Discussion psychologist work?

[Ulisses]

do you think therapy with a psychologist is useful? I go to a psychiatrist just to get the drugs that ease my mental suffering. what is your opinion about these professionals?

 

[Wisdom3_1-9]

I think some people have very positive results; others experience no change or a continuing worsened situation.

Our understanding of the human mind is so far behind our understanding of the human body. It's a valiant and important effort to know as much about the brain as we can, but to say that we can treat mental health with similar efficacy to how we treat physical health is absurd.

Because of this, I personally think it's hit-and-miss. If the issue is mostly situational, there could be great use in talking through things with someone else. If the issues are more deeply rooted, I think it's a crap shoot as to whether or not they help.

 

[Ulisses]

I think some people have very positive results; others experience no change or a continuing worsened situation.

Our understanding of the human mind is so far behind our understanding of the human body. It's a valiant and important effort to know as much about the brain as we can, but to say that we can treat mental health with similar efficacy to how we treat physical health is absurd.

Because of this, I personally think it's hit-and-miss. If the issue is mostly situational, there could be great use in talking through things with someone else. If the issues are more deeply rooted, I think it's a crap shoot as to whether or not they help.

my situation is rooted. I have a problem with my mother, who is toxic and suffocates me.

 

[Caspers]

If you have a good therapist and are willing to open up, yes. I find the opening up the hardest part. It's like dating; not all therapists are a good choice, but maybe you'll find someone who will click. Mine is pretty good, he's definitely helped me through these years, although we still have some way to go before we truly click. There's nothing wrong with trying one or two if you can.

 

[Ulisses]

If you have a good therapist and are willing to open up, yes. I find the opening up the hardest part. It's like dating; not all therapists are a good choice, but maybe you'll find someone who will click. Mine is pretty good, he's definitely helped me through these years, although we still have some way to go before we truly click. There's nothing wrong with trying one or two if you can.

thank you. I will follow your recommendation

 

[BPD Barbie]

Any kind of therapy will be helpful as long as you're willing to put in some work as well. Therapy will not work otherwise and it will be a waste of time. It's also not a quick fix cure. Psychiatrists and therapists help as much as you're willing to help yourself, in my opinion and experience anyway.

 

[Caspers]

thank you. I will follow your recommendation

I wish you the best of luck, you deserve someone good.

 

[Ulisses]

I wish you the best of luck, you deserve someone good.

we deserve it

 

[Caspers]

we deserve it

You're making me mushy now

 

[J113632]

I think it depends on getting lucky and finding someone who actually understands what mental illness is like. I saw a therapist in high school and all he did was talk for the entire time about how life gets better and things won't be like this forever. I was there after getting out of a psychiatric hospital. I tuned him out most of the time and thought how sad it was that after all the money and time spent on schooling, this is the best he can do. For all the people like me going here, this is the kind of shit help they will get.

 

[Ulisses]

I think it depends on getting lucky and finding someone who actually understands what mental illness is like. I saw a therapist in high school and all he did was talk for the entire time about how life gets better and things won't be like this forever. I was there after getting out of a psychiatric hospital. I tuned him out most of the time and thought how sad it was that after all the money and time spent on schooling, this is the best he can do. For all the people like me going here, this is the kind of shit help they will get.

I agree with you. they spend time studying, to tell you to forget what happened and continue living. it sucks to hear that from a psychiatrist, who should help you.

 

[EmbraceOfTheVoid]

I'd argue that most of them are completely useless for anything beyond generic problems that everyone deals with. If your problems have to do with things like perpetual poverty & homelessness, disability, chronic pain, trauma, etc then you are pretty much on your own. These people don't have any special insight into their own privileged lives much less lives full of adversity like mine or yours.

Most will waste years of your life and money just to alienate you, dehumanize you, and instill fear into you. Anyone that does those things can never realistically help you in any meaningful way. I'm sure that there are exceptions but they are far and few inbetween. The odds of finding a competent therapist and one that has a good moral compass would be akin to winning the lottery; though I think you'd need to win the lottery first to be able to afford them.

What, then, are psychotherapists and what do they sell to or impose on their clients? Insofar as they use force, psychotherapists are judges and jailers, inquisitors and torturers; insofar as they eschew it, they are secular priests and pseudomedical rhetoricians. Their services consist of coercions and constraints imposed on individuals on behalf of other persons or social groups, or they consist of contracts and conversations entered into by individuals on their own behalf." ― Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy

Yes, most therapists must receive post-graduate education and certification. The education they receive is functionally like that of a priest; e.g. they are taught to view things through a very particular scope - whereas the priest is taught the lens of their particular religion, the therapist-to-be is taught the lens of contemporary psychology and its endless pathologies. Therapy in-and-of itself, is like a confessional in a church, the therapist is the priest and the patient the confessor. The patient confesses their worries and problems much like a would-be blasphemer would confess their "sins".

