Because it's an inherently flawed system in my opinion.
For clarification, I don't buy into this notion that people are just randomly cursed with depression because of genetics and muh chemical imbalance. Except in rare cases, I believe that brains are reacting logically (if not perhaps more sensitively than some) to real immutable circumstances. It's not inexplicable magic. Cognitive reframing is often double-speak for gaslighting... speaking as someone who really tried therapy and several different therapists for over a decade before I became too old to be covered under parental insurance. It's hypnotism with extra steps and the clout of a degree.
Most suicidal individuals, in my estimation and personal experience, are reacting deeply to societal and economic factors beyond any individual's control, including the therapist's.
Meds are there in an effort to unnaturally force you to "tolerate" it. Think soma from Brave New World.
When someone I know is struggling with making friends, I do not recommend they hit up ChatGPT.
When someone I know is struggling with dating or in their sex life, I do not recommend getting a hooker.
I fail to understand why a therapist is treated differently. It's an expensively cheap substitute that doesn't address the underlying problem that leads people to seek them out in the first place.
Therapists are the perfect scapegoat for the average person to sleep with a clean conscience that they "did the right thing" by telling someone to call a hotline or talk to a therapist. They can sleep soundly without any need to authentically confront the very dark struggles and lived experience of someone else. Just tell them they're thinking wrong and go to a thinking doctor to learn how to think right, and you've done your good deed as a stand-up citizen for the day. Fuck off.
But the question then remains: what do you say to them? What do you do for them? If it's not appropriate to insist they seek out the equivalent of a fake-friend or hooker or hypnotist, then what else?
I try to be as kindly but bluntly honest as possible. Speaking from my own experience, welcome to reality. This is how it is. Few care, and those who do have no substantive answer for you. They can't change the structure of society itself. They can't bend time. There are losers and winners, but the winners get to live in the fairy tale of a "Just World." The world isn't just. Most do not deserve their success any more than anybody else, nor are they necessarily undeserving; it just is. This reality makes those people uncomfortable, so they come up with copes, platitudes, ignore survivorship bias and any inconvenient thought. They live in their bubble and they don't want you to pop it. They will go through all manner of mental gymnastics to avoid the cold and often unforgiving truths.
Nobody wants to live with survivor's guilt. Nobody wants to feel that their worth seemingly comes at the expense of others. They will vehemently believe they earned that shit. That they deserve it, every single bit of it. They conjure up concepts like meritocracy. Someone is suicidal or depressed because they're weak, they're lesser, they didn't try as hard they did. An easy to pill to swallow, the idea that anyone and everyone can just have that life, the good life, if they take a pill or talk to someone who read some psychology / sociology textbooks and got a piece of paper to prove it.
The world is way more complicated. We live in a world where if you are frustrated over not being rewarded for being a good person, you are shamed and lambasted, not consoled or given reparation. There are Cains and Abels in the world, but unlike the Bible, the distinction in real life is completely arbitrary. Bad people get ahead. Bad people get rewarded. They Abels are not all good, pure, saintly. Far from it. They are often no better than you are me. For the most part, we are all equally shitty. So the inequality cannot be explained by some ideal of ethics or morality. It does not take a fucking rocket scientist to see this. And so it is no surprise to me that people lose in this casino so badly and repetitively that they want to leave.
