It’s seldom covered in any decent capacity by most work or private health insurance unless you target it directly and lose out on other options.
Most offices are corner cutting so hard that the following week, you might have a new therapist/counselor that has no frame of reference beyond the former’s patient folder on you.
A lot of therapy is just a gotcha for Christian and religious bullshit.
Therapy and mental health is often seen as a sign of weakness for men, who often times never open up or seek help to begin with due to the stigma.
This isn’t a huge conundrum. It’s pretty easy to understand.
That and therapy is treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause. Therapy can help you heal, but when every week brings a new trauma you’re just treading water.
Ok but therapy doesn’t have to be a “crisis of the week” situation. A person and their therapist should be working together toward a set of goals that aim to address their needs (e.g. getting enough self-esteem, confidence, new perspectives, etc. to treat the cause (e.g. quit abusive job, leave a partner, make boundaries with crazy family, etc…). Good therapists identify when therapy is drifting outside of effective modalities and guide the sessions back to the overall goals.
Signed, a person who is in “crisis of the week” therapy but is also terrible at confrontation and is working toward bringing it up.
That and therapy is treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause.
As a therapist, I have to object and say that’s not good therapy. Even when the underlying cause is something external to yourself that you do not have control over, a competent therapist should be working with you on how you can minimize contact, manage contact better, or completely escape said external stressor. A complete fix may not be possible, but there’s usually room for improvement.
Regardless, it’s incorrect to say therapy treats symptoms, but not underlying cases. Underlying causes are focused on all the time.
I think the issue being remarked on is while yes therapy helps one better manage and attempt to do everything within an individual’s power to react to something (include minimizing contact) there are enough stressors beyond people’s individual locus of control that no matter how personally resilient one becomes misery is still a natural outcome. Therapy attempts to address underlying causes… But ultimately it still places the burden of fortitude on the person. If the situation merits more fortitude than person is capable of even at their best then the solution lies beyond that individual’s training to respond to it and must be addressed at the source. Hence the phrase “Treats symptoms, not the cause” is catch-phrasy and not by all means technically correct, but encapsulates this frustration at having to constantly be the one expected to exert constant personal effort to be okay while the source problems, which are often cultural/social in nature, are treated as immovable constants and continue being a source of inhumane conditions.
Can you help me escape politicians who are taking away the ability for women to have safe abortions, attempt to overthrow the government, and their voters who brag about it by flying fascist flags on their cars? What about massive inflation without a similar rise in income that is needed just to survive?
Thanks in advance.
Yes this is snarky, but the stressors that most people are talking about in this thread are completely out of their control AND things they can't just avoid.
If I was your therapist, while I couldn’t change the world for you, I could certainly help you change how you’re thinking about all of this political shit to reduce your stress and distress. Most of us have political misgivings, but only some of us have those misgivings create serious problems in our lives. I’m obviously sympathetic to—for example—women who can’t get abortions in their state, but therapy is about coping with reality, not changing reality in ways that correspond to wishful thinking.
Yeah, with the state of things right now, I’m not sure anxiety is so much a bug but a feature. The vast majority of the population is being exploited or ignored while a small group of people plunder the world’s resources and talents and continue to do so despite it obviously threatening the balance that life on this planet currently depends on. And different factions of those assholes use some of the population to try to take or protect what they have from others and have enough weaponry to devastate the entire population.
Even if it can be consciously ignored, the subconscious will figure it out and try to warn us and I think that denial is one of the big causes of mental health issues.
Can you help me escape politicians who are taking away the ability for women to have safe abortions, attempt to overthrow the government, and their voters who brag about it by flying fascist flags on their cars? What about massive inflation without a similar rise in income that is needed just to survive?
Nope, that's going to take a lot of work to do anything about. What (imo) your therapist should be helping you do is develop strategies that let you deal with your anxieties. If therapy was only for dealing with things after the fact I don't think I would be doing it because I agree with you, we can't escape all the awful shit in the world but what we can do is make it not so debilitating that you can't do anything.
