Venting The mental health system is a failure in every way

[CatabolicSeed]

My experience with the mental health system so far:

- Therapist who didn't help
- Psychiatrist who made me see her way more often than needed because money (gave me prozac that worked for a couple years before it stopped working)
- CBT course with exposure therapy that did actually help my anxiety significantly (the singular only win I've had with therapy/psychiatry)
- Psychiatrist who tried me on 5 different antidepressants after prozac stopped working, including one I was allergic to, none of which worked
- Therapist who didn't help and started making our sessions shorter and shorter until they were barely 10 minutes while charging the same
- Therapist who actually started to help for a little bit but then got really hung up on me going to an inpatient facility. When I went and it didn't help, she suggested another inpatient facility. When I refused, she dumped me and said no therapist wants the liability of a suicidal patient.
- Inpatient facility that didn't help, and in fact made things 10x worse by giving me recurring nightmares about returning there, a phobia of hospitals, and prescribing me meds I should never have been on as I am prediabetic and the med is not supposed to be given to prediabetics. Received advice such as "stop crying or the doctor will make you stay longer". Essentially an insurance scam.
- Outpatient facility that was advertised as "intensive" but actually was just 30 mins of therapy a day for 2 weeks. Did not help.
- Therapist who didn't help
- DBT group therapy that I was actually really optimistic about, but then my most recent therapist tattled that I was suicidal and had stopped seeing her for individual therapy and the group therapist kicked me out because I'm a liability.

It's all just bullshit that exists to drain vulnerable people of their money and kicks the MOST vulnerable people to the curb because we're a "liability". Therapists have been tossing me around like a time bomb that no one wants to be holding onto when it finally kills itself instead of actually trying to offer me help. Fuck all of those lying bastards.

 

[rs929]

Hey, what's your diagnosis if I might ask? I can't believe you were kicked out from a DBT group given that DBT was developed for BPD, and being suicidal for a BPD is really common.
I don't live in the US anyway but I guess there must be good therapists and doctors there too, maybe you got really bad luck?

 

[nasblue]

It's not just the mental health system. You could also leave out the "mental". Or look at political elites. Or global corporations. Basically just nuke the earth is what I'm saying.

 

[CatabolicSeed]

Hey, what's your diagnosis if I might ask? I can't believe you were kicked out from a DBT group given that DBT was developed for BPD, and being suicidal for a BPD is really common.
I don't live in the US anyway but I guess there must be good therapists and doctors there too, maybe you got really bad luck?

I am diagnosed with major depression, social anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Multiple therapists have also said I probably have autism or adhd or both but haven't given me an official diagnosis. I don't have BPD, but the group therapist knew that before initially accepting me.

 

[rs929]

I am diagnosed with major depression, social anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Multiple therapists have also said I probably have autism or adhd or both but haven't given me an official diagnosis. I don't have BPD, but the group therapist knew that before initially accepting me.

Do you think your depression is a consequence of your OCD? (comorbidity is the right word I think)
I have depression and OCD too. I used to be an introvert but now I don't give a shit.
Why aren't you doing more ERP (exposure and response prevention)? I think it's really helpful for OCD but it seems that you have bad luck when it comes to finding the right therapist (and maybe your health system sucks too but I can't give an objective opinion)

 

[EmbraceOfTheVoid]

I am diagnosed with major depression, social anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Multiple therapists have also said I probably have autism or adhd or both but haven't given me an official diagnosis. I don't have BPD, but the group therapist knew that before initially accepting me.

A lot of people with trauma related disorders are misdiagnosed with autism because of the similarities in symptoms.

I agree that the mental health field is mostly a joke and generally works for people who were already capable of helping themselves. Most therapists are more concerned with their license than helping you or treating you like a human being.

"Will the therapist (despite the fact that not even a single provider in my area has a slide scale pay program for extremely low income people like me and even a coworker i know who got hurt on the job is still financially broken by medical bills even with health insurance which did not pay enough) ignore the inability of a person to afford their expensive service?

