This is a more personal than usual entry in this series. I've talked about the fact I'm a therapist before on this blog, and have deliberately brought my love of RPGs into that work. I'm also a lifelong psychiatric survivor, which I consider more useful to my job than any formal training I've undergone.
I had the idea for Happy Medium a while ago, when I had nearly as many bad patient experiences under my belt as now, but very little experience on the other side of the Freudian couch. That is no longer as true, and seeing the specifics of how organizations fuck over patients on a structural, systemic level has not only been eye opening, but also quite helpful in fleshing out this GMC cabal.
I still have more to write about the role of psychotherapy in Unknown Armies because it is a game explicitly about trauma (among other things) and explicitly mechanizes the therapeutic process in ways I find naive, and too trusting of psychiatry as a system built within and supportive of capitalism. Another day, for sure.
Unlike other StatSat posts, I'm going to have an afterword as well as this little introduction. Please read it, too.
Happy Medium
Most people agree that the "occult mainstream" is more socially accepted in the wider world than ever before. As we approach half a century since the height of the Satanic Panic, astrology, tarot, crystals, new age medicine, even Paganism, wicca, and Santeria are everywhere. Long, long gone are the days of burning people at the stake because of a fear of the unknown power they had, or were believed to have had. Into this cultural climate steps Happy Medium, with arms wide open.
While many occult practices have, by and large, ceased to inspire primarily fear and disgust among the masses, it can still be hard for many magick practitioners to integrate fully into society. Happy Medium's viewpoint is that the fragmentary, insular, and eccentric communities that comprise the so-called "occult underground" exist in fearful opposition to normality.
Some adepts wear their heterodoxy as a badge of honor, scoffing at those who desire to integrate with society. Happy Medium feels for these wayward souls, but believes that attitude can only hold them back. Magick is a wonderful gift that can change lives, but to use it doesn't make you a god or a messiah. No man is an island, says Happy Medium; what good is the power to change humanity if you insist on setting yourself apart from it?
Beliefs & Objectives
In a phrase, Happy Medium believes in respectability politics for the occult. They want to be sure that in any hypothetical conflict with the occult underground, they're seen as "the good ones", and are left alone, while the "real bad actors" get what's coming to them. They reject the Sleepers' framing of the Sleeping Tiger in a world now so saturated with weirdness; it doesn't have to be all-out chaos when magick and mundanity meet. At the same time, they're no Mak Attax. They are happy to keep the occult underground separate but equal, as it were.
Their focus is on the rehabilitation of occultists' image and wrongdoings. Where the Sleepers want to cover things up at all costs, Happy Medium seeks to smooth things over and reach a mutual understanding. To that end, they operate not as disconnected vigilantes, but under an organized hierarchy, which is just as rife with petty internal politics as you might imagine.
Operations
Happy Medium was founded by philanthropist, retired psychiatrist, and cliomancer (in that order), Patricia Walton. She identifies as self-made, despite being the beneficiary of both occult and socioeconomic nepotism in a dozen subtle and several obvious ways. Her vision remains the guiding star by which the organization operates.
Happy Medium is unique in the occult underground as the only legally qualified, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that regularly interfaces with charges and major cabals. Naturally, this earns them no shortage of revulsion, which is not easy for them to understand, since they perceive their mission as so noble.
Nonetheless, many adepts, and even avatars, who get in too deep lean on the resources they provide: namely, financial and legal support, housing assistance, and therapy. All these services come with strings attached; their goal is not simply charity, but to reform their clients into respectable members of society. They operate shelters in several major cities across the northeast U.S. and have a number of additional offices where those willing to jump through the requisite bureaucratic hoops can be connected to aid, both by Happy Medium and a number of wholly mundane partner agencies.
Mum is not just the word, but a way of life when interfacing with these latter allies. Happy Medium uses coy language, typically framing their clients' real magick as delusion and psychosis (not that there's never overlap), and insisting they play along if they want to keep getting handouts. Legally binding documents and their implicit financial threats are weaponized to further ensure compliance here, although they aren't always enough to contain rebellious and/or unstable mages who have had enough being bossed around and made out to be kooks.