The original point was that therapy doesn't address the underlying problem. It led to the post above:
If therapy was only for dealing with things after the fact I don't think I would be doing it because I agree with you, we can't escape all the awful shit in the world but what we can do is make it not so debilitating that you can't do anything.
Which doesn't address the underlying issues or solve anything when it comes to actual problems that directly impact people. It is also worded as if the therapy helps by avoiding the awful shit so someone can do something. Which probably means not letting stress about one thing keep you from doing something else you can control, but in the context of the comment it was replying to could be read as doing something about the examples.
Therapy is great for addressing personal issues such as anxiety and trauma that are keeping someone from successfully acting on things they do have control over. But when it comes to things people can't control it is just a coping mechanism that doesn't solve the underlying problems that someone is reasonably responding to with frustration and helplessness. Yet it keeps being suggested as a solution.
Something that has always helped me with things like this (I’m trans in the uk, and have various other things around decentralised networks and such, also the economy and like 5000 other things, personal situations, etc.) is doing concrete steps towards my socio-techno-politico-economic goals and personal stuff.
Things like organising with other people (not just for protests/riots, but also things like underground services, discreet information leaflets, and just general community), trying to develop new tech, etc. ^.^
Decent therapy can help at least with dealing with some of the effects of this stuff, and manage interpersonal causes of mental health issues, in theory, if you can access it - though there are many issues imo with certain types of therapy that promote accepting shitty sociopolitical situations and personal situations, though this seems to be more of a philosophy thing than really therapy related specifically.
Techniques for managing the effects of poor sociopolitical situations - and working with someone to come up with more strategies to deal with these effects as well as avoid more common self-destructive thought patterns - might help you act more towards fighting the root causes even if it can’t solve them itself ^.^
For people in these situations, if you want someone else to help come up with personal coping strategies and to practise identifying more destructive thought patterns and manage emotional states, my opinion is that this is where a good therapist may be helpful if you can access one and want one.
For solving the more underlying issues? They probably can’t help directly, but they may help you gain more ability/mental bandwidth to deal with them either personally or via organising and political strategy. However this is all very conditional on therapist quality and some therapists may be actively harmful.
At least, this is my view. I have a pretty complex set of thoughts about therapy and mental health systems - and am familiar with the ways they can be used as weapons against individuals and larger groups as a trans and autistic person, as well as how they can be helpful - but hopefully the stuff about acting to do political things is useful to someone.
Actually doing something rather than just watching things get worse is helpful for me personally at least ^.^
The author of this is the official historian for the Council on Foreign Relations. The Chariman of CFR is David Rubenstein, who is also the head of The Carlyle Group.
It's hilarious to me that people are willing to accept that technology can come as far as producing an LLM of the caliber of ChatGPT, but they can't fathom that it will continue to iterate and get better. It may be "bad" at certain writing styles right now, but give it some time. Think about how far it's already come for us to even be having this conversation.
Did you not read the article? Their whole point is chatgpt isn’t good at this type of writing because open ai intentionally trained it to do very non threatening corporate friendly speech. While code-davinci-002 (which predates gpt3.5/4) is objectively weaker this limitation wasn’t baked into it and it demonstrates LLMs can certainly write jokes and edgy humor.
Didn’t Trump literally already say he was bringing back the Muslim ban and making it worse? But ok, I guess vote for him anyway. Most republican voters vote against their own interests all the time so they’ll fit right in until they’re deported.
It’s sad you can’t see how false that is because of how recent events have unfolded. It’s like you’ve just now looked at politics for the first time. You’re so concerned with the marginalized people on the other side of the world you’d let it happen here out of short-sighted spite.
RIGHT NOW, a strict Christian fundamentalist was elected speaker by the GOP. Given further empowerment, he would cause more harm to marginalized people and much of the populace. He has declared his intentions. This will not help the people of Gaza if that’s really your only concern.
Someone who doesn’t see a difference between them is an absolute idiot. It should be very obvious that with Trump, Palestinians would be in a much worse situation. He’d tell Israel they need to go even further or order the US military to also bomb Gaza.
Marginalized peoples are the ones who most understand these differences. Champagne socialists aren’t going to see a difference. Rich white straight people don’t stand to lose anything.
