Venting Mental health is the new religion.

[Justaroguegear]

I feel like mental health or at least the mainstream understanding of it has become the new religion. Just how the gods moved from caves to mountain tops then to the sky and finally beyond space and time, well now religion has moved beyond gods, because people stopped buying it.

Now the extent of mental health is, repress negative thoughts, don't hurt others and yourself, be submissive, cope, just suck it up and keep going. Be a good worker, pay your taxes and make a bunch of children and brainwash them too into this garbage. That's what mental health boils down to these days, just coping. Yeah it sucks but would you rather be locked up or would you rather pretend to be free in a fantasy world? So here you go have some medication, have some therapy, hell have some drugs to help you get through the day.

Get up from your desk every 15 minutes and do stretches, it's science, you'll be more productive that way. Here's how to study hard, don't skip sleep it won't work, take some drugs but not too much, exercise to fill the void and tire yourself out so you don't have energy left to think. Here's how to eat cheap and healthy here's how to have good posture, we have all this knowledge just work goddammit, behave and act normal. Repress everything that's not considered normal.

Here, this is how you avoid toxic people, this is how to find real friends it's all within reach you just have to want it. Here's how to deal with the worst mental disorders, we have a trick for everything. We'll hypnotize you, we have behavioral therapy we have all this shit, just use it.

To me it seems that mental health has just been rewritten into the new religion, turn the other cheek but do it for yourself this time, it's science. I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it is bent just enough to make it is easy to write people off as crazy and shut anyone up who speaks the truth.

That's the bar for mental health these days, just how normal you can act day after day, consistently. But this just allows all the best liars and fakers to rise to the top which I think has been happening for several lifetimes now.

I think it's just impossible for the average person to comprehend how the world has been over taken by predators with endless appetites and look where it all lead to. I think even if they know what their endless greed leads to they won't stop, they can't help it. And being a remorseless, lying, manipulative animal is what is rewarded the most.

I saw this question on a personality disorder test that said something like do you think those who got to the top did so by lying and cheating?

And that's when it sort of clicked, you're supposed to feel bad for thinking that you're supposed to believe in the implicit good, that it's not like that, that it's you who is crazy for thinking like that. So that's what it is, the entire mental health thing is just the rewritten religion, the law beyond the law that we're supposed to follow out of morality.

I guess the alternative is too crushing for many people to face, that the lies go all the way to the top, that we've been overtaken by the worst people, that our language wasn't rewritten like in 1984, it was, just not the way we would think, because we still need words to describe the things that seem like crazy conspiracy things to make them seem outlandish and discredit anyone immediately.

Just like how religion was used throughout history for control and to discredit anyone who opposed you, so is the general idea of mental health these days.

We're not supposed to live like this, in concrete cages scrubbing everything clean constantly, ourselves, locked in the same loops for years. It never was possible to be happy and fulfilled this way. It's just that all this mental health and modern comfort helps the cogs function in a completely unnatural way. Until the endless greed catches up and we have a climate apocalypse on our hands.

 

[TheLastK]

What an excellent way of putting it, well done. If we think back to the majority of human existence it is pre-civilization, nevermind the industrial revolution. We have lost community and, in the western world anyway, rely on an increasingly large amount of individualism to seek fulfillment. Community barely exists anymore, and the contemporary views on mental health and psychiatry are all based around coping as to truly become better the world must become better, at least that is how I see it. Top quality post from @Justaroguegear here, 10/10.

 

[chocolatebar]

Get up from your desk every 15 minutes and do stretches, it's science, you'll be more productive that way. Here's how to study hard, don't skip sleep it won't work, take some drugs but not too much, exercise to fill the void and tire yourself out so you don't have energy left to think. Here's how to eat cheap and healthy here's how to have good posture, we have all this knowledge just work goddammit, behave and act normal. Repress everything that's not considered normal.

This is so true. This almost sounds like a prayer. The same words, over and over, without even understating the person's struggles.

And the worst of all, it's unquestionable. If you stand up and talk against what's forced on you, people will use your mental condition as a way to discriminate you, as if you don't have the capacity to exercise complex thinking.

If we think about it, while the science has been intensely developed and reshaped society, the mechanisms in which people assimilate the scientific knowledge aren't different from the mechanisms in which people assimilate religious beliefs. It's all a matter of believing what a person of higher authority tells you. The education system doesn't promote thinking, investigating, testing and validating the knowledge, but only promotes believing and memorizing.

It's no wonder that people will find themselves creating new beliefs and developing systems akin to religion when all they are able to do is believe in authorities and memorize things.

