Posted: 2026-01-25

An Egregious Example Of Social Coercion

(plus an announcement)

Context

I've been through the ringer. I know this is not unusual for a major life transition, but from 2023-2025 I went through social coercion processes at least a half dozen separate times. It was a psychological gauntlet, but I came out stronger, and now I know the mechanisms back to front.

This is one of the examples that most of my social graph has not heard about. These things are always easier to understand from outside the sphere of character assassination and misdirection.

Situation

The person is a psychologist — I believe clinical, but I might have misremembered.

They have borderline personality disorder and are quite open (in this group) about their ketamine habit. They use it as a self-medication when their emotional swings become too much.

For me, this is a giant red flag. Ketamine is quite pharmacologically unique: in the short term, it acts as a dissociative (NMDA antagonist) and creates emotional distance from events. It's sometimes used in emergency medicine as an on-scene anaesthetic: it barely effects most vital parameters, and it doesn't actually affect perception of pain, but silently inserts a barrier between that perception and the emotional impact of being in pain, rendering the person indifferent to the pain they still feel.

It is certainly not a psychedelic (like the person claimed) in the traditional classical serotonergic sense, but the word is sometimes used extremely broadly. But that wasn't the problem.

A relatively recently discovered property of ketamine is that it is a powerful and abnormally fast-acting antidepressant. It can yield a measurable effect in hours, not weeks, and this effect lasts for months.

Something a lot of people misunderstand about antidepressants: they do not merely reduce depression; they broadly increase activation. For someone with bipolar, they can absolutely cause the person to become manic. For someone with borderline personality disorder, ketamine can and often will cause serious destabilisation many weeks later. It exists as a treatment for the condition, but only in a measured and carefully monitored sense.

When someone is misusing it as-needed for emotional stability, we can very easily end up in a situation where they're feeling better for a few hours then simply stoking the fire for more explosions later. Personal drug use is one thing, but downstream effects many weeks later that the person is not even aware are a consequence are a very serious problem.

Given that this is a person who regularly makes life-and-death calls with vulnerable people, taking this risk — let alone being wilfully ignorant of it — is completely fucking unacceptable.

Conflict

I got as far as saying "you should know there are risks-" before the person cut me off and flat out declared war on me, using everything at their disposal to turn others in the group against me.

I'm soft. Similar to the other people who have played this game with me, I regret not simply going straight to AHPRA before they could muddy the waters and turn it into diffuse "drama". Abusers reliably work on the assumption that you won't go nuclear, and that's partly because it's usually true, partly because they assume any "rational" person would go all-in if they really had damning evidence, but also because of selection bias: prison creates a very different category of abuser.

The form of coercion the person used on me is one which has become quite familiar the last few years. I've been following the various trails of wreckage to learn how these people operate, and it is extremely repetitive and predictable. You keep hearing the same stories over and over again; once you learn the tricks, it becomes extremely simple to understand. Convincing bystanders that the opinions the abuser is inserting into their head is their own organic belief is the whole goal.

I'm not going to go into the mechanics right now, because:

My next book is a manual explaining what these people do, why, how it works and how the methods scale to our formal institutions. When everyone involved understands the playbook, it rapidly falls apart, and these personalities usually do not have the capacity to learn and adapt. They have a set of magic tricks that reliably work on individuals as long as nobody sees it twice; once the tricks are revealed to all, we're left with some scared and insecure individuals who have little else.