From inside the mental health industry it doesn’t feel like we’re pushing drugs because we’re too hooked on this model and afraid to be scrutinized; we all know none of this is actually getting solved until there’s widespread social reform. Being able to hand out the drugs just feels like the only tool we’ve been handed.
It’s like being on a tiny life boat boat full of life jackets in the middle of a sea of people thrown into the ocean. I could start pulling people onto my tiny boat but eventually that’ll sink it. I do have all these life jackets I can throw at them though, which will buy a little more time for somebody with a bigger boat to come along and scoop them up. I don’t think it’s the people in tiny boats handing out life jackets that’s the issue; I think it’s whoever actually does have the resources to actually come get them and just won’t. I also think I would be generous to say it’s that they don’t care when the truth is they’re actively benefiting from people being afraid of falling getting pushed into the water. And yeah, nothings really going anywhere until we stop dumping people overboard in the first place.
I’m going to abandon that metaphor before it loses its usefulness. But yeah TLDR, I don’t hand people drugs because I think it will fix them, I’m just trying to buy this person time until they can either fix themselves, or until someone cares enough to give them the support they truly need and that I don’t personally have in me right now. I guess I can’t speak for everybody in the industry but all my coworkers seem to know we’re at best just handing out life jackets and its ultimately on the patient and particularly society at large to not waste that extra time bought.
And honestly if you want one issue that I think will legit just solve about 3/4 of the mental health crisis it’s housing. It’s literally just housing. And not shelters, I’ve never met anyone who really feels safe in one, they all tell me they got beat or raped or stolen from in one. No we need to just start putting people in houses. But I could write a wholeass Manifesto on this (and I think I may have somewhere in my comment history).
I’m glad you took the time to respond, even if I’m not sure how many dive into these comments.
I agree completely with you. I read the article and thought, I really don’t think anyone in healthcare really truly thinks the diagnoses are simple illnesses with an organic cause anymore. But the frameworks are helpful to direct what treatment options we have/as guidelines.
I find patients themselves want a name for what they’re experiencing, even if it is an approximation of what’s going on with them.
But at the end of the day, it’s no surprise people are depressed, anxious, etc when there are so many fundamentally broken things in the world.
I will say as someone who was diagnosed with borderline and having interacted with that community, a lot of people do make that their whole identity or at least a massive, structural part of it. It’s also a disorder that’s easy to do that with because one of the key facets of that disorder is an unstable sense of personal identity. So of course the kind of person who would be diagnosed with that is also the same person that’s gonna latch onto it and not let go.
But you could again see this as a society-wide structural issue more than a problem with the individual or even with the mental health system itself. If they could have an identity as a baker or a friend or an artist or a person who likes music they would probably be doing that already. But we’ve commercialized so much of people’s identities that people start feeling like these pathologies are the only thing they have left, and that’s also a very dangerous place to be.
God I wish you were my therapist! That was a hell of a read and also a bit of hope that there’s still some good ones out there. I’ve had such bad luck so far finding someone that seems to care or even cares enough to try and appear as if they do.
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