Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbelder | Hacker News Reader

>"Well, you didn't get any help in those days, you just had to deal with it, haha!"

I can't help but wonder sometimes if that's healthier. Probably better for some people in some circumstances and worse in others.

View on HN

Having dealt with mental health issues in adulthood after stuffing them for decades, the consequence being that they came raging to the surface at the risk of breaking apart my family, and then shortly afterwards parenting children whose trauma was able to be noticed and cared for as a result (and with great success), this comment has me somewhat riled.

The comment you are responding to is wondering about what might be "healthier" in general? It even acknowledges that it could work "worse in others".

I do not think it's a stretch to say that some people deal with adversity and misfortune better than others, and not everyone ends up with mental health issues after very similar experiences!

So without getting riled up, my response to the GP would be: "no, it wouldn't, because even if that works with simple majority of the population, it might leave 49% of the people messed up — let's not move away from the individual approach!" (I don't have actual numbers).

The problem is that attitudes like GP’s are why mental health is so disregarded. It’s tempting to believe that people should just man up and deal with it, and presto: you have both toxic masculinity and also a reason not to bother taking mental health seriously. After all, if 51% of the population can handle it, is it really a societal problem worth bothering with? (They can’t, and it is.)

The idea that it’s healthier to internalize trauma is wrong in well over 90% of cases. Most people have lots of problems as adults due to trauma they got when they were kids, usually by emulating a dysfunctional parenting model, and they don’t even realize it. I lost my best friend when my issues flared up, and I was blind that I even had a problem at all. My actions felt healthy, and they were anything but.

Please don’t minimize mental health. If not for yourself, then for your future children.

It's clearly a serious problem that GPs ignore things that will surface but it is also a problem that experts surface things that don't need to be surfaced and in the worst cases even did not exist but fit a fad theory.

One should be very careful with measures claiming things like 90% as GPs defer to experts for these measures.

What fad theories are you thinking of?

The "satanic panic" was certainly an extreme example, but in general the entire industry spent a few decades inducing false memories. Because of the nature of trust in authority few people question when they are pressured to have a trauma and psychological effects from events that never occurred.

On the lesser end, I think many of the consumer oriented psychologists will take you in this direction with events that did occur but are probably typical experiences and only actually effect specific personalities.

It does look like the whole false memory theory was blown out of proportion:

https://news.isst-d.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-false-memor...

https://neurosciencenews.com/false-memories-psychology-28326...

Even more so, “satanic panic“ is a term that contains some truth (“tread carefully, conspiracy nuts territory“) but the overgeneralization makes it so actual organized abuse structures and its victims are dismissed too easily. Plenty of hard fact cases of such structures exist. See also for example the recent warning by Europol and the research into structures such as 764. The Bhagwan/Osho cult and many others can serve as prominent examples.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/inte...

https://gnet-research.org/2024/01/19/764-the-intersection-of...

Reality is all shades of grey (or colors), not black and white. I find it important to warn of the dangers of such spiritual abuse communities and its techniques, and to not dismiss it as nonexistent and an invention of some esoteric nutjobs with the wave of a hand, which is what this terminology is doing. This attitude drives more people into such structures.

I don't really get your point. Our skepticism toward reports involving real cults and incompetent insititutions is certainly higher since 12000 patients were hurt by non existing satanic institutions in bad therapy. They are not less hurt by the fact that it could have happened.

Percentages from the lost in a mall experiment don't seem to show anything surprising about how I would expect these traumas to end up integrating with real experience, and the patients that were going to be most susceptible were probably not going to look like a random selection study, see far more in the importance of their relationship with their therapist, etc.

You’re talking about two different GPs.

The other poster meant “grandparent”, as in the comment above the one they were replying to.

And I think you mean GP in the British sense of “general practitioner”, i.e. medical doctor.

Ah, yes, I took this to be a reference to general doctors don't take psychological issues seriously, which is both true at times and sometimes exaggerated.

> After all, if 51% of the population can handle it, is it really a societal problem worth bothering with? (They can’t, and it is.)

But you are making assumptions just like that: what makes you say 51% of the population can't handle particular types of trauma better than others?

Lots of things we are talking about are really "learned" and have no basis in biology, for instance: society itself is a human construct, and relationship to people around us are clearly built in that context. That does not mean they are not real, just that they can be learned even in a different way, and they surely are.

The reason we should take individual approach is because we can't know in advance who can "handle" a particular stressor in their current situation and who can't (and this is never black or white, all experiences — good and bad — shape us into persons we are). The onus is on those providing the help to provide just enough so we can deal with the situation in a reasonable manner.

> But you are making assumptions just like that: what makes you say 51% of the population can't handle particular types of trauma better than others?

The fact that most people’s actions are influenced by trauma in ways they don’t even realize. That’s why it’s called trauma instead of temporary.

Most people's actions are influenced both by stressful, but also by positive events in our lives: that's what makes us, really, "us". And really, everyone experiences what one would call trauma (trauma can be temporary as well).

When an event, positive or negative, influences us in a way where we can't continue to operate according to certain norms, we recognize that as a mental health issue.

So we can either claim that there are no people without mental health issues, which I think is not a very useful "calibration" of the terminology, or we can establish a baseline where we expect people to have some challenges with mental health which we call "normal response to trauma", and focus on those who have exaggerated or diminished responses.

That word, “healthier,” is doing a lot of lifting in the parent comment. I read it in the maximally-utilitarian viewpoint, in which all the individual harm is completely ignored, and all we’re talking about is the collective health of society.

Few people should want to live in a society which completely disregards the individual in favor of the collective. It is an inherently totalitarian worldview. It has inspired some of the worst atrocities in human history, including eugenics in the USA and Nazi Germany, and de-kulakization in Ukraine.

In discussing such things with authoritarians, I think bringing up your lived experience just triggers their impulse for cruelty. Instead, I’d point out that totalitarian societies that cover up macro and micro level human rights abuses have always underperformed more “liberal” (as in freedom, not politics) societies in the long run.

Ireland was a broken, impoverished backwater, backing in the days of the Magdalene laundries and Catholic theocracy. I’m talking mid-20th century, for those who are not familiar. Now it’s one of the richest countries in the world. It is not a coincidence that America’s least repressed, most godless city, San Francisco, is also its richest. There is a causal link between prosperity and not burying all the skeletons in your closet (individually and collectively).

I wouldn't necessarily go that way: a case in point might be China, who many would characterize as "over-performing" many of the more just societies (like the ones in most of the modern Europe). One could use the same argument for USA vs EU too.

I really prefer to decouple care for the individual and their rights from the economic success: really, this is worth paying a cost for, and I am sure many would agree! (I believe the fact that financial benefit was so closely tied to EU membership was why Brexit happened).

You do bring up religion a few times: it basically is a psychological framework which does support discussing your challenges with "someone" (be it a priest or "God"), but eventually offers one solution to any issue ("God will balance it out, you just persevere").

I obviously simplify things quite a bit: there's a lot of nuances to all of these.

You can tell that people in the past were healthier mentally, from all the wars, slavery, physical abuse, etc.

Lot of smoking and drinking oneself to death in those generations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com