It's meant as a substitute for social connection and comradery that is sucked out of your life the second you start relying on a wage.
I'm the sort of person who really struggles (or has really struggled, might change some day) to feel social connection and camaraderie with anyone. I'm working on it but it's an uphill fight. Even though I feel warm toward people, and I want what's best for people around me, there's just some part of me that refuses to get any kind of nourishment from social interaction.
so like... SSRIs rock for someone like me, is all I'm saying.
*for more context, I have ADHD, and if what I'm describing sounds familiar to you and you know how to fix it please fucking tell me
In that case, therapy should be in service of you being more comfortable with that comradere, and not focused on getting you back into wage labor.
It's a case of treating the symptom, and not the disease. It's good that people are getting relief, but the only way to cure society from the mental health epidemic is the death or capitalism and alienating wage labor.
Exactly. Until then I understand some people's resistance to therapy and psychology because it's so frequent used in service of employers through HR and just societal norms in general.
It also gets easier to treat the people who really need it when the societal stressors creating lots of these anxieties and depressions fade. They become more visible and easier to give special treatment to as opposed to just being another face in the line.
therapy has helped me a lot in the past when my main issues were my family, social stuff, school, even just some personal issues. But now that the biggest problem in my life is working, therapy feels increasingly useless, and I feel like I'm being blamed for not wanting to work
I’d look into a new therapist if you feel like you’ve hit a wall (or maybe even wrapping treatment for now).
Therapy isn’t supposed to go on forever, you can do it to build skills and then come back for a bit if/when you run into a problem you don’t know how to deal with.
Most therapists are cool with this and even encourage it.
yeah ive been thinking this way lately. I might wait until I get a little more settled in my new job and then cut it off
You probs already know this, but definitely share how you’re thinking with your therapist. They can help figure out other areas you might want to work on and/or an “exit plan”. That’s totally normal and a part of the process.
That's absolutely how it feels to me. My friends who have mental health problems all agree, it feels like they just give you some pills (just one more bill to pay) and tell you to get back on your hamster wheel.
I don't want to discredit it entirely but my experience with psychiatrists and mental health centers has been more traumatic in itself than helpful
sure Caocao and his upvoters meant well but yeah. this is always the issue with mental states though: we all tend to project our own onto other people, because we've never experienced how it feels to be wired any other way than the way we're wired
also the "ADHD is made up" thing is so persistent partly because the motive checks out, like I understand why people find it persuasive. "Kid fidgets in class so drug 'em until they sit still" has the same shape as a lot of school abuse stories we hear.
Bingo. The take is very "feels" based because if they bothered looking into the topic, they'd believe both the people affected by it and the mountains of research into it.
A friend of mine was actually part of this information cause he needed a brain scan and has ADHD so they got him to consent to provide data. There are like, actual brain imaging differences.
Yeah. Being neurodivergent is a pain in the ass in a society that is built to squeak effencies out of the median brain chemistry.
You learn to deal with it in different ways, but everyone is very much wired differently along a spectrum.
edit: as in inventing the disease worked. Psychiatry = ideology
germ theory = ideology. Read capitalism and the four humours by deleuze.
yeah cause psychiatry is doing such a great job combatting depression, anxiety, etc.
“doctors exist and yet cancer still exists, curious”
Psychiatry + psychology is saving lives and keeps improving. It has flaws like all healthcare within capitalism.
These are real phenomena but cannot be addressed at the individual level. Chemical imbalance in the brain is a symptom, not a cause
It’s both. Even in a communist society, you would still have chemical imbalances, depression, neuro-divergence, schizophrenia, etc. The system would just be accommodating and not adding more stress.
Thinking capitalism is the cause of all mental health issues is utopic and not based in reality. It willfully ignores science in favor of ideology that is outdated and deleuzional (pun intended).
alright, I see you're doubling down on this without education
let me ask you something. where do you think schizophrenia comes from? can anyone develop schizophrenia if they have a bad day?
Love when dudes are so obsessed with owning the libs that they think pop psychology means psychology is fake.