 

[TheLastK]

This is so true. This almost sounds like a prayer. The same words, over and over, without even understating the person's struggles.

And the worst of all, it's unquestionable. If you stand up and talk against what's forced on you, people will use your mental condition as a way to discriminate you, as if you don't have the capacity to exercise complex thinking.

If we think about it, while the science has been intensely developed and reshaped society, the mechanisms in which people assimilate the scientific knowledge aren't different from the mechanisms in which people assimilate religious beliefs. It's all a matter of believing what a person of higher authority tells you. The education system doesn't promote thinking, investigating, testing and validating the knowledge, but only promotes believing and memorizing.

It's no wonder that people will find themselves creating new beliefs and developing systems akin to religion when all they are able to do is believe in authorities and memorize things.

I think we have a void of community in our society currently like I said above, which is why people turn to new age stuff like astrology, crystals, tarot and, most importantly, mental health stuff. I guess that some sciences are beyond the realm of authority and theoretically you could perform experiments yourself to prove certain hypotheses (like chemistry or mathematics), but when it comes to mental health and the social sciences it is really unclear. I don't believe psychology is a true science and that comes from someone who studies (or at least attempts to) psychology.

 

[chocolatebar]

I think we have a void of community in our society currently like I said above, which is why people turn to new age stuff like astrology, crystals, tarot and, most importantly, mental health stuff. I guess that some sciences are beyond the realm of authority and theoretically you could perform experiments yourself to prove certain hypotheses (like chemistry or mathematics), but when it comes to mental health and the social sciences it is really unclear. I don't believe psychology is a true science and that comes from someone who studies (or at least attempts to) psychology.

In theory, all kinds of scientific knowledge can be reproduced by anyone, but in practice, there all several barriers preventing people from doing so, starting at the non scientific education system and going up to lack of resources. However, authority also plays a greater role in science than most people would like to admit. For example, most journals will require someone having specific degrees and sometimes, specific contacts in order to publish, no matter if you work follow correctly the scientific method or not.

You're right about mental health. Things are highly unclear and there's an intense debate on whether some works are reproducible or not, especially in psychology. There are also problems related to methodologies and conclusions taken from the results. One good example is the biochemistry hypothesis for depression, which new findings are proving to be misleading and probably untrue.

 

[foreverfalling]

Amazing post. It is putting all the responsibility (blame) back onto the individual to force them to meet the standard of normality, which is whatever an authority wants to mold us as. Don't want to play by the rules? That's anti social personality disorder, we'll lock you up so you're out of the way. Tired of grinding a 9 to 5 every day doing meaningless work? That's depression so pop some pills so you don't think about it.

Where does this authority come from? As much as I'd like to think some evil Illuminati are planning all this, perhaps this is all just the natural equilibrium of human nature. Most people are simply driven by what makes their life easy, and so following along is all they do. There is no community, only individual choices. There is no meaning, only bullshit jobs that take all our energy. And there is no way for the individual to change any of that, and so we make up reasons to the problems that we think we can fix. Anyone that speaks up about it is silenced, because they don't want the illusion broken, that they need to solve a much harder problem that they cannot comprehend.

 

[houseofleaves]

«Fitter, happier
More productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient, better driver
A safer car (baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well (no bad dreams)
No paranoia
Careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole)
Keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at bank
Favours for favours
Fond but not in love (!!!)
Charity standing orders
On Sundays ring road supermarket
Car wash (also on Sundays)
No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows
Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish
At a better pace
Slower and more calculated
No chance of escape
Now self-employed
Concerned (but powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
Will not cry in public
Less chance of illness
Tyres that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat)
A good memory
Still cries at a good film
Still kisses with saliva
No longer empty and frantic
Like a cat
Tied to a stick
That's driven into
Frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness)
Calm
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibiotics»

 

[Celerity]

For the most part, I agree. Therapists have started to fill a gap clergymen used to occupy in their communities with dubious success. The "positive mantras" every Tom, Dick, and Harry pushes on patients sound a lot like prayers.

Not to hijack your topic, but I think this is why some "new Atheists" like Sam Harris have taken a spiritual turn in their interests. Atheism, a rejection of an ideology, can only take you so far.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out going forward. For now, secularism is on the rise. If our society collapses due to, say, climate change or nuclear war, I suspect we will return to the primitive, polytheistic animism of the past as we lose access to our accumulated knowledge of the natural world. We will once again beseech the clouds for rain and the earth for fertility.

