Therapy isn't fixing America's mental health crisis

I'm quite confident that this isn't a thoroughly examined belief for most people espousing it, it's a meme that's supposed to show sophistication as a partner.

I think that's a great insight which tracks well to my anecdotal experience from the last 10 years.

Dating apps have turned potential partners into Pokemon on your phone to be collected. Doordash has stripped delivery drivers of all humanity and abstracted them away into mindless automata. Social media has gamified and commodified outrage and hatred on a global scale. At every corner you look today, the bonds of human society have been disolved and replaced with pay-gated third party API calls. And this mindset has extended like a cancer to all aspects of life. Even "therapy" itself conforms to this. What was once something relied upon friends and family has been outsourced to the "heres my money, now fix my problem" mentality.

Corporate greed has effectively atomized us in a way that 20th century totalitarian states could have only imagined. And once we've been atomized, it becomes trivial to sell basic human experiences back to us in a nice neat package. Empathy becomes just another service you can summon with your phone, so why bother practicing it?

The personal trainer metaphor is one I used when trying to convince a friend (we're both Iraq veterans) to go to therapy.

Something to the effect of: "it's like personal training, they're there to respond and push you, but ultimately you're doing the work and making things happen. sometimes you need someone to push you hard, sometimes you need a soft touch, and sometimes you need someone to just check your form or get you to do different exercises."

While is it easier than ever to enter social spaces, I think people are struggling to build real meaningful relationships (romantic and platonic).

There is the western "coming of age" ritual that involves going off to university by yourself for a few years and then a few years later going off to another place by yourself.

Whether the fear of being misinterpreted is real, it is there for many people. People I know have changed a lot about what they say and the way they speak when people they don't know show up or enter a conversation, often saying things they don't believe in to give a good impression.

The message for the last decade has been very much don't-feel-guilt-or-shame about anything, just blame those who came before you. Doesn't matter if your parents divorced, stayed together, were overattentive, were underattentive, were poor or were rich. It's their fault you're miserable.

In reality, it's learned helplessness reinforced by social media and ongoing tech developments. Let me drive for you. Let me cook for you. Let me entertain you. Let me tell you what to believe. Let me write "your" speech for you and create "your" art for you.

It's life in captivity. Animals in cages at the zoo are always miserable.

This is a bit inaccurate. ADHD is diagnosed more in boys than girls, but is way, way more debilitating than being energetic to the point where they may be incredibly dangerous in a woodshop or metalshop. It's not being able to keep track of each tool being used, or the order in which to use them. It's forgetting to turn machines off, and forgetting to unplug dangerous equipment. It's turning around to grab something and forgetting what you turned around for, and then forgetting the task you were doing before you realized you were missing a part.

I would argue against treating ADHD like it's not a legitimate disability that requires accommodation. In the past, people with ADHD were just told they were stupid, lazy, or absentminded, when in reality they had a neurological disorder that had no diagnosis and no treatment at the time.

That being said I overall agree with the fact that society doesn't allow for breathing room for people to be people and form human relationships that doesn't have a financial or economic angle. This is horrendous, and no amount of therapy or medication will resolve this fundamental, societal-level problem. But ADHD is real, acting like ADHD treatment is just societal feminization of men is a completely incorrect depiction of the disorder. We can simultaneously argue that the medical system is completely fucked and also acknowledge that sometimes you really do need a surgeon to repair broken legs!

love to be a woman with ADHD-PH and read this shit

Easier said than done. You need money and a job fore that. A job which makes many people miserable.

That's not the problem

> My solution: Focus more on hands on activities, bring back woodshop and metalshop, include more breaks for physical activity during the day.

Schools today seem to have more hands on activities and breaks for physical activities then they did when I was a kid in the 1980s; at least my kids' school certainly does.

While it helps some for ADHD (not its main purpose), it doesn't actually stop ADHD from being an issue for kids (not just boys) that have it. Individualized support helps more, and, where appropriate, medication helps even more.

> The solution we went with: Get the boys so high on stimulants they can sit still like the girls.

Getting high on stimulants doesn't make people more able to sit still.

Its true that some stimulants have a paradoxical effect that is the exact opposite of getting high in certain doses for people with ADHD, and this is leveraged therapeutically (not just boys), but, well, that's not the same thing.

ADHD isn’t the same as being energetic. Clinical depression isn't sadness.

But it's important to recognize people have different challenges and live different lives than you.

I'm likely much younger than you. My parents were able to afford to raise me in a house they owned, at my current age. I am not and nowhere near that buying power. My parents can look forward to a retirement fund. I cannot. My parents were able to work through the summer to pay for their graduate degrees. Graduate degrees are too expensive for me to attain, now. My parents could afford to take me to the emergency room when I had fevers as a child. I cannot afford a single emergency room visit for anything.

World Health Organisation does a bunch of work on safer pesticides because it's so commonly used as a method in lower income countries.

https://www.who.int/news/item/17-12-2020-new-study-highlight...

(Reducing access to means and methods is part of a package of measures that can be used to reduce deaths by suicide, and suicidality. It's important to remember that it's not the only thing being done).

Psychiatry is only really significant in wealthy societies. It requires a lot of resources- Look at the psychiatrist themselves: Need a medical education, and then need to choose a field that helps people with more subtle diseases. Most poor countries don't have an abundance of doctors, and the doctors they have focus on illnesses that are going to physically hurt people.

Then look at the patients. They need to have enough money to pay the psychologist, and then they need to have enough time to schedule the appointments, stick with them, and afford the pills.

Looking at the basic resources and constraints of a society, it'd be very surprising if poor countries had as many diagnoses of psychiatric conditions as wealthy countries.

And please note: I'm not making a value judgement on psychiatry here! Only saying that it requires a certain level of prosperity to become an element of society.