Imagine watching doctor oz and deciding that germs weren’t real lol
Close. It's true in the wild ADHD would not be maladaptive. It does however describe a specfic subset of neuroanatomical and functional features. As that is the case people don't get addicted to speed. That is actually normal people's relationship with caffine. People with most types of adhd have low dopamine levels. So very small doeses of stimulants are given to promote dopamine. If you want to picture it, it is actually more akin to changing the tuning of a car. ADHD actually represents a low idle speed. Patients with adhd have low dopamine, so they are basically waiting for something big to happen to they can respond to it. In the wild that was pretty common. Stimulants turn up the idle speed on the brain and convince it than regular tasks are worth doing.
If you are instrested, I can look up the proper pathophysiology of the dosal regulator clusters of the bain and the proper names for the systems involved. I can't remember off the top of my head right now.
Agree, but will add that ADHD does not make you remotely immune to abusing/becoming addicted to speed. I am imperical proof.
ADHD infact incrased the odds of addictions. There is a bunch of xlinical data related to that. Some of it crosses over but some specifcially for that constalation of symptoms
Fucking thank you. This shit isn't some pharma plot to push meth. There were issues with over-prescribing like 20 years ago and it was largely dealt with. Mental healthcare is flawed within capitalism because fucking everything is flawed under capitalism.
edit: all mental illnesses are made up. There is no such thing as “neurotypical.” Psychiatry is modern-day alchemy. Read capitalism and schizophrenia by deleuze
:very-intelligent:
I want to say "deleuze and his consequences" but I dont know shit about the guy but I'm pretty sure that would be a correct statement.
If his take is that capitalism causes neurodivergence, then he's just the ableist version of the "homosexuality is bourgeoisie decadence" take.
Haven't bothered reading and don't think I will anytime soon based on who recommended him. Time better spent readint other things.
That's exactly my experience with therapy. The therapist I visited didn't listen at all, but the moment I said I didn't have a job that was all he could talk about.
It's like, motherfucker, you're confusing cause and effect: I'm not depressed because I don't have a job, I don't have a job because I'm depressed. How is a job supposed to help me if I can't keep it when this episode of depression is fucking with me?
As someone with ADHD your sentiment is pretty bullshit tbh. There's a ton of stigma around stimulant medication and the laws around getting some for treatment are literal hell for people with executive functioning disorders. There's been a ton of research on them — if you need them, a therapeutic dose isn't at all the same as what NT people taking them at parties is. In fact other than improving mood and energy somewhat it's hard for me to comprehend what you'd get out of them — for me, taking my medication is like putting the glasses on my brain. And when the bullshit controlled substance laws make it so I have to ration my doses, I'm more likely to skip on workdays than on my days off because it just makes me feel more like myself — my short term memory functions better, I'm able to focus on stuff I wanna do instead of getting paralyzed scrolling or something, and it's easy to overcome the inertia that keeps me from switching from one thing to another.
Comparing stimulant medication to the opioid crisis is fucked up for so many reasons, not the least of which being that if you need adderall or whatever it's not habit-forming.
It's not my place to argue with someone with an ADHD diagnosis about their condition.
The fact is that amphetamine use has been normalized to an amazing degree in the culture. I don't think any other country regards them in the same way.
It's funny because the way it's been normalized to a degree for neurotypicals — i.e. neurotypicals taking it as a fun party drug like you mentioned — increases the stigma for people who actually need it to function. The perception is that I'm partying or tweaking every day, at work, whatever, when the reality is that I literally will forget to eat lunch if I'm not on my medication
Amphetamines, pharmaceutical or otherwise, have been used long before they were prescribed for ADHD related diagnoses, though. For fun, work and war. Their use was curtailed generally because of the heavy societal downsides of wide use.
I'm not commenting on your diagnosis, but on the current normalization of amphetamine use again. Opiods were over prescribed. It's not a stretch to say the same about amphetamines imo.
Even if they're over prescribed, what happens to someone who doesn't "need" it who has a script for it? They don't overdose, there's not much in the way of withdrawal at therapeutic doses, and it's significantly less addictive than opioids. You take it before work, your workday is a little more fun instead of excruciating. There can be some long-term health effects but nothing worse than the effects of alcohol use.