It’s almost as though the entire war on drugs was used to give police an excuse to selectively enforce drug laws against minorities whose communities Republicans wanted to disrupt, leading to the overincarceration of demographics Republicans don’t want voting.
“Hang in there” is not therapy, to me it’s infuriating if anything. I can list several well-grounded in reality reasons which made me lose hope. Random phrases are not changing either these reasons or my ability to adapt to them. At some point “hope” feels like self-delusion. But it’s nice to know others are not there yet.
That’s a fair point for sure. It’s definitely going to get a lot worse and there’s no changing that (just the extent I suppose). However, there’s still always hope no matter what.
Legitimately, it’s one of sickest jokes about this country, that you can spend an hour with a therapist working on improving your mood, walk out of the session, and have it immediately undone when the receptionist tells you what the copay is.
This is so crazy to me. Many mental health places near me won‘t even take insurance. I got an estimate on getting tested for ADHD the other day at 5k. This was after the year wait to even hear back.
I lucked out and happen to be going for my Master‘s degree. The University had a trainee do it for only 500 usd. I have my suspicions the other place (with the quote) may be an extreme example, but it’s still insane
100% agree that it's fucked up, but also you should check on if there's some sort of a community counseling program. I know where I live they do community counseling and it's sliding scale down to $5. I really wish that was more places
Every aspect of life demands 110% from us at all times.
We are all having to clean an entire house, cook every meal, pay huge mortgages or rents, pay loans, daycare costs, and insurance...for what? We've removed all economies of scale for ourselves, and made it to where it's easier to spend the cash to have someone else do it. They then get the economies of scale that we used to have when we lived with extended family and didn't have to pay for every basic service multiple times.
It's exhausting, and there's no slack left in the system. You can't cut back on much to make the rest float, because everything is the maximum cost it can be for even the shitty versions, and prices on everything go up continually with no real raises available for the vast majority.
We are one major catastrophe away from huge swaths of our population becoming migrant refugees to other states.
We've removed all redundancy and forgot that it's synonym is resiliency. We are absolutely fucked, it's just a matter of counting the time before the house of cards collapses.
Back in 2016, after the election, the NY Times put together a panel discussion with the creators of all the top TV political shows. Veep, The West Wing, Scandal, and others. Every producer and writer questioned said the same thing; if they’d had a fictional character say that the “liked soldiers who didn’t get captured” on a show the netowrks and advertisers would demand that the character be hated and despised by every American.
The victims are the wrong colour, the perpetrators are the wrong religion, the west is distracted, Africans aren't great fans of former colonial powers getting involved in their former colonies, and it's in the Russian/Chinese sphere of influence.
I’ve been trying to add “Horn of Africa” when I talk about Ukraine, Gaza, etc. It’s an awful situation. I know people only have the capacity for so much horror but the same refugee charities are going to have to work there too. I do a monthly donation to Refugees International and Doctors Without Borders in part because they go anywhere, sometimes before journalists.
I like how they say things like “there may be a way” and “will be studied” as if they’re trying to crack some immutable law of physics and not just taking some bigotry out of the stuff they made up.
The Catholic Church is an ancient institution built on centuries of men just writing up and codifying ideas. They need to be able to find loopholes in this box they’ve thought themselves into if they want to change direction on something like this at this point in the game.
Just admitting there is might be a way is enough for the old and embittered to declare this pope the antichrist (again)
Yeah, I think people need to focus on this aspect the most. They are not going to deny their book. Worming their way through scripture to claim a new fundamental way of understanding seventeen hundred year old writings is going to be incredibly difficult to do. It’s written so explicity. While certain texts written in different areas of the world have been considered non-canonical The Bible™ has never had a serious alteration aside from translation errors that may not have understood the original authors intent. The church will identify the change as moral progress and a better understanding of God, but don’t expect yhem to condemn those who used scripture against homsexuality previously.
Isn’t there a line in the bibble that basically amounts to “if you all agree on it, I’ll go along with whatever” from god? Something like “if you hold it true on earth, I will hold it true in heaven”?
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