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.
I'm well aware that the field is very scientifically minded. In fact, that's the problem! It's too scientifically minded!
Science requires measurable outcomes. But human subjectivity can't be subjected to measurable outcomes. How can you quantify the value of a life, or a particular form of life?
I am personally unaware of any instance of someone visiting a (mainstream) mental health professional and being unable to walk away with at least something, whether that be a medical diagnosis of some sort and/or medication. It seems to me that virtually 100% of people who show up can at least get some SSRIs. How often do mental health professionals tell people "actually, there's nothing wrong with you and you don't need any treatment"? I'm sure it's happened before and I'm just ignorant. But it's incredibly striking that I cannot recall a single anecdote of this ever happening, meanwhile I can recall countless anecdotes of people getting prescribed SSRIs.
EDIT to try and lay my cards on the table a little more. I am perfectly aware that some people have very debilitating psychiatric conditions that prevent them from functioning, and modern medicine has produced at least some interventions that allow these people to begin functioning again, and it’s a real lifesaver in those cases, and that’s all great. I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is that large segments of society have been brainwashed into an almost cult like mentality that keeps them on the therapy treadmill for years because they’ve been lead to believe that any sort of pain or negative affect at all is pathological. No one ever sat them down and said “look, pain is a part of life kid, get used to it”.
High-quality care involves things like doing nothing, prescribing lifestyle interventions, and therapy as a first line and sometimes only line.
I know this happens. It really does, but -
Corporate medicine disincentivizes this - most physicians are owned now and most patients show up expecting medication and get mad if they are told to exercise to fix their mild depression.
The traditional model for mild to moderate pathology is that you sit down with a psychiatrist for 90-120 minutes, they get to know you, they talk through what you are experiencing and they try and address things without medication. Most physicians prefer this.
The current corporate model is that you show up, have a 20 minutes appointment, say you are depressed and want it fixed, and get prescribed Zoloft.
That absolutely does work for some people but it isn't great and it's something physicians don't have much control over and they do complain about.
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