Ron Collins
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

first received a devastating diagnosis

As for me, the only “diagnosis” of anything mental about me, was delivered from a witness stand by a contracted social worker in a custody case. She had spent exactly one lunch meeting with me. The diagnosis was “narcissistic personality disorder”, only she didn’t have the courage nor the credentials to come right out and say under oath that I had the thing, only that things she had observed about me were “concerning” and that they “resembled” this so-called disorder. Anyway, she was quite assured that, poor Ron, he just can’t help himself, he simply isn’t capable of thinking of anyone but himself…

Let me tell you about that lunch meeting.

First off, this lady was not under contract to my legal opponent, my infant son’s mother who had kidnapped him and committed an interstate felony no one would even touch (and it had been suggested that calling security would be the response, next time I brought up a class V felony punishable by five years’ incarceration, more than once, including in the office of my own attorney I mistakenly took on later).

No, her role in the thing was as a “special advocate” or what in other States is called a GAL (in a bizarre pun) or “guardian ad litem.” Her job was as a contractor to the State and its presiding judge in the matter, and she was by law supposed to represent, or “advocate” for, neither litigant but the child himself. She had informed me in a phone message earlier on, that I would be asked to take various personality-screening tests and meet with a psychologist at least once. I called her office and said, of course I can only agree to this, given assurances that the mother will have to undergo the exact same procedures. Oh yes, of course, my role is as a neutral party, blah-blah-blah. (The mother never had to undergo any part of what I went on and endured, which was several written personality tests and a meeting with a nutjob religious fanatic of a Catholic shrink who later refused to testify that he had uncovered no cause for alarm over me, because of a billing dispute…)

So, amid all this hoop-jumping, this lady calls a meeting with me so she can see for herself what sort of person I am. (I think it was my son’s grandmother who had suggested this from the background, his grandmother the social worker, who had engineered the kidnapping and the subsequent appointment of her colleague as Special Advocate, and was the brains behind the entire affair from before he was born…)

Trying to be a good citizen and show myself a committed dad (who has not seen or spent time with his child in nearly two years by then), I agreed to the meeting, a four-hour drive away from my home to the town where the mother had run away to after the abduction and her having come back from rural Montana with her estranged father and back to her mother’s home town in Colorado. I was by then living in New Mexico, several hours closer to where my son was by then, than where we had lived when he was born.

So she tells me that at such-and-such time we are to meet at such-and-such restaurant, a four-star affair in a big semi-luxury hotel she was fond of. I walked in and saw her, and another (female) colleague she had not told me would be there, and sat down. I opened the menu, and did my best to disguise my astonishment at the prices, and the two women were already taking notes. I took from the note-taking and their general demeanor, that these two public contractors would be billing their junket to the State, and that I was to go Dutch, so I ordered a cup (not a bowl) of soup and a (three-dollar) cup of coffee. The trip itself, which of course had to be on a weekday for the ladies’ schedule requirements, was costing me an entire workday plus some five hundred miles’ driving expenses. The lunch had me wondering if I’d be running out of gas somewhere down the Rio Chama and thumbing a ride the rest of the way home, in the middle of the night in midwinter.

They set upon me, asking all kinds of obvious trick and leading questions about obscure matters, to mine me for damning reactions and opinions. They never stopped scribbling the whole time, other than to sip their pinots and gorge themselves on blackened salmon at public expense. The most grating thing of it all, was that I knew enough about Stalinism to know that this was both denunciation and interrogation going on and that their role was as the investigators of a crime they didn’t have to tell me I was being accused of, to see if I would just cop to it myself. And yet the both of them kept their tone in that nauseatingly “appropriate” range that I find one of the most hypocritical and dangerous forms of interpersonal conduct of all, and ran their whole dog-and-pony show like some kind of semi-upscale business meeting.

I wanted to throw those glasses of wine in their faces. I sat there fantasizing about ME being the one to call security, and THEM being the ones under a bright light answering trick questions. It must have shown, that I was absolutely disgusted at some of the most ill-brought-up behavior I ever witnessed, and it was their being passive-aggressive toward me and my trying not to react as I deserved to (which would have been in any sane setting, to stand up and walk out without a word), that was what they were there to take notes about. It was NKVD in the Lyubyanka dungeon grilling someone who didn’t even know why he was there, in an upper-middle-class setting while the muzak played and everyone went around with those fake smiles upper-middle-class people always have plastered on their faces.

And that shit-show, was as close as I ever allowed anyone to get, to rendering a professional opinion about what might be going on in my head. And yeah, I wanted to take the lot of them, and shove their heads in a god-damn toilet, including that weirdo shrink back in New Mexico with the attention span of a seven-year-old who ended our business by overcharging me and using that as an excuse not to answer for his findings in court.

But I didn’t. I never harmed nor threatened nor stalked nor harassed anyone through two full years of this kind of humiliation. And meanwhile me, and later my two-year-old son, were stalked by police, harassed by social workers, threatened by lawyers, and our father-son bond done irreparable harm from which the two of us have yet to recover. He is nineteen now, and still too brainwashed by his mother and grandmother who have told him all his life that I am dangerous and don’t care about anyone but myself least of all him, to just pick up his own phone and call me or answer when I do.

Charlatans, opportunists, hustlers, face-stuffing pocket-liners,

and bald-faced liars.

That is what I think of these head-shrinkers, the mentally-diseased two-faced pack of them, with no reason on earth to think different.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s