The sad thing is, "just put your head in the sand" is probably a pretty common response to the OPs concerns not only at mental health resources across the world, but from peers and colleagues; the patient lives in a world where being open about such things in the dehumanized, hyperindividualized public sphere typically only invites scrutiny and further alienation (likely from individuals who are just as alienated and scared as them), which increases their reliance on the therapist as much as it increases their sense of cognitive dissonance, as though they are caught between two realities in a depersonalized limbo. Of course, there's only the one reality as far as we know, but to this patient their inner world has become an enigma and its workings thoroughly mystified by an industry that portends one must go through many years of schooling and certification before they can make sense of the human mind; which is as absurd and circular claim to make as "God works in mysterious ways." - as if that explains why your toaster catching on fire this morning and the delay that caused made you miss your train commute derailing, killing everyone on board. Likewise, it is just as circular to tell someone they have a disease called "depression", which can only be treated by "trained professionals" - trained, of course, in "psychology", an invention of the human mind as much as the phrase "mental illness" with all it's implicit meanings. But the backbone of the entire practice is to be a truthclaim, much like any religion - they suppose "mental illness" to be as sacrosanct as religions hold their Gods; that is, as self-evident and infallible as a physicist would consider thermodynamics.

Perhaps it would be too radical to admit "depression" is an entirely normal reaction to a world in which one exists as a dehumanized, chronically hollowed-out wage slave whose life has been reduced to a series of empty, mindless labor and emptier consumption rituals, comforted only by addictive drugs pushed on them at every turn, and vacuous social ties of similarly hollowed out wageslaves who only know how to monologue and compete; who breathes, eats and shits microplastic, pollution and pesticides, and can't remember the last time they felt somebody actually cared if they lived or died. It'd be far too radical to admit we're living through the slow-motion collapse of the living super organism we call 'civilization' and every case of "depression" is like one little support column showing signs of giving out under the weight of a monstrosity that has become too bloated and labyrinthine for its own good. Then we'd be engaging in reality, giving the "illness" the scope it deserves, and psychology cares not for this.

The reality is, contemporary psychology functions much like a religion or a cult does, in that what one receives from it depends very much on what one puts into it - the power wielded by such organizations are directly correlate to belief of their followers. This is the power of placebo, confirmation bias, and magical thinking. If one considers their reaction to, say, climate change to be "abnormal", they merely have to walk into a therapist's office and their belief will be confirmed - their conscious experience will become a list of "symptoms" of "illness", for which they'll receive "medication". The words, the labels, the pills, they're all momentarily comforting, but none actually deal with the original problem any more than popping an Aspirin cures a raging influenza infection. That's because the entire "mental health industry" is palliative at best - worse yet, it serves at the behest of the state, which benefits massively from an industry that teaches individuals to view their life's problems through a scope that is not only decidedly apolitical but atomized as well.

Take an issue like climate change and this scope fails almost entirely - its sufficiently large-scale enough that the therapist's individualizing lens has no real answer to it. One who is trained in end-of-life therapy may have some more substantial answers that verge into decidedly philosophical territory, but most "by the book" therapists will preach willful ignorance; their role is not to create independent-thinking individuals, community leaders, politically-minded citizens or would-be revolutionaries, because they don't operate in this paradigm; an office vending machine is more communalistic than a therapist's office could ever claim to be. No, their role is to keep people complicit and complacent in the consume/work false dichotomy lifestyle for they are part of the very same paradigm, this being their work as much as preaching is a priests'. The "mental health" industry is obliged to meet the absurdity of the world it exists in and profits off of, and so existential terror becomes "eco-anxiety", another cutesy label which can be "treated" with the right combination of benzodiazepines and willful ignorance, just as a village witch doctor may have once treated "spiritual possession" with a concoction of ayahuasca and a ceremony. Now this ceremony only takes 45 minutes and $200 a week and a monthly trip to the pharmacy. Who ever said capitalism wasn't efficient?! -Suicidal stranger from the internet

 

[Sinkinshyp]

since my son passed in a car accident almost 3 years ago I have tried hard to find therapy. No one around takes my insurance. If I did find one who took my insurance they would probably not know how to deal with me. I have so many issues starting from a childhood of mental and physical abuse. The death of my son was just the icing on the cake. A good therapist just to deal with my sons death wouldn't be easy to find if I had choices to pick through. The none option really narrowed it down. Money hungry greedy profession.

 

[Dude1983]

I think they are useless, and the pills they give are also dangerous and can really fuck u up, i think the only thing they are able to do is to just stun people with pills, My mom sent me to therapists sometimes when i was 16-20, they did not even know if there was a problem at all, which there was not.

Unless u are unable to follow commonn sense logic, u do not need anyone to tell u what is ur problem, if u know the problem u can try the solution.

 

[Meditation guide]

The none option really narrowed it down. Money hungry greedy profession.

I agree. When my mother died I tried very hard to find someone to talk to, a therapist. I talked twice to someone associated with hospice. That young lady was horrible. She was so condescending so disinterested and just there to collect her paycheck. She really seemed to be bored, felt superior, and added to my pain immensely. I finally went to a synagog that had a group session for people who had lost a loved one. They were very nice to me and supportive. I'm not even Jewish. It wasn't counseling but just being around a group of others in pain who treated me nicely helped a lot.