Resources & Organization
Money is king, of course. It is in and of itself self-evidently useful even to people who can bend reality to their will through less conventional means. Connected is Happy Medium's plentiful social capital. Through expert politicking, choice "financial incentives", discretion uncommon among adepts, and, yes, the occasional sneaky spell or two, the organization is in surprisingly good standing considering its volatile clientele.
Many checkers, a solid handful of avatars, and even a few adepts besides the founder are on the payroll. All have had enough exposure to the unnatural to at least keep it together in the face of open displays, and the therapists on staff tend to be especially prepped. They are required to be in therapy themselves, although they tend to need to metaphorize their stranger experiences to their own shrinks.
Although Happy Medium employs occultists, much like in TNI they are rarely promoted very far, and for similar reasons. The organizational culture is forcibly unified to the extent of feeling uncomfortably culty, which is an unpleasantly familiar vibe for many of its clients. Patricia has done everything possible to distance herself from the cliomantic circles of her youth, but out of the kindness of her heart they still find their way to her organization more than most other adepts. Their brand of magick is easier than most to make palatable and useful for her agency's needs, after all.
In any moderate-to-large city in the northeastern U.S., Happy Medium maintains at the very least an office where you can get started on their substantial battery of intake questionnaires and assessments, and then be directed to the nearest relevant providers, which are almost always within a day's drive. They also offer remote therapy and social work services - by Zoom, not astral projection or anything like that, of course.
Second only to the behavioral health staff in number and prominence are the lawyers, all of whose loyalty is thoroughly paid for. Their work on clients' behalf is often dicey, and they are also frequently deployed to protect the organization's good name. However, they tend to be spared the most unpredictable interactions with clients while taking home the best pay and benefits by a mile, a fact they are regularly reminded to appreciate.
Management has the privilege of all the best perks and status without having to regularly expose themselves to the target demographic of the organization. They are the elite, and they and everyone beneath them know it. More often than dissent, this results in employees trampling each others' careers to make it into the club themselves. While this doesn't usually serve the clients, it's tacitly encouraged, in part because the infighting protects the managers' seats at the top.
Drawbacks
For the rank and file, burnout is at least as big a problem as in any other human services work. They're overworked, underpaid, and once in a while they hear a horror story about a colleague being hit with a blast spell.
Additionally, it's not too uncommon for some cabal to get the idea of infiltrating the organization, trying to broaden the availability of its resources without the associated judgment, or even just for purely selfish purposes. Over time, this has prompted a pretty strong paranoid streak amongst the upper eschelon of management.
Uses for Happy Medium in Your Campaign
If a PC seeks therapy, especially for some hard-to-explain Unnatural notches, Happy Medium is a solution that offers lots of ways to turn healing into blowback.
Similarly, Happy Medium can offer a lifeline after the law gets involved, which is frankly a pretty likely consequence for the pursuit of many objectives, even at the local level.
As described under "Operations", maybe the PCs have ideas about how Happy Medium could be run better, or its resources redirected. Do they want to try and fix it from the inside? Or perhaps a more radical approach?
Maybe someday Patricia loses her shit (again) and the end result is a bunch of highly unstable patients back out on the street to start charging up again, all at once.
GMC: Patricia Walton
There is a perverse secret behind Happy Medium's seemingly banal structure: Patricia Walton was not always Patricia Walton. Before that, her name was Dawn Miller, agent of renunciation, and before that, Leticia Tobin, down-and-out wife of a poor, sleazy gambler. In seeking better for herself from the latter, she wound up the steward of the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted (see Statosphere from 1e), transformed from a young Black woman troubled by her oppression and its interplay with her undiagnosed autism, to a shrewd white matron with a savior complex.
The thing is, that didn't really solve her problems. Eventually, after years as a magickal social worker, it hit her that nothing had actually changed. She had gone from living in service of a husband who didn't care for her, to fixing the problems of whoever the Room sent her way, and at no point was she getting anything out of the arrangement.
The day this realization hit her, she waited for her secretary/bodyguard to leave for the day and repeated her renunciation, starting another new life. Maybe she should have waited to calm down and think through her options, though, because the Room was just as fickle the second time it spat her out as the first.
