limits of psychiatry

[megastalin]

I would really love to find a psychiatrist and/or psychologist who understands that mental health care is essentially lifelong palliative care and doesn't traffic in sugar and rainbows.

It's really the worst aspect of this day hospital thing. The forced nicety, the implication that some kind of a great comeback, some transformation is just around the corner if only we try hard enough if only we believe.

But that's not what's around the corner. Around the corner are new challenges at best and devastating crises at worst. Why pretend otherwise?

I firmly believe that once this civilisation returns to some form of rationality (which has, to put it lightly, fallen out of style worldwide) all of these therapeutic practices will be revised and most of them will cease to exist.

I keep looking at people here, they seem not all that responsive, kind of out of it. And I think to myself, surely they must have been admitted a few weeks before I did, this is the start of their treatment. But then the next day, I find out they've been here for 2 and half a months and are being released the next day!

They come in banged up, they leave banged up. The entire focus is on the process, not the outcome.

Psychiatry as it is now is like the astronomy of old before the heliocentric system. These astronomers, despite their fundamentally wrong model, were able to make accurate but limited predictions of the motions of the stars. So can psychiatry get the patient back from the ledge, with medication, with deep-sounding truisms (that don't stand up to further scrutiny) but can do little else in terms of elevating the patient's quality of life.

Why is this so? Because psychiatry is essentially solipsistic, it doesn't concern itself with the outside world, with social relations, or even the bare necessities of social life. No, as far as a psychiatrist is concerned, only you and your psyche exist. And once we get it somehow in order, while it being an open secret that we can't get it in order, something will mystically transform.

Eventually, soon, in a few centuries tops, this will be replaced with a kind of Marxist psychiatry that will center mental illness where it needs to be centered - in the society and group that generated the malady in the first place. It will be revealed that no mind or body is a wrong mind or body requiring medicalisation (in the broadest term, I don't mean just taking meds) but understanding and above all grace.

Until then, people like me, and there are so many of us, are left to contend with a system that we need to make us barely functional and alive, but that doesn't help otherwise and that's worse -- a system that is fundamentally violent and cruel and won't hesitate to punish you at a mere perception of being not quite contrite enough as you receive its ministrations.

Comments

[sabotabby]

To be the ideal approach balances the societal/cultural with "yeah, sometimes my brain just wants to kill me for no reason." But good luck finding both of those approaches in the same psychiatrist.

[theradicalchild]

Getting to the roots of mental illness should definitely be key to resolving it, something all my pill-pushing psychiatrists seemed to not grasp, and I paid the price.

In my case it was my parents exploiting my poor in-person communication skills as an autistic, but every time I try to bring this up to them they deny, deny, deny, and I don’t want to get on their ugly dark sides since they pay my rent.

Interesting you bring up the term Marxist—I know it’s liberally and I think in many cases incorrectly used—but I had read The Communist Manifesto and one thing that resounded with me was parents exploiting their children, one of the stories of my life.

[illuvium]

honestly, the idea of getting cured at all is ridiculous to me. what happens to you will always stay with you and that's unchangeable unless you have really selective memory (but even then the funny thing is that the body will remember, so. back to the unchangeable idea). things happen and all you can really do is manage it or at least pretend you can so you can go back into the labor force and do as you do. i totally agree with your point regarding psychiatrists taking you in isolation. the real issue i see is where people refuse to entertain the notion that things don't happen in vacuums and that there's always context to the people you see and the events that happen. in any case, i think normalcy as a concept is a real joke since it's so subjective. this might not mean too much, but i do hope you feel better, though

[igenlode]

They were running a programme on the radio this afternoon about 'the youth mental health crisis' -- something like 25% of *all young people* in Britain now being reported as having diagnosable mental health conditions, a significant proportion of that being 'anxiety' -- and I cannot but feel that it seems very obvious that the problem is not the young people. Not, at any rate, unless their genes have been damaged en masse by their parents' poor diets or low-level doses of pesticides or microplastics in the environment while they were growing up, or any of the other hypotheses that have been put forward as to how our civilisation is somehow busy poisoning itself...

If you have a human society with that level of generational breakdown in it, then the conclusion would seem to be that the problem is not with the humans but with the society.