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This. Most people do drugs or alcohol for kicks or to put the pain away, as in general, but there are a lot of people who are self medicating symptoms they are

• Our_Benefactors 1y ago
  > told me it take years to get to the That’s the grift — healing sold as a subscription. The incentive for therapists to behave this way can’t be regulated away because the regulation itself acts as a cover for this behavior: credentials, ethics boards, continuing-ed checkboxes — all window dressing to sanctify creating a dependency in the patient. The system launders manipulation through professionalism and calls it care.
  • intended 1y ago
    Yes the lack of a magic bullet is definitely the fault of science. You can have bad experiences with therapy. It will put patients off entirely from further therapy. It sucks if this is you. It really does - because on the flip side, if therapy has worked for you, then you know how your life has improved.
    • zeroq 1y ago
      To be devils advocate it was an intersection point between psychotherapy being socially acceptable here in my part of EU and the start of covid where a lot of people reached a breaking point. From a business perspective it's a hunting season and it's not so different from IT where a lot of people game their way in. I was only shocked because I thought it was highly regulated system and on average you should get at least some help.
  • justonceokay 1y ago
    I’m not so sure. I think there really are a lot of people who benefit from some kind of talk therapy and that that therapy might actually take a long time to produce results. You have your whole life to ingrain thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses into your being. If you anre unlucky, you might be surrounded by other people who reinforce maladaptive ways of thinking and being, such that they seem 100% normal. Expecting those deeply carved neural pathways to change quickly through any intervention is ridiculous. Think about how cult deprogramming is a specialized skill with a high failure rate. Except this cult only has a single member, your inner monologue. It can take a lot of time for a therapist to figure out what the cult is even about, and it all comes from you talking (and talking and talking…)
    • dns_snek 1y ago
      I think "a lot" is understating it, I would guess that this describes the vast majority of people. It can take years just to find the connection between surface level problems that you see and their root causes. Then once you find the connection it takes a long time time to accept it and even longer to actually heal from it (if ever). From what I understand, it's generally a lot easier to heal from an acute traumatic event of some sort, no matter how serious it is (e.g. physical or sexual assault), that than it is to heal from sustained and repeated trauma caused by "well-meaning" people. In the latter case you probably don't even realize that it happened at first because it's an accumulation of a million paper cuts throughout your life. Then if you try to talk to the people involved (e.g. your parents) they'll probably dismiss you and say that you're being dramatic because each instance is utterly insignificant on its own. You have to peel back so many layers of it until you finally understand what happened, how it affected you, and how to heal from it. And that's just on a cognitive level, on an emotional level which is the one that actually matters it's going to take even longer to internalize everything. The best thing we could do as a society to solve like half of all of our problems (with everything from unemployment due to personality disorders, to drug use, to violent crime) is to start taking mental well-being seriously, to prevent as much harm as possible and to offer help (for free) at the earliest possible opportunity. There should be mass public education campaigns about how seemingly subtle and inconsequential things can break people's minds if they're sustained and perpetuated over a long period of time and especially in childhood. And I don't mean those trendy "mental health matters" and "we accept your depression and anxiety <3" campaigns that have been going around for a while because 99.9% of that is completely inauthentic. Even out of the people who claim to care, the vast majority only care long as it's a mild case of it that doesn't actually visibly affect you too much - then the judgement starts.
  • zeroq 1y ago
    And the problem is - after a few screw ups I've told myself - hey, maybe you don't know it all, maybe they have some secret formula you don't know about, just take it easy, lay back, don't be a smart ass, and let them take care of you. Be open minded. I mean, I drove a Mustang in EU, shipped from US before Ford started selling them here. Local Ford didn't even had "mustang" in their system. I kept trolling them when they were offering free service for Ford drivers. My first 6 car mechanics were either a total scam or they were genuine but had absolutely no clue what they were doing. What was I thinking? Maybe that the trade is regulated, and people with a title are more professional? Hell no.
    • jakelazaroff 1y ago
      You probably won't make any progress you if think of therapists like car mechanics, where you give them your broken car and they give you back a fixed one a few days later. Therapists can't just poke around in your brain to find the problems. They certainly can't fix them without your participation. It's more like working with a physical trainer. You won't accomplish your fitness goals by just showing up. Rather, you need be engaged, learn how to actually use the tools they give you, strive to improve yourself and put in the effort to do so.