 

[Funeralprincess]

I feel like mental health or at least the mainstream understanding of it has become the new religion. Just how the gods moved from caves to mountain tops then to the sky and finally beyond space and time, well now religion has moved beyond gods, because people stopped buying it.

Now the extent of mental health is, repress negative thoughts, don't hurt others and yourself, be submissive, cope, just suck it up and keep going. Be a good worker, pay your taxes and make a bunch of children and brainwash them too into this garbage. That's what mental health boils down to these days, just coping. Yeah it sucks but would you rather be locked up or would you rather pretend to be free in a fantasy world? So here you go have some medication, have some therapy, hell have some drugs to help you get through the day.

Get up from your desk every 15 minutes and do stretches, it's science, you'll be more productive that way. Here's how to study hard, don't skip sleep it won't work, take some drugs but not too much, exercise to fill the void and tire yourself out so you don't have energy left to think. Here's how to eat cheap and healthy here's how to have good posture, we have all this knowledge just work goddammit, behave and act normal. Repress everything that's not considered normal.

Here, this is how you avoid toxic people, this is how to find real friends it's all within reach you just have to want it. Here's how to deal with the worst mental disorders, we have a trick for everything. We'll hypnotize you, we have behavioral therapy we have all this shit, just use it.

To me it seems that mental health has just been rewritten into the new religion, turn the other cheek but do it for yourself this time, it's science. I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it is bent just enough to make it is easy to write people off as crazy and shut anyone up who speaks the truth.

That's the bar for mental health these days, just how normal you can act day after day, consistently. But this just allows all the best liars and fakers to rise to the top which I think has been happening for several lifetimes now.

I think it's just impossible for the average person to comprehend how the world has been over taken by predators with endless appetites and look where it all lead to. I think even if they know what their endless greed leads to they won't stop, they can't help it. And being a remorseless, lying, manipulative animal is what is rewarded the most.

I saw this question on a personality disorder test that said something like do you think those who got to the top did so by lying and cheating?

And that's when it sort of clicked, you're supposed to feel bad for thinking that you're supposed to believe in the implicit good, that it's not like that, that it's you who is crazy for thinking like that. So that's what it is, the entire mental health thing is just the rewritten religion, the law beyond the law that we're supposed to follow out of morality.

I guess the alternative is too crushing for many people to face, that the lies go all the way to the top, that we've been overtaken by the worst people, that our language wasn't rewritten like in 1984, it was, just not the way we would think, because we still need words to describe the things that seem like crazy conspiracy things to make them seem outlandish and discredit anyone immediately.

Just like how religion was used throughout history for control and to discredit anyone who opposed you, so is the general idea of mental health these days.

We're not supposed to live like this, in concrete cages scrubbing everything clean constantly, ourselves, locked in the same loops for years. It never was possible to be happy and fulfilled this way. It's just that all this mental health and modern comfort helps the cogs function in a completely unnatural way. Until the endless greed catches up and we have a climate apocalypse on our hands.

Don't forget the ones who are now "healed" from their mental issues lol. They have the same energy as corrupt christians that have been "saved". They think because they got a better job, second chance at love, and a better life overall that all sick people can. They are just like the "saved" Christians, preaching to us about how we don't try hard enough to recover, we don't put the work in, we don't want to heal because it's a "choice"… that is what really makes me agree with your post and truly
See the angle of mental health being a new religion. It's insanity that once a fucked up person magically gets some luck, they feel every other fucked up person is just not trying to do better in life to solve their mental disease. Ive seen people
Who have become "healed" begin to silence and shame any other person with mental health problems, berating them and criticizing them

 

[Euthanza]

Indeed, that's why they have scientology peers as opponent to modern psychiatry/psychology. The drugs are magic potion and prescription is the mantra.

 

[Ethereal Knight]

I feel like mental health or at least the mainstream understanding of it has become the new religion. Just how the gods moved from caves to mountain tops then to the sky and finally beyond space and time, well now religion has moved beyond gods, because people stopped buying it.

Now the extent of mental health is, repress negative thoughts, don't hurt others and yourself, be submissive, cope, just suck it up and keep going. Be a good worker, pay your taxes and make a bunch of children and brainwash them too into this garbage. That's what mental health boils down to these days, just coping. Yeah it sucks but would you rather be locked up or would you rather pretend to be free in a fantasy world? So here you go have some medication, have some therapy, hell have some drugs to help you get through the day.