Will the therapist change the economy to stop poverty wages/unaffordable housing/unsustainably high rent/boring miserable shit jobs/unsustainably long work hours/work and school stress/political and economic and social issues that divide people and cause constant conflict and isolation and loneliness?/etc

Why recommend a therapist or try to fix people if after therapy people will just be thrown back into the same situation that destroys them again?

A therapist may be helpful for people who literally just want/need to talk about feelings, but it does nothing for people whose lives are being destroyed by situational stressors and a variety of political/economic issues that neither the therapist or the person can control." -Suicidal stranger from the internet

I used to think that suicide prevention was just another case of good intentions gone too far. That people really did care about those that wanted to die. That they did in fact want what was best for us and simply didn't understand that in some cases, they were doing nothing but prolonging a miserable existence.

And yeah, people are sympathetic, to an extent, to those who are suicidal. Nobody likes seeing someone in so much pain that they would rather die than keep living, but what are they actually willing to do to care for the people in such misery? Not much.

That's why suicide prohibitions and the current paradigm of mental healthcare in general are so convenient for everyone else. Despite claiming to follow the biopsychosocial model of mental health, clinical psychiatry/psychology pretty much leaves the -social part unaddressed and almost unacknowledged. Everyone is perfectly content to pretend that all issues of mental health are a matter of pathology. "Oh it's no problem that you can barely afford to pay your bills. That you've been isolated and ostracized, if not outright abused, for most of your life. There's just a problem with your brain chemistry, here's some pills. Go to some therapy because you clearly need to learn better coping skills."

The nice thing about painting our problems as individual defects or deficiencies, is that the onus is now completely on us to make our lives more livable. If they accepted that people are often driven to suicide by external pressures, that some people actually can't make it on their own, then they would have to make more tangible efforts to support those who are in need. Or they would have to admit that their honest attitude is, "Yeah we'd love for you to be living a satisfying life, but if enabling you to do so requires anything from us, well then fuck off."

Refusing to allow people to freely kill themselves allows the rest of society to feel like they're supporting suicidal people without having to assume any of the burden of those lives. And they know it isn't going to be enough for everyone. That is made abundantly clear by the thousands of people who kill themselves every year despite how difficult they've made it to commit suicide. But when those people inevitably fall through the cracks, everyone will just pat themselves on the back and tell themselves, "We did everything we could to keep them from dying." Yeah, but you did fuck all to give any of us a life worth living. -Suicidal stranger from the internet

As others have said, Psychiatry and Psychology are different. Psychiatrists can prescribe medication, while Psychologists are only lisenced to practice therapy and offer ways of coping that do not involve pharmaceutical intervention.

However, these two specialisms come from the same side of the coin when it comes to the fact that both of them are entrenched in the concept of diseases originating in "the mind".

There is an article floating out there somewhere about why Psychiatrists resist merging with Neurology, they seem to distance themselves from the idea of purely physical, somatic ailments causing someone to have a distressed mental state, I suppose because research is incredibly lacking in regards to mental ailments.

Likewise, many psychiatrists and psychologists seem to neglect very important environmental and socioeconomic factors that would rationally make a person depressed, scared, miserable, and anxious. I find it akin to scolding a person who recoils when they touch a hot stove. Your brain's natural response is to send out signals of pain in response to the damaging stimuli that has just burned the skin, you can't really control that reaction.

When people who are poor, alone disabled, underemployed or unemployed, marginalized, being abused, neglected, and so on and so forth seek assistance from the mental health industry, a lot of them are told they are ill and are either medicated unnecessarily or forced into things like CBT which tells them their negative feelings are cognitive distortions. When feeling awful and depressed in those situations is a completely natural response. If your environment is godawful, it is hard to delude yourself and pretend everything is peachy instead.

So instead of giving those people tangible help that would improve the mental anguish caused by their circumstances, or simply trying to provide symptom relief for things like lethargy, panic attacks, and loss of appetite, we tell them they are diseased. There is a serious lack of pragmatic help in these fields. People who need human connections aren't given opportunities for developing social skills besides their artificial interactions with the therapist. The impoverished aren't being given financial assistance. The unemployed aren't being given references and assistance with gaining employment.

