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0 pointsroughly3y ago0 comments

It's worth considering a therapist as similar to a medical intervention - yes, good eating, clean living, and regular exercise can keep you healthy, but after a very long time of not doing so, it's possible to find oneself too far down the road for that kind of change to sufficient on its own. Similarly, the help of friends, family, etc. can do wonders for one's mental health, but after a very long time of neglect, that can be beyond one's reach.

I say this as someone who rather successfully turned things around with a therapist - I simply did not have it in me to have those conversations with others and I didn't feel I had the relationships or support to do so (in retrospect I probably did, but that's the thing about mental health).

I don't think your diagnosis is wrong, particularly - there's a lot in the modern world that promotes alienation, feelings of low self esteem, and depression, but I think a lot of people find themselves at the bottom of the well before realizing quite what's happening and without the support structures to get out on their own.

(Edit just to note that, like physical health, mental health is not just the consequences of one's own actions - both genetic predispositions and unexpected life events can necessitate professional intervention by no fault of one's own. It's not what we're talking about, but just so nobody takes my post to be a psalm from the church of the self-sufficient.)

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mancerayder3y ago

I don't disagree with anything you've said, and I don't think therapy is useless. Especially when one is past a point where there are few other options.

It's just a sad state of affairs that there are so few other options for people. I continue to pin the blame on the remote-first nature of society, which seems to make in person interaction secondary. It perpetuates loneliness which perpetuates mental health issues.

crtified3y ago

Jumping in here.

I suspect that the number of people who could benefit from quality therapy, greatly outnumbers the amount of quality therapists that exist in the world.

To the point where, I surmise, a vast majority of the world's population simply would not have meaningful access to it, due to location, finances, availability, introversion, etc.

So for me, it's not that "get therapy" is bad advice. Good thing is good. Therapy has proven techniques and results. But that doesn't help the majority of the world's population, who do not have access to the luxury of visits to high end trained professionals that only exist in suitably affluent settlements of certain countries.

roughlyOP3y ago

Honestly, echoing some of mancerayder's sentiment here - I actually think there's a ton of mileage one can get from a not particularly extensively trained listening partner - I think there are cases where you genuinely need a highly qualified therapist, I think there are situations where an under-qualified individual can do a great deal of harm when dealing with someone with particular types of mental issues, but I think there's also a huge amount of therapy that can be done by someone a whole lot closer to an RN or a PA than an MD.

I also suspect that the broad lack of coverage for therapy and other kinds of mental care in most medical plans, as well as a "treatment/cure"-type paradigm when it IS covered ("we expect your 40 years of accumulated neurosis to be adequately addressed within 6 months, otherwise we're not going to pay anymore") is part of why this is out of reach for many people.

(I also suspect providing the population with broad access to mental health care would almost immediately pay for itself in terms of better physical health outcomes, improvements in the crime rate, and better economic outcomes, but that's the kind of second- and third-order thinking we're pretty notoriously bad at in this country, policy-wise)

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johnchristopher3y ago

> I don't disagree with anything you've said, and I don't think therapy is useless.

That's really not how you framed your comment.

> There are friends, elders, books, and a number of other ways to climb out of a mental rut.

> I continue to pin the blame on the remote-first nature of society, which seems to make in person interaction secondary.

Which doesn't concern the majority.

> It perpetuates loneliness which perpetuates mental health issues.

You seem to think mental health issues originates in loneliness. I can see how convenient that outlook is but it's nowhere that simple.

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