Get up from your desk every 15 minutes and do stretches, it's science, you'll be more productive that way. Here's how to study hard, don't skip sleep it won't work, take some drugs but not too much, exercise to fill the void and tire yourself out so you don't have energy left to think. Here's how to eat cheap and healthy here's how to have good posture, we have all this knowledge just work goddammit, behave and act normal. Repress everything that's not considered normal.

Here, this is how you avoid toxic people, this is how to find real friends it's all within reach you just have to want it. Here's how to deal with the worst mental disorders, we have a trick for everything. We'll hypnotize you, we have behavioral therapy we have all this shit, just use it.

To me it seems that mental health has just been rewritten into the new religion, turn the other cheek but do it for yourself this time, it's science. I think there's a lot of truth to it, but it is bent just enough to make it is easy to write people off as crazy and shut anyone up who speaks the truth.

That's the bar for mental health these days, just how normal you can act day after day, consistently. But this just allows all the best liars and fakers to rise to the top which I think has been happening for several lifetimes now.

I think it's just impossible for the average person to comprehend how the world has been over taken by predators with endless appetites and look where it all lead to. I think even if they know what their endless greed leads to they won't stop, they can't help it. And being a remorseless, lying, manipulative animal is what is rewarded the most.

I saw this question on a personality disorder test that said something like do you think those who got to the top did so by lying and cheating?

And that's when it sort of clicked, you're supposed to feel bad for thinking that you're supposed to believe in the implicit good, that it's not like that, that it's you who is crazy for thinking like that. So that's what it is, the entire mental health thing is just the rewritten religion, the law beyond the law that we're supposed to follow out of morality.

I guess the alternative is too crushing for many people to face, that the lies go all the way to the top, that we've been overtaken by the worst people, that our language wasn't rewritten like in 1984, it was, just not the way we would think, because we still need words to describe the things that seem like crazy conspiracy things to make them seem outlandish and discredit anyone immediately.

Just like how religion was used throughout history for control and to discredit anyone who opposed you, so is the general idea of mental health these days.

We're not supposed to live like this, in concrete cages scrubbing everything clean constantly, ourselves, locked in the same loops for years. It never was possible to be happy and fulfilled this way. It's just that all this mental health and modern comfort helps the cogs function in a completely unnatural way. Until the endless greed catches up and we have a climate apocalypse on our hands.

this is by far one of the better posts I've read on the entire SS.

you're a very smart person. I commend you on your ability to do critical thinking and to see behind the curtains.

you seem to have chosen the Red Pill.



"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." (Seneca)

"No society wants you to become wise: it is against the investment of all societies. If people are wise, they cannot be exploited. If they are intelligent, they cannot be subjugated, they cannot be forced into a mechanical life, to live like robots. They will assert themselves —they will assert their individuality. They will have the fragrance of rebellion around them; they will want to live in freedom.
.
Freedom comes with wisdom, intrinsically — they are inseparable — and no society wants people to be free. The communist society, the fascist society, the capitalist society, the Hindu, the Mohammedan, the Christian — no society likes people to use their own intelligence, because the moment they start using their intelligence, they become dangerous, dangerous to the establishment, dangerous to the people who are in power, dangerous to the 'haves'; dangerous to all kinds of oppression, exploitation, suppression; dangerous to the churches, dangerous to the states, dangerous to the nations." (Rajneesh)

 

[Pluto]

This is a very interesting take. A few points to make.

Every thought system that discourages completely open investigation is already corrupt, and from that point there are only gradations of compromise. From this perspective, the mainstream fixation on endless band-aid solutions for human suffering could be seen as somewhat cultish. It also fits into the capitalist mold of selling solutions to perceived problems.

Authorities enjoy control, and sometimes the masses enjoy being controlled. It is a functional, yet dysfunctional relationship. Independent thinking requires not only strain to achieve, but further effort in copping any backlash in the event that one draws non-mainstream conclusions. I can say from experience that it can be an extremely lonely journey, potentially leading to CTB, in which case the conformists can be seen to enjoy a potent evolutionary advantage.

A society devoid of these collective diseases would be a different place. There would likely be a far more open attitude towards issues like universal adult euthanasia, yet ironically there would presumably be far less mental illness to warrant it.

