research might give doctors like him “100 free research assistants, making the job much more fun”.
After opening my eyes to Dr. Healy’s way of operating and relating, I no longer have any reason to believe that someone like him can be honest when offering hope of finding a cure to desperate people, nor that he has any compassionate motive in doing so.