As we've seen with the war on drugs, all moralizing about drug use serves to "other" drug users — practically all of whom use drugs as a response to their material conditions — and this stigma ultimately leads to criminalization, which only serves to worsen the material conditions of drug users in a vicious cycle. If people wanna take the drugs I use for medicine just because they're fun, I fully support them — legalize everything tbh.
Peak Marxism is using Marxism to reject Marxism to further the goals of Marxism.
Marxism is when you contrarian yourself into becoming AnPrim.
:a-guy: :farquaad-point: “Marxist”
Yes, technology is going to be crucial to saving humanity. It just has to be owned by the workers.
I have an anprim streak in me but no, I just think Anglocentrism is pure cringe
I mean fuck here in the USA we wipe out asses with paper
after I got a bidet I was like holy shit this society is barbaric
it's like watching my morbidly obese honorary white boss throwing all the food bank donations into the garbage instead of putting it out to the donation pick up area just to own the homeless
it's like watching a traffic jam and knowing everyone consents to it and even LOVES it
For all the fancy widgets the White Man has made, they have built a profoundly unhappy society that spends all of its time pretending that it is not profoundly unhappy, with successive innovations merely being tools to either distract us from the alienating nature of a society built by the many for the few or as systems of control to reify this arrangement.
idk reads pretty :anprim-pat:
I agree that euro/anglo culture has a lot to learn from everyone else. For example, the long history of mental healthcare practiced by indigenous people across the world.
Western education
you mean being around westerners
doesn't really matter if you were educated there or not
This is why it's so tragic that so many people send their children to American universities. They're going to catch the infection and bring it home.
Ehhh, this kinda seems like it's promoting some kind of "woke" anti-therapy mindset or somethin', and I'm not sure I'm down with that. Kinda gives me the same vibes as those memes that say shit like "Who needs medication when you can go on a hike instead?".
Not saying specifically "western" therapy is flawless and works perfectly for people of all cultures/backgrounds, but overall: Therapy good.
I dunno, just rubs me the wrong way.
Good post. Group therapy is a good example of other ways to work with people
At the end of the day when trying to heal someone’s mental anguish you gotta do what resonates for them.
Material conditions matter. Someone comfortable surrounded by others / community? Great, go with group. Someone isolated down to the individual? They’re going to feel safe 1:1.
Likely scientologists.
Anytime you see someone get up and loudly denounce psychologists, it's a good chance they're a scientologist. The org is famous for being anti-psychologist, because those are the ones who diagnose their cultists as being in need of mental help.
If you can afford the long expensive treatment, and stick with the long treatment, and can find a good therapist, therapy is excellent.
If you're a poor shut up and take your work pills.
The first thing people say is 'find the right therapist'
What the fuck? I don't have to 'find the right doctor'.
The wrong doctor gets sued for malpractice and loses his license. Why are there 'wrong therapists'?
There are definitely wrong doctors. That’s where the expression getting a second opinion comes from.
Go to any women’s forum and you will see tons of post about women who left their doctor because they refused to give them tubal litigation or they were suffering for years with severe pain that they were told was normal only to find out they have a huge cyst or something similar.
I’m sure this isn’t an experience exclusive to women, but it happens a lot.
They say find the right therapist because there are different approaches and personalities. Older therapists tend to be more rigid, but that’s changing as they age out and retire. You have to find someone you feel comfortable opening up to.
With approaches, CBT and ACT worked for me. They’re more outcome based and also have more structure that works with how I think.
What the fuck? I don’t have to ‘find the right doctor’.
You honestly kind of do. Second opinions aren’t uncommon. I’ve had a couple shitty GPs.
The wrong doctor gets sued for malpractice and loses his license. Why are there ‘wrong therapists’?
Happens to therapists all the time, same as doctors. The records are public in a lot of states too, which is another way they’re kept accountable.
Because the brain and mind are far less well understood and mapped out than the physical body and the illnesses and injuries it can suffer is?
It doesnt seem like that complicated of an answer to figure out.
