And I speak from experience after going to therapy for my anxiety. I guess it sort of helped, but also I could very easily imagine a world where the whole problem wouldn't have existed in the first place - it's just not the world that we live in.
Definitely agree that human therapists aren't perfect either. I never had much success with therapy personally. I've had to basically figure it all out myself. But I have occasionally had some really good therapy sessions.
But ok, at least with a therapist, another human being cares enough to want to help, and that can make a difference.
Tell a heavily depressed person to use a chat bot, and you're implicitly telling them they're so worthless that they're not even worth another human having a conversation with them. You might not mean that, but that is what the depressed mind will read into it.
That's sort of my point. They don't actually care, they help you because you pay them. I don't know if it's how I grew up or what, but this is somehow off-putting to me. I mean, I'm not against paying for services in general, but the sort of human interaction that therapy provides seems me like something that we should be able to get without money.
But I would argue against the "don't actually care" angle. They do, they would not have devoted years of their life to a quite miserable role if they didn't care about helping people. Their expertise matters, just like any other role in life, and it's what you're paying for.
I do not expect therapy to be like friendship and friendships can not provide the kind of help therapy is supposed to provide. Friends can try and give you huge amount of contra productive advice or judge you, simply because they do not understand the kind of issues therapy deals with.
The socially superior periods had also much higher substance (including alcohol) abuse rates ... and non-triavial part of that was self-medication.
Usually there's money involved, no?
Also, therapists usually have long referral lists, so they still have to decide that you're worth their time and that they believe they can help you.
Visited a psych ward once (because suicidal idealization was happening and I wanted/asked for help for the first time in my life).
Well if my experience in one of those facilities is not an uncommon one, then they are horrifyingly dehumanizing and actually cause harm to other people (this is what I observed).
A big problem in facilities is that the information they receive will determine more of what they will do/prescribe than what the patient is actually asking for.
I watched transgendered patients be purposely miss gendered by staff. Countless other patients being otherwise ignored or treated like anything they have to say doesn't matter because of where they are or the diagnosis that they have.
For myself I was told I was schizophrenic and prescribe meds with terrible side effects because my parents told that to the admit facility. No treatment for depression and anxiety was really given (which is what I was saying I wanted), I was ignored by the therapist and social worker assigned to me, and the contact that I wished to hear from was conveniently removed from my file.
Therapists and support staff in the public sector outside of a mental hospital are grossly underpaid, thus only the inexperienced and inept (with a few people that care too much for their own good) are the ones likely to be working in Federally funded health centers.
Mental Healthcare is a abysmal joke in the United States. Suicide is very easily a valid and top choice here.
> I watched transgendered patients be purposely miss gendered by staff. Countless other patients being otherwise ignored or treated like anything they have to say doesn't matter because of where they are or the diagnosis that they have.
> For myself I was told I was schizophrenic and prescribe meds with terrible side effects because my parents told that to the admit facility. No treatment for depression and anxiety was really given (which is what I was saying I wanted), I was ignored by the therapist and social worker assigned to me, and the contact that I wished to hear from was conveniently removed from my file.
If you had the capacity to self-direct your care, you wouldn't have needed to be in a mental hospital in the first place. You would have done the rational thing and sought help from somewhere other than a crisis intervention center. You were clearly also a minor at the time. Mental hospitals do suck for many reasons but your expectations are/were unrealistic.
As an adult, you'll have the same experience declaring bankruptcy and bemoaning why nobody will give you a credit card. "Helping" you means trusting someone else to pull you out of the pit and not letting you jump right back into it. Sometimes that means not letting you make phone calls with whoever on the outside contributed to your being there.
I don't disagree with your opinion that it's all a joke (especially for what it costs; just send your ass to summer camp) but the solution is not to literally let the lunatics run the asylum. Go to Discord for that.
I was an adult and my parents were abusing me and have proven throughout my life that they do not have my best interest at heart.
The hospital lied repeatedly to me and others and is as well documented and reviewed for it by many others.
Concerned about the latest reports on ocean warming? Well, climate change has been happening for a while!
Concerned about the AI-fuelled destruction of art and writing as middle-class careers? Don't worry, artists have been poor for quite a while!
It's possible (and, indeed, likely) that:
- Things have gotten progressively worse
- There is a tipping point, after which the system will undergo a phase change; i.e. the difference between making rent and not making rent
- We are now much closer to that point than we were
Expected response is, "oh fsck, that makes the current situation even worse, I should definitely care about it!" Response I see instead is, "well that's old news."
(So, call this the Old News Defense.)
What is fascinating to me is the frequency with which this defense is thrown up. I'm pretty sure that if we got hit by an asteroid, someone would be commenting, "don't worry, we've been getting hit with asteroids since Chicxulub, stop being alarmist"
It's probably worth examining where this reflexive response comes from. The person you're replying to didn't defend anything. The comment was just that the trend predates the past couple of decades.
Feedback from user testing has been great, patients loved it generally.
For me, therapy was very similar to private tutoring sessions. I did almost all of the work. Took about a year to nail down all of the corners. Haven't had to go back since.
In an ideal world, therapists should be no different from personal trainers. No one really questions having someone help you learn how to exercise. Learning how to handle your mental hardware should be the same way.
Granted, we're living in a Sci-Fi dystopia. We're have a lot less problems if we didn't.
Therapy is a very poor replacement for having a good social support system. But for some things, it's a resource your usual support system is unlikely to have.