 

[chocolatebar]

Don't forget the ones who are now "healed" from their mental issues lol. They have the same energy as corrupt christians that have been "saved". They think because they got a better job, second chance at love, and a better life overall that all sick people can. They are just like the "saved" Christians, preaching to us about how we don't try hard enough to recover, we don't put the work in, we don't want to heal because it's a "choice"… that is what really makes me agree with your post and truly
See the angle of mental health being a new religion. It's insanity that once a fucked up person magically gets some luck, they feel every other fucked up person is just not trying to do better in life to solve their mental disease. Ive seen people
Who have become "healed" begin to silence and shame any other person with mental health problems, berating them and criticizing them

These people are the worst of all. Instead of using their experience and new social positions to actually help the ones who suffer and spread information for the ones who don't understand mental conditions, they become some sort of traitors and join the masses in doing exactly what you describe .

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

In theory, all kinds of scientific knowledge can be reproduced by anyone, but in practice, there all several barriers preventing people from doing so, starting at the non scientific education system and going up to lack of resources. However, authority also plays a greater role in science than most people would like to admit. For example, most journals will require someone having specific degrees and sometimes, specific contacts in order to publish, no matter if you work follow correctly the scientific method or not.

You're right about mental health. Things are highly unclear and there's an intense debate on whether some works are reproducible or not, especially in psychology. There are also problems related to methodologies and conclusions taken from the results. One good example is the biochemistry hypothesis for depression, which new findings are proving to be misleading and probably untrue.

This is a really intriguing thread and both you and the OP are echoing a lot of the "out there" thoughts I've had for a long time. The mental health industry seems to operate more like a church and a place of worship rather than an institute of rigorous, reproducible science.

Speaking from experience as someone who has studied and worked in this field (Neuroscience), you're right on the money about psychology being not much of a science. The scrutnity and standard of work one has must produce in a molecular biology lab is leaps and bounds ahead of what is expected of a psychologist's research.

Most of the criteria used to evaluate standards of mental wellness is extremely arbitrary, rudimentary, and subjective. Within psychology there is loads of sampling bias, you will have 20-21 year old students who party every night, have robust social lives, and no health problems of their own self-selecting friends from their cohort to participate in their dissertation/thesis research. A lot of the data we have about mental health is skewed by the types of people filling out surveys, which comprise a good chunk of our mental health understanding.

Researchers don't want complicated cases, often times individuals will be excluded from studies because they have comorbities or other overlapping issues. Thus you will see a lot more of the milder cases being represented in studies where the principal aim is to promote a certain drug or therapy modality. You are a lot more likely to boast high success rates/efficacy if you purposefully remove the most severe, at risk populations like suicidal people from the equation.

I don't think many people truly realize how subjective and shaky the foundations underlying the field of mental healthcare are. When it comes to lisenced therapists, in most countries, their training is woefully inadequate, especially after they have become lisenced by their government's regulatory body. Typically, all it takes to become certified in a specific modality (giving you street cred and bragging rights to being an expert practioner of something like DBT) is a 3 day workshop or cluster of seminars.

The scientific backing for many types of therapy is hauntingly barebones, especially when you consider that many elements of therapy are borrowed from religious practices. Nu age therapy is surprisingly interwoven with Buddhism, right down to meditation and "radical acceptance". In a way, the idols and chants of civilization's pious past have sneakily been resurrected and fashioned into a brand new set of clothes for the emporer, posing as a new subset of science.

Nowadays we tend to be more rational (as opposed to whimsical/spiritual) and scientifically minded, so rebranding these concepts as "evidence based behavioral techniques" makes their usage a lot more palatable to the average joe, who takes the word of his doctors, family, and friends at face value and truly believes that he's getting a treatment on par with most modern medicine when he walks through his therapist's door.

Don't even get me started on the piss poor methodology used in psychiatry studies. No long term follow ups, no investigation of how long therapeutic effects last for, no proper tapering guidelines for most medications, marginal benefits compared to placebo.. You'd probably see more organization and attention to detail in a fucking meth lab.

 

[chocolatebar]

This is a really intriguing thread and both you and the OP are echoing a lot of the "out there" thoughts I've had for a long time. The mental health industry seems to operate more like a church and a place of worship rather than an institute of rigorous, reproducible science.

Speaking from experience as someone who has studied and worked in this field (Neuroscience), you're right on the money about psychology being not much of a science. The scrutnity and standard of work one has must produce in a molecular biology lab is leaps and bounds ahead of what is expected of a psychologist's research.

Most of the criteria used to evaluate standards of mental wellness is extremely arbitrary, rudimentary, and subjective. Within psychology there is loads of sampling bias, you will have 20-21 year old students who party every night, have robust social lives, and no health problems of their own self-selecting friends from their cohort to participate in their dissertation/thesis research. A lot of the data we have about mental health is skewed by the types of people filling out surveys, which comprise a good chunk of our mental health understanding.

