God's Shrink

Book excerpt: A Riveting Spiritual Thrill Ride Like most seasoned psychiatrists, Dr. Richard Johnson thought he'd heard it all. His assuredness falters when a first-time client arrives at his office and announces that he is God. Listening intently to the man, who is obviously suffering from severe psychosis, he agrees to take the case. What transpires over the course of the next nine sessions will test everything in the doctor's bag of tricks. As he struggles to unravel the client's illness before he becomes a danger to himself, a chilling series of coincidences and events cause him to question everything he thought he knew about himself, his place in the world, and life after death. Was their time together the revelations of divinity or the ramblings of a delusional? What's possible? You decide . . . Ten sessions. A lifetime of answers. Under normal circumstances, the province of psychotherapy is practiced privately. What is said behind closed doors remains there. The patient can sing like a bird, but the therapist is ethically and legally bound by confidentiality. I can truthfully say that in all my years of practice, I only gave up two patients. The first involved serious child abuse and the second concerned an individual who was imminently suicidal. These were clearly based on a duty to warn and protect. What you will read in these pages is the third breach of my silence and has nothing to do with legalities or ethics. It has to do with a patient whose initial claims represented the most elaborate and complex delusional system I've ever encountered. I was given express permission to tell the story in a public forum. Indeed, I was encouraged to.