I get what you're all saying completely. You even worded things I felt but never put into words.
I am incredibly dumb for thinking people IRL are capable of helping... It's just that I see them as friends and I don't want to just ctb and leave people saying I didn't try to reach out. But it always turns out to be a huge mistake... I end up exposing myself to someone who doesn't understand and will only judge me for it... Some people mean well with their advice, I know they do, but they still fail to understand how disabling this is.
I get a lot the "seek professional help" one. I tried, they suck so much at dealing with these kinds of issues. I don't have the money to go around looking for "the perfect fit" only to never find them, or think I found them and then they end up not helping.
Sometimes I would leave the therapist's office feeling worse. He once said aggressively and sighing how I would break my mom forever if I did it because he had a patient who lost her son to suicide and she has never been the same. Then even threatened me with "do you want to go back to the hospital? because I can make phone call". Dude, chill, I'm here trying to get help. I'm here talking to you about these issues because they EXIST and cripple me every day and I'm seeking the almighty professional help.
God, that bit about "seek professional help". I hate how this society has such a "one size fits all" mentality when it comes to treating mental illness. It's good to have a general protocol to follow, of course, but the human brain is just so incredibly complicated, and a lot of the time, it's just not as easy to "get help" as a lot of people seem to think... and that's excluding any other barriers that might exist that keep professional help from even being accessible in the first place, be it money, physical barriers, etc.
And not only that, it seems that as soon as an individual doesn't respond to the general protocol in question, they're automatically written off as being "non-compliant" or "not trying hard enough", when that's just not the case at all, and often just leaves the individual feeling even more hopeless/helpless than before, even though it's not their fault that the general treatment protocol didn't work for them. Not everybody responds to psychotherapy, or one specific medication, or finds the crisis hotline useful. Some people do, but lots of people don't, and then a lot of the time, these people are just tossed aside or left to fend for themselves, without any further guidance or resources whatsoever, and often feeling even worse than before.
Just based on my own (unfortunately extensive) experience with the mental health system: I almost became homeless because my then-psychiatrist wouldn't fill out my long-term disability paperwork, because I wasn't in a DBT program... even though they were all expensive (I barely had enough money to live and was over $15,000 in debt), she didn't give me any other resources or even a number to call, and I was physically struggling. I'd also been in a number of DBT programs before that, and they didn't do much for me at all, as much as I wanted them to.
It just all feels like one big, sick joke. I feel so sad for everyone who has tried to get help but been left to rot by this "amazing" professional help that everyone's always throwing around, like it's really that simple.
(I hope this somewhat makes sense. I'm so tired.)