Researchers don't want complicated cases, often times individuals will be excluded from studies because they have comorbities or other overlapping issues. Thus you will see a lot more of the milder cases being represented in studies where the principal aim is to promote a certain drug or therapy modality. You are a lot more likely to boast high success rates/efficacy if you purposefully remove the most severe, at risk populations like suicidal people from the equation.

I don't think many people truly realize how subjective and shaky the foundations underlying the field of mental healthcare are. When it comes to lisenced therapists, in most countries, their training is woefully inadequate, especially after they have become lisenced by their government's regulatory body. Typically, all it takes to become certified in a specific modality (giving you street cred and bragging rights to being an expert practioner of something like DBT) is a 3 day workshop or cluster of seminars.

The scientific backing for many types of therapy is hauntingly barebones, especially when you consider that many elements of therapy are borrowed from religious practices. Nu age therapy is surprisingly interwoven with Buddhism, right down to meditation and "radical acceptance". In a way, the idols and chants of civilization's pious past have sneakily been resurrected and fashioned into a brand new set of clothes for the emporer, posing as a new subset of science.

Nowadays we tend to be more rational (as opposed to whimsical/spiritual) and scientifically minded, so rebranding these concepts as "evidence based behavioral techniques" makes their usage a lot more palatable to the average joe, who takes the word of his doctors, family, and friends at face value and truly believes that he's getting a treatment on par with most modern medicine when he walks through his therapist's door.

Don't even get me started on the piss poor methodology used in psychiatry studies. No long term follow ups, no investigation of how long therapeutic effects last for, no proper tapering guidelines for most medications, marginal benefits compared to placebo.. You'd probably see more organization and attention to detail in a fucking meth lab.

You've just hit the spot in describing how mental health studies work

There are too many flaws in the studies and sampling bias is definitely one of the most common and that most people without scientific education will fail to understand. I remember seeing someone on reddit making a sensationalist claim about mental health based on a study done with a sample of us residents who did a military admission test in the 1970s. The comment had more than a thousand upvotes and I, naively, tried to point out that the sample was too specific (people interested in joining a certain military organization in the US during a certain time interval) and couldn't be simply extended to the whole world population. turns out I just got downvoted to the point of being suppressed.

THere are too many problems in these studies and we could go on and on for hours. Some are plain out ill intended, like the students I saw with my own eyes forging answered questionnaires.

In the end, we go back to authority, what is, perhaps, the greatest problem. We can't simply accept what is told to us, especially when it doesn't match our experiences and that's my biggest problem with mental health, the fact that the patient doesn't have a voice at all!

 

[Mr2005]

It's the new normal certainly. If you don't have one you feel left out

 

[katagiri83]

Don't even get me started on the piss poor methodology used in psychiatry studies. No long term follow ups, no investigation of how long therapeutic effects last for, no proper tapering guidelines for most medications, marginal benefits compared to placebo.. You'd probably see more organization and attention to detail in a fucking meth lab.

So true, Kuri. It is basically playing with someone's life by arbitrary trial & error…

 

[Funeralprincess]

These people are the worst of all. Instead of using their experience and new social positions to actually help the ones who suffer and spread information for the ones who don't understand mental conditions, they become some sort of traitors and join the masses in doing exactly what you describe .

Yep. I describe it so accurately because I've sadly seen it happen many many times. What's disgusting is many of them will go to extremes with the mental illness shaming.. I'm like remember when you weren't "saved"? You too were bad mentally but you seem to forget that

 

[whatevs]

Amazing post. It is putting all the responsibility (blame) back onto the individual to force them to meet the standard of normality, which is whatever an authority wants to mold us as. Don't want to play by the rules? That's anti social personality disorder, we'll lock you up so you're out of the way. Tired of grinding a 9 to 5 every day doing meaningless work? That's depression so pop some pills so you don't think about it.

Where does this authority come from? As much as I'd like to think some evil Illuminati are planning all this, perhaps this is all just the natural equilibrium of human nature. Most people are simply driven by what makes their life easy, and so following along is all they do. There is no community, only individual choices. There is no meaning, only bullshit jobs that take all our energy. And there is no way for the individual to change any of that, and so we make up reasons to the problems that we think we can fix. Anyone that speaks up about it is silenced, because they don't want the illusion broken, that they need to solve a much harder problem that they cannot comprehend.

It seems to be both things, human nature and le Evil Illuminati. One thing leads to another. A country of sheep will have a goverment of wolves.

