Likewise, many psychiatrists and psychologists seem to neglect very important environmental and socioeconomic factors that would rationally make a person depressed, scared, miserable, and anxious. I find it akin to scolding a person who recoils when they touch a hot stove. Your brain's natural response is to send out signals of pain in response to the damaging stimuli that has just burned the skin, you can't really control that reaction.
When people who are poor, alone disabled, underemployed or unemployed, marginalized, being abused, neglected, and so on and so forth seek assistance from the mental health industry, a lot of them are told they are ill and are either medicated unnecessarily or forced into things like CBT which tells them their negative feelings are cognitive distortions. When feeling awful and depressed in those situations is a completely natural response. If your environment is godawful, it is hard to delude yourself and pretend everything is peachy instead.
So instead of giving those people tangible help that would improve the mental anguish caused by their circumstances, or simply trying to provide symptom relief for things like lethargy, panic attacks, and loss of appetite, we tell them they are diseased. There is a serious lack of pragmatic help in these fields. People who need human connections aren't given opportunities for developing social skills besides their artificial interactions with the therapist. The impoverished aren't being given financial assistance. The unemployed aren't being given references and assistance with gaining employment.
I do believe medications and therapies have their place in some situations. I lived with a violent schizophrenic, who absolutely needed to be on a low dosage of Antipsychotics or else everyone in the family would be continually tormented by them. People who are violent or having extreme hallucinations do need pharmaceuticals to manage their conditions in the majority of cases. Likewise, Lithium can be helpful to some bipolar people. Yet, I think SSRIs are handed out like candy, and rarely alleviate the problem because the efficacy seems to be marginally higher than a placebo. A good number of serotonin receptors are in the GI tract, so I got nothing out of those medications except further illness.
Also, psychiatry truly lacks reliable diagnostic tools and relies on very subjective criteria. There are no blood tests, no scans, no biopsies, and things like the DSMV are often far too broad and speculative. I was seeing many different psychiatrists from age 13 to 20 and it took 6 years for them to order a laboratory test for me.
