The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I’ve started seeing a therapist. If you had told me 6 months ago that I would be in this position today, I would have called you insane.
I’m still fiercely critical of the “medical model” of mental health, and find much in contemporary “therapy culture” that is deeply disagreeable to me. You can’t manufacture human subjectivity on an assembly line. But, the fact that I’m seeing a classically trained Lacanian psychoanalyst rather than a more “mainstream” therapist is part of what allowed me to reconceptualize the enterprise enough that it became palatable.
I don’t have much of a point in posting this besides: if you feel like you’re stuck in a rut and things will never change, you can have hope. Sometimes radical change can happen very fast if you just give yourself a little push.
Keep in mind that tens of thousands of experts in a variety of fields over multiple decades and many paradigm shifts are actually thinking about this and working on epistemic certainty.
Not every therapist is academically minded (and many types of degrees don't engage with this at all) but despite anti-psychiatry people the field is more scientifically minded then you might imagine but it rarely comes out in frustrated opinions by people who are mad that things aren't going the way they them to.
For instance for nearly a hundred years, there was a pipeline from Psychiatry to neurology. Once medicine understood the disorder better (for example, Alzheimer disease) it moved fields. This means that Psychiatry is naturally left with the less understood stuff.
However diagnostic entities like Schizophrenia are pretty well understood with clear medical shit (such as direct identification of neurotransmitters and pathways).
The more common and less severe things (such as simple anxiety and depression) are less understood but you better bet that experts in the field have a decent enough understanding of what's a severe biochemically mediated depression and what's more likely to be SLS (shit life syndrome).
These conversations and investigations happen they just don't make it to you.
That doesn't matter. If he said he can come up with a better theory, but if all he's saying is that the current theories as garbage, there should be nothing surprising if he's right. There were times when science was so undeveloped that "thousands of experts in a variety of fields over multiple decades and many paradigm shifts" were doing little more than writing fanfics. Given the results psychology is delivering, his take being correct is what should be expected.
Ultimately the point is that the people complaining about the scientific state of mental health research don't really seem to know anything about the state of mental health research.
It's easy to grab one specific thing (commonly: the trans issue) and assume it's representative of the whole field but that isn't a fair conclusion nor is it accurate.
I see the same thing happen all the time with general medicine, people here often complain about their doctor being a barrier to the medication they want, and that's a topic, and a high frequency topic because outpatient medicine is a lot of medicine by number of patient encounters, but it's a very small portion of medicine by the number of jobs or specialties or research topics. Insight into that one specific issue does not provide a lot of experience with respect to the whole field.
Well, I freely admit it's been ages since I even tried skimming an actual paper, so my impression comes from feed scrolling, but wasn't there a "oops, SSRIs are no better than placebo" thing relatively recently? Isn't there still a 50+% replication failure rate?
The conversation about SSRIs is more complicated than just "such and such recent paper says X." But that's not the point. The point is that their is a variety of pathology in Psychiatry and the Psychiatry adjacent fields and focusing your thoughts on SSRIs and low severity pathology misses dementia, autoimmune encephalitis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and so on.
If you are lucky all you have to think about is depression/anxiety/adhd/"autism spectrum" but that's not all the stuff!
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