 

[theboy]

Well, it's what the world offers us. For better or worse, it is what is available.

 

[Justaroguegear]

Where does this authority come from? As much as I'd like to think some evil Illuminati are planning all this, perhaps this is all just the natural equilibrium of human nature. Most people are simply driven by what makes their life easy, and so following along is all they do.

It takes just a bit of power to influence things on a massive a scale. Just a few companies forming a cartel, agreeing to sell shitty light bulbs because it's more profitable for everyone. Or car companies lobbying against public transportation and now look where we are. Everyone wants a metal vroom vroom. Or the sugar industry funding studies, pretending that it's healthy. The average person doesn't look or care who made which study. Their attention spans are non existent anyway. We might be wiser now but it's already way too late. They won. Everything has sugar.

It's not the evil illuminati, it's just a few greedy pigs here and there.

It's just so frustrating that the average human is just completely deaf to these things. And they don't have the capacity to change their mind about it. They will argue to the grave and won't concede the smallest things.

Humans just have this default setting, that if something seems too bad too be true, it isn't. Just ignore it. Just don't think about it, pretend you never noticed it. There's just no way it's this terrible.. Right?

All it would take to not fall into this life model is just to think and have an open mind, instead of being swept away by the automated life.

Yeah it's what the majority do and you either play along or become an outcast.

Well here I am, I never bent to the peer pressure. I never accepted something just because the majority said so. Now I may have the opportunity to watch their world burn down. I just can't help but feel some satisfaction now that in the end I feel like I was right.

 

[wait.what]

(Re-wrote some of this to make it clearer and less rambly. Sorry if anyone is in the middle of a long reply to something I ended up editing. Assuming anyone reads my monster posts.) :p

Excellent thread. It brings to mind the Serenity Prayer, which is more of a little "life hack" with the word God stuck in it than a prayer in the usual sense. I couldn't tell you who wrote it, but it's certainly Alcoholics Anonymous and its spin-off 12 step groups who have made it famous.

For those who may not be familiar with the Serenity Prayer, it goes like this:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

As life hacks go it isn't terrible. The trouble is that no one ever hacks their life with it. It's just memorized and then regurgitated whole, much like the Lord's Prayer, which is also usually regurgitated at AA meetings. (The Lord's Prayer is absolutely a Christian religious text and not self-help advice, which is a problem since people who get arrested in active alcohol addiction often get court ordered to attend AA meetings. Why should a Jewish, Muslim, or atheist person be forced to attend Christian religious services in order to qualify for substance abuse diversion programs instead of going to jail? The short answer is they shouldn't.)

Anyway, in practice, people tend to forget that the second half of the Serenity Prayer is about changing the things you can. That's just the blahblahblah part that comes after the acceptance thing. Nobody likes "acceptance" at first, largely because the thing everyone wants them to accept is that they're alcoholics and if they keep drinking, they're going to die. Once folks get past that (if they ever do), "serene acceptance" starts to sound pretty good, because it's a convenient figleaf for covering up laziness, irresponsibility, cowardice, and the sin-by-omission form of cruelty that Martin Luther King Jr. described as "the silence of our friends."

To be fair, you do hear some AA members talk about making a commitment to serving their communities as a way to "change the things they can." You are actually supposed to start doing things like that after you've been off the booze long enough for your brain to quit being a twitching gelatinous blob screaming constantly for dopamine. Most AA members don't ever really make the transition from seeking help to providing help, but I'd say a decent-sized minority do.

Outside the recovery community, however, the Serenity Prayer is never invoked like that. Instead, it's used to prop up all the absolute worst, most disempowering, and most utterly infuriating elements of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and its love child by Zen Buddhism, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). CBT's hypothesis is that people become mentally ill when their thoughts do not square with reality. CBT therapy involves "retraining" the mind, as if orthodontic braces could be put on people's thoughts. Once a patient's thoughts are correct, their emotions are supposed to fall into line, and they should no longer spend 20 hours a day lying on their sheetless mattresses, staring at cracks in their ceiling, longing to die but unable to muster enough energy to kill themselves. I have no idea why a particularly clear-eyed perception of the world couldn't make someone's depression even worse, but then I'm not a CBT therapist.