I do believe medications and therapies have their place in some situations. I lived with a violent schizophrenic, who absolutely needed to be on a low dosage of Antipsychotics or else everyone in the family would be continually tormented by them. People who are violent or having extreme hallucinations do need pharmaceuticals to manage their conditions in the majority of cases. Likewise, Lithium can be helpful to some bipolar people. Yet, I think SSRIs are handed out like candy, and rarely alleviate the problem because the efficacy seems to be marginally higher than a placebo. A good number of serotonin receptors are in the GI tract, so I got nothing out of those medications except further illness.

Also, psychiatry truly lacks reliable diagnostic tools and relies on very subjective criteria. There are no blood tests, no scans, no biopsies, and things like the DSMV are often far too broad and speculative. I was seeing many different psychiatrists from age 13 to 20 and it took 6 years for them to order a laboratory test for me.

By then it was too late, I've had neuropathy for years now and it was very likely kickstarted by the fact I had dangerously low vitamin b12 levels for years and no general doctor or psychiatrist would give me a blood test, insisting my symptoms were psychosomatic.

Sure, these disciplines are not lobotomizing people anymore or locking women in prisons for disobeying their husbands under the guise that this behavior was lunacy and insanity.

However there are still human rights abuses going on every day in psychiatric wards. People being put in restraints because they're suicidal, forced drugging and physical exams that can traumatize a vulnerable person, gaslighting, verbal abuse, the list goes on and on. We should strive to criticise psychology and psychiatry to improve them, not shrug our shoulders and say, "well at least we aren't living in the barbaric times of lobotomies anymore!"

People airing their grievances against these professions on this forum doesn't mean that you personally have to stop engaging with these services or question their benefit to you, especially not if you've improved with voluntary therapy or psych meds and whatnot.

This discussion is not about those who personally benefited from psychiatry or psychology and thus see no issue with it, it is about the people who are receiving subpar, lackluster, un-scientific, and quite frankly, shitty care. Individuals who want things to change, and want to push for better treatments, diagnostic criteria, and services aren't going to impede someone from accessing things like talk therapy and SSRIs if they personally want those options for themselves and find them helpful.

But when it seems like the entire world does nothing but victim blame those who got no results from these things, and insists that it is a deficit of willpower and desire to change, that is the problem. Telling people they need to keep throwing out money to try a million different therapists is appalling. If you sent a plumber out to fix a leaky pipe and he couldn't do it, you wouldn't have to call 30 different plumbers to get the job done, would you? So why don't we hold counselors to the same standards?

I get that the science hasn't progressed far enough to understand complex cognitive processes and abnormalities. I am studying a Neuroscience degree, and I know how very little we actually know about things. Yet, we shouldn't put people in harms way and subject them to invalidation and gaslighting because of this. I blame stoicism for creating this falsehood that one can be in total control of their every thought and emotion. Sometimes, most of the time actually, that isn't the case. My severe ptsd isn't going away after reading some self help books about loving yourself.

You can't treat a malfunction of the fight or flight response with self help and mindfulness mantras. Neither can you fix derelict living conditions by popping a handful of pills. This is the dichotomy that psychiatry and psychology have plagued themselves with.

You aren't stupid for being skeptical of these things.

"Yes, most therapists must receive post-graduate education and certification. The education they receive is functionally like that of a priest; e.g. they are taught to view things through a very particular scope - whereas the priest is taught the lens of their particular religion, the therapist-to-be is taught the lens of contemporary psychology and its endless pathologies. Therapy in-and-of itself, is like a confessional in a church, the therapist is the priest and the patient the confessor. The patient confesses their worries and problems much like a would-be blasphemer would confess their "sins".