The product she became was still white, still an expert of bougie social mores, and she retained her rediscovered drive to put herself first for a change. Unfortunately, she came out even less like her original self, and her altruistic motivations were utterly subsumed by the desire to finally get hers.
She really doesn't care a bit about whose neck she has to step on to satisfy herself. She's done her time on the bottom rungs. Now she wants to reap the rewards, with the aid to others at best a thin veneer, and at worst a disguise for her desire to manipulate others embroiled in the occult and make them suffer as she has. She no longer gives any thought to the life she left behind in the Room, just as she stopped thinking about her daughter long ago. If she had gotten the chance to find her own courage in her own time, who knows what good she could have done. But the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted has twice molded her, leaving only this bitter discard in its wake.
Obsession: putting herself first. Patricia has had two lifetimes of serving others; been there, done that. It's me time now.
Rage stimulus: people who make their problems, her problem. She has a nonprofit to run; she doesn't have time for your whining!
Fear stimulus: confronting the several paved-over layers of her abandoned lives, and figuring out what's still left of her underneath it all. (Self)
Noble stimulus: giving others what they need. At this point, it's so obvious to Patricia how to fix someone's problems. Why wait around, explaining it over and over to them, when you can just bring them in line? They'll thank her later.
Boss Bitch 90%: Subs for Status, Coerces Helplessness, Protects Helplessness
Psychotherapist 30%: Subs for Connect, Evaluates Self, Therapeutic
Third Time's the Charm 60%: Subs for Secrecy, Subs for Lie, Protects Self
Possessions: the definitional girlboss wardrobe, pricey and gaudy jewelry with a couple of cars and a house in the suburbs to match, plus a timeshare in a delightfully quaint Martha's Vineyard cottage.
Afterword
Besides the stress healing mechanics, the other place where therapy shows up prominently in the official Unknown Armies books is the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted in 1e's Statosphere, which is *all kinds* of icky, and not just in relation to my profession.
The agent of this room of renunciation is a Black woman implied to be neurodivergent who got turned into a white woman therapist, which. Wow. Also, it's one of fairly few canon ways to trans your gender, which in connection with other details is pretty wild.
Patronizing and microaggression-riddled writing by Rick Neal aside, it's pretty unclear as to whether this was supposed to be a good, bad, or lateral thing for her. By extension, it's unclear what the reader is supposed to make of her role as a magick therapist. A lot of times, the House of Renunciation is supposed to just be about changes without qualifying them as positive or negative, but when they get this political and intersectional I personally find that quite unsatisfying and centrist-y.
The emphasis on individual autonomy is super at odds with the fact that Dawn's current existence as outlined feels like it would be a personal hell for her original self. I also really, really hate the preachy bullshit about how if she just had a spine, she (and every other abused wife) should have left her husband and fixed her whole life, easy peasy. I read her becoming the room's agent instead as almost some kind of karmic punishment for not doing that. This reading casts the whole entry in a really ugly light, and my writing Patricia as the result of Dawn rejecting that is an attempt to call that out as the patriarchal slime it is, while maintaining the idea that the room will always fuck you over monkey's paw style (and there's a case to be made that I should have challenged that part, as well).
Happy Medium and Patricia are a response to the Room of Heart's Burden Lifted, but also a response to my experience working against my institutional role as a therapist at a nonprofit for the sake of my clients. Maybe doing both those things in one piece of writing isn't a great idea, I dunno.
I'll end by stating that I am a white trans woman who grew up in a petit bourgeousie ("upper middle class") family. I'm not trying to claim any authority to speak for all others who share those identities, but I think it's useful information as to why this came out the way it did.
I'm more invested in the explanation here than I usually am on this blog because, again, this is an unusually personal piece of writing, and because I took some big ideological swings at some shit I'm still navigating and will probably have to navigate the rest of my life. I reserve the right to look back at this in six months and put up a big disclaimer of how hard I'm cringing at some or all of it, but hopefully I have the courage to leave it up, as an artifact of who I am at this point in my life if nothing else.
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