I actually really like Zen Buddhism, and have been a practitioner of sorts since my mid-teens. I'm also not going to begrudge chronically suicidal people any relief they might get from Zen, or from Marsha Linehan's abridged version of it. (Linehan is a longtime student of Buddhism and the creator of DBT.) I do have a couple of concerns about what elements of Zen didn't make the editorial cut in the translation from Eastern mental/spiritual discipline to Western mental health treatment modality, however. First, I think anyone considering getting involved with DBT should be clear that most of its "distress tolerance skills" are inherited from Zen, and the component of Zen we're talking about is basically a controlled form of dissociation. Anyone who's studied Zen or DBT (or both!) is familiar with the practice of reminding yourself that you are not your thoughts, and you are not your feelings. You can stand at a distance from them, examine them, decide whether or not they serve you, and either choose to keep them or dismiss them. (That doesn't mean that "dismissed" feelings will stay gone forever, or even for 5 minutes. Some people get some relief from dismissing painful emotions over and over and over, however.)

This practice of mentally standing outside yourself and looking dispassionately at whatever you are thinking, feeling, and doing is literally the definition of dissociation. That's not necessarily a problem. Dissociation can be a powerfully effective coping mechanism for deaing with extreme stress, but only when it isn't both your first and your only line of defense against life-blighting suffering. You don't want it to grow out of control, like so many invasive weeds, and turn you into a helpless, dependent, shuffling zombie. You need to have enough access to your feelings, including your pain, to sort out what people, places, and things are safe for you. It does you no good to develop 16 new mental gymnastics tricks for enduring a terrible living situation when you could be developing skills that will eventually allow you to move out and live independently instead.

Second, DBT is as hopeless as any other mental health treatment when it comes to helping people challenge external realities that are causing them undue suffering. Somewhere I have a meme that shows a woman who has fallen down in front of what appears to be a speeding 18 wheel truck. There's a man standing several meters away, frantically waving his arms. The caption is: "Concentrate on the things you CAN change." Gee, thanks talk therapy! I was foolishly worried about that truck, when clearly the thing that matters is my attitude about getting run over by a truck. I guess I'll have to journal about that. In the afterlife.

One might "almost" get the idea that the mental health system was developed by a group of people so privileged that it never occurred to them that protest and civil disobedience could be basic skills that people need in order to survive. If you'll indulge me in a brief digression to provide some background information: the first wave of social workers were hobbyists. They were well-to-do white ladies who spent their spare time dispensing free advice to the poor, as a kind of modern take on alms. They did this by organizing labor unions and agitating to demand workplace safety standards that could and would be enforced. Ha! Just kidding. They did stuff like telling poor women they should control their husbands' drinking by refusing to have sex with them if they came home drunk.

After a few hours of giving surreally out-of-touch lifestyle tips like this, the wealthy ladies went home to their real jobs: furthering their husbands' careers by attending important society events and doing what we would now call "networking." The "network" in question consisted of Gilded Age capitalists who owned the factories all those poor folks worked at. Could there maybe . . . possibly . . . have been some conflicts of interest there? OF COURSE THERE WERE. ARE YOU BLIND??

Anyway, to return to the topic of the thread: our system of social services is so weirdly invested in micromanaging individuals' lives and personal habits because trying to effect major social and economic changes is scary. Modern social workers are about as broke as anybody, but the folks who may come baying at their heels if they stir the pot too much have plenty of resources. So when they tell you to think only about what you can change, there's the implicit message that you shouldn't be looking to your shrink if you want to see changes bigger than a single person can bring about. (In reality, I think some mental health workers would back your play if you became a pain in the ass to your local power brokers. They just don't know how to support you as a therapist, because no one has bothered to develop therapeutic techniques for that.)

In requiring patients to look relentlessly inward, talk therapy creates the impression that if you are a person with problems, the root of those problems is always YOU. It's your responsibility to perform advanced mental yoga all day in order not to lose your shit at the slum lord who owns your building and won't fix the furnace. You need to spend three hours a day holding ice cubes in one hand and journaling with the other just so you can get through a work day in which you have to see the supervisor who sexually assaulted you. When a crooked, racist cop drags you out of your car and bashes you over the head with his 24" steel MagLite, you grin, and your bear it, and you grin some more, and you just keep on grinning.

"God grant me the timidity to accept the things my boss and my landlord would rather I didn't try to change . . ." That is what mental health treatment as orthotics of the mind will have us reciting if we aren't careful. The white coat brigade want us to take the pills, read the books, fill out the workbook pages, paint the little balsa wood bird houses. Twist ourselves into whatever pretzel shapes we have to in order to make sure that the people who boss us around don't have to do any self-reflection or effect any changes themselves. Change is frightening and difficult and demoralizing--and that's why it's our job to do it, not theirs.