The sad thing is, "just put your head in the sand" is probably a pretty common response to the OPs concerns not only at mental health resources across the world, but from peers and colleagues; the patient lives in a world where being open about such things in the dehumanized, hyperindividualized public sphere typically only invites scrutiny and further alienation (likely from individuals who are just as alienated and scared as them), which increases their reliance on the therapist as much as it increases their sense of cognitive dissonance, as though they are caught between two realities in a depersonalized limbo. Of course, there's only the one reality as far as we know, but to this patient their inner world has become an enigma and its workings thoroughly mystified by an industry that portends one must go through many years of schooling and certification before they can make sense of the human mind; which is as absurd and circular claim to make as "God works in mysterious ways." - as if that explains why your toaster catching on fire this morning and the delay that caused made you miss your train commute derailing, killing everyone on board. Likewise, it is just as circular to tell someone they have a disease called "depression", which can only be treated by "trained professionals" - trained, of course, in "psychology", an invention of the human mind as much as the phrase "mental illness" with all it's implicit meanings. But the backbone of the entire practice is to be a truthclaim, much like any religion - they suppose "mental illness" to be as sacrosanct as religions hold their Gods; that is, as self-evident and infallible as a physicist would consider thermodynamics.

Perhaps it would be too radical to admit "depression" is an entirely normal reaction to a world in which one exists as a dehumanized, chronically hollowed-out wage slave whose life has been reduced to a series of empty, mindless labor and emptier consumption rituals, comforted only by addictive drugs pushed on them at every turn, and vacuous social ties of similarly hollowed out wageslaves who only know how to monologue and compete; who breathes, eats and shits microplastic, pollution and pesticides, and can't remember the last time they felt somebody actually cared if they lived or died. It'd be far too radical to admit we're living through the slow-motion collapse of the living super organism we call 'civilization' and every case of "depression" is like one little support column showing signs of giving out under the weight of a monstrosity that has become too bloated and labyrinthine for its own good. Then we'd be engaging in reality, giving the "illness" the scope it deserves, and psychology cares not for this.

The reality is, contemporary psychology functions much like a religion or a cult does, in that what one receives from it depends very much on what one puts into it - the power wielded by such organizations are directly correlate to belief of their followers. This is the power of placebo, confirmation bias, and magical thinking. If one considers their reaction to, say, climate change to be "abnormal", they merely have to walk into a therapist's office and their belief will be confirmed - their conscious experience will become a list of "symptoms" of "illness", for which they'll receive "medication". The words, the labels, the pills, they're all momentarily comforting, but none actually deal with the original problem any more than popping an Aspirin cures a raging influenza infection. That's because the entire "mental health industry" is palliative at best - worse yet, it serves at the behest of the state, which benefits massively from an industry that teaches individuals to view their life's problems through a scope that is not only decidedly apolitical but atomized as well.

Take an issue like climate change and this scope fails almost entirely - its sufficiently large-scale enough that the therapist's individualizing lens has no real answer to it. One who is trained in end-of-life therapy may have some more substantial answers that verge into decidedly philosophical territory, but most "by the book" therapists will preach willful ignorance; their role is not to create independent-thinking individuals, community leaders, politically-minded citizens or would-be revolutionaries, because they don't operate in this paradigm; an office vending machine is more communalistic than a therapist's office could ever claim to be. No, their role is to keep people complicit and complacent in the consume/work false dichotomy lifestyle for they are part of the very same paradigm, this being their work as much as preaching is a priests'. The "mental health" industry is obliged to meet the absurdity of the world it exists in and profits off of, and so existential terror becomes "eco-anxiety", another cutesy label which can be "treated" with the right combination of benzodiazepines and willful ignorance, just as a village witch doctor may have once treated "spiritual possession" with a concoction of ayahuasca and a ceremony. Now this ceremony only takes 45 minutes and $200 a week and a monthly trip to the pharmacy. Who ever said capitalism wasn't efficient?!" --Stranger from the internet

 

[CatabolicSeed]

Do you think your depression is a consequence of your OCD? (comorbidity is the right word I think)
I have depression and OCD too. I used to be an introvert but now I don't give a shit.
Why aren't you doing more ERP (exposure and response prevention)? I think it's really helpful for OCD but it seems that you have bad luck when it comes to finding the right therapist (and maybe your health system sucks too but I can't give an objective opinion)

No, I think my depression is a consequence of my anxiety if anything. My OCD primarily manifests itself as obsessive compulsive skin-picking.

I am done with mental health professionals at this point and plan to CTB this May. I do not believe it is possible for me to get better.