Yeah. Therapy is not a silver bullet, it gives you the skills to deal with your problems and helps you understand your issues in context.
Westerners failing to adapt their behavior to the cultures they visit? Say it ain’t so.
:very-intelligent: No no the takeaway is clearly that medicine doesn’t work.
It's a shame that western medicine ended up being the tradition that ended up becoming synonymous with evidence-based medicine, because all the practices and trappings that came into it from history and culture instead of science are the worst.
Psychology especially is working as a field to correct this. A lot of indigenous cultures have had long traditions of mental healthcare for centuries.
mental health care is perhaps the one branch of science most easily learned by peasants eating just enough calories to live because if you get it wrong people die. We also intuitively know a lot like take breaks if you're feeling tired, check in on family that has been acting funny, and so on. Sciences like geology couldn't get too far off the ground until a bunch of rich white guys traveled the world with microscopes an figured out that sandstone is a rock that wanted to be sand and changed its mind, but mental health is just part of being human.
Well therapy's never done anything for me except make me feel worse so yeah, drum circles could only be an improvement
yeah man I agree therapy was/is mostly just annoying to me. $80 for half an hour of someone to telling you how to take deep breaths and give you some information you can easily find in a book or on the internet. don't even know what I'm supposed to tell them half the time and everytime I left I always felt a little bit cheated (unless they gave me some awesome narcotics tbh but that was not often)
I'm sure it works for plenty of people and they like it yah yah but I am not one of them.
*circle jerk about communities that extend to larger groups than the nuclear family.
Damn feminists.
"feminism is when men neglect their mental health."
Building scarecrows is fun, I get it.
I would honestly also be concerned that these mental health professionals were engaging in some academically extractive exercises, planning to publish what was told to them in some fashion or another. Informed consent has been ignored before.
ITT people who got their understanding of mental health by watching “one flew over the cuckoos nest”.
They don’t seem judgmental to me, at least not in the way you describe. As a neurodivergent person, I’m really glad to see them all over the thread, because they’ve been actively fighting mindsets that stigmatize my medicine.
Yes and it's a great read. It was part of what kicked off a decades long effort to address issues in mental healthcare.
Basing your understanding of psychology on it though is like watching the original "12 Angry Men" and thinking you understand the American Court system.
I've also heard that they weren't always that bad and that the movie was used by Reagan and others in order to defund actual mental health care.
Yeah. There were genuine issues that needed to be addressed, but the answer wasn’t defunding healthcare.
In no way is psychology or therapy bad, it's just not like the sole thing that people need.
Any therapist who tells you it’s all you need should be fired. There’s no silver bullet.
You can't end a famine by just teaching everyone to farm and you can't solve a mental health epidemic by just giving everyone therapy.
At no point did I say that.
Teaching everyone to farm doesn’t end a famine, but it sure does help everyone figure out how to survive.
I was agreeing with you and doing an anecdote lol. Like farming is an incredibly useful skill during normal times, but can't end a drought or weather induced famine.
Therapy is a tool that can be incredibly useful, but it's not as good when the societal ground is fallow.
Okay, cool, sorry for being a skeletal grump. Medication and therapy saves fucking lives, so I come at the topic with a mallet when I see the “healthcare bad” circlejerk show up in leftist spaces.
It’s really harmful to stigmatize either of them and also just a really weird take to see coming from Marxists. Looking at something systemically doesn’t mean thinking everything is caused by a system, you know?
Exactly, that's why I thought the farmer analogy was pretty good. Like a lot of people who would have starved if they didn't know how to farm won't, but on the whole that attempt to end the famine by training farmers is pushing a boulder up a hill.
By all means offer everyone free and unlimited access to therapy, and make therapy a more universal tool, but don't think that getting everyone therapy will solve systemic issues.
Yeah, exactly. The point of therapy isn't to be a cure, it's to help people understand what they're dealing wkth and give them the tools to work through that.
The rich are going to go from having like ten yachts to one and then say everyone needs to cut back 90% like they did.
You’re right and that’s a problem. I formally nominate Kanna for admin.
Kanna 2022: compassionately purge all liberalism.
I give full permission for her to use that.