      • zeroq 1y ago
        Have you even read my post? I met a gal who kept silent for five visits. Five paid visits and I got no feedback at all. Silent treatment is what you call it. And when I finally confronted her about that she told me that I'm making a scene, because normally people are seeing a change only after couple of years.
        • jakelazaroff 1y ago
          I'm not defending every therapist in the world, I'm responding to your car mechanic anecdote.
    • throw83749499 1y ago
      It kind of proves it is a scam. You tried it, it did not work. But for some reason you lived experience is invalid, and you should keep trying again and again! I know a few people, who import and run vintage american cars in EU. They do all servicing themselves, buy spare parts from american ebay. They totaly think modern car industry is a scam. They would never allow some "professional" mechanic into their beloved car.
  • jakelazaroff 1y ago
    If you want to become fit, you need to exercise indefinitely or your muscles will atrophy. If you want to lose weight, you need to diet indefinitely or you'll regain it. The steps you take to lower your cholesterol? Indefinite. Blood pressure? Indefinite. Blood sugar? Indefinite. It's no different with mental health. We are perpetual works in progress. Any changes take not only effort to accomplish, but effort to maintain. That's just how humans work.
    • weregiraffe 1y ago
      >If you want to become fit, you need to exercise indefinitely or your muscles will atrophy. You can feel and see the effects of exercise very soon after starting. It's cumulative and predictable. Therapy is nothing like that.
      • kelseyfrog 1y ago
        If therapy was like that, what would it look like?
        • weregiraffe 1y ago
          If I knew, I'd be a billionaire.
      • fragmede 1y ago
        It depends on the therapist and the patient. Therapists, like every other profession has practitioners that are really really good, some that are mediocre, and everything in between. Patients, too, come in all shapes and all sizes. When therapy works, it works really really well, and relatively quickly too. From casual observation of friends and other people around me (ie, as a regular person; I'm not a health care professional.) I've seen people manage to make sustained healthy changes in just a handful of sessions. I've also seen people not improve, or take far longer. If you've been going to therapy for more than a few months and haven't been improving, it's time to change something up. Therapy should be "something like that".
    • kelseyfrog 1y ago
  • dns_snek 1y ago
    > That’s the grift — healing sold as a subscription. This therapist might've been, but often problems that require psychotherapy can't be done quickly, no matter how qualified they are and how expediently they're trying to help you. What they said wasn't wrong, but that description certainly makes it sound like they weren't trying to help at all which would've moved that healing timeline from "years" to "never". Are you saying that psychological issues could be healed quickly if they just tried harder and didn't have the profit motive, or that they don't need to be healed at all?
• itsme0000 1y ago
  I saw many therapists and I have pretty mixed feelings about it. I honestly it did a lot for me when a therapist simply said “Wow that’s a bad situation I feel really bad for you. It so unfair.” But anytime I looked for instructions or objectives on how to improve my life they would basically say “I can’t tell you exactly what to do, you need to come to that conclusion for yourself.” The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. They always tried to see things from my side, but never really believed that spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity. Even though it’s against their training, they can’t help but judge you lifestyle and unusually that manifests as silence on important issues instead of disagreement.
  • nostrademons 1y ago
    > The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. That is the problem, yes. I think a lot of the confusion from people just beginning their psychotherapeutic journey is that they think the point of therapy is to make them happier. No. The point of therapy is to make them happier, and sadder, and angrier, and more driven, and aware of their fear, and connected to their shame and guilt, and able to love. In short, it's to give you perspective on emotions, so that you can feel them on a minute-to-minute basis and decide what you want to do, and realize that "because you want to do it" is just as valid as any other reason, if not more. > spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity A therapist would be naturally conflicted about this, because spending your night in a drunker stupor watching TV will make you happier, but being in agony every night slowly building your contempt for humanity is the work that needs to be done. The point of therapy is to help your understand a.) that you are in agony every night and b.) why are you building your contempt for humanity? It's to help you feel the emotions, and to feel them as emotions, and then to eventually integrate them into your life in a way that is constructive.
    • itsme0000 1y ago
      Yeah actually I don’t need to be in agony or improve my outlook at all or even understand my motivations for my own actions to be happy. I needed real medical care. Therapists think pain can teach you to accept something, but true pain, it can’t teach you anything. It only makes you a worse person. There’s no possibility for the rationalization of true agony. Attempts to do so simply lead to worse, more dangerous mental problems. The majority of people are tourists in the world of pain. They enter, make observations, then exit, assured that they had a harrowing experience. But for those of us who are residents in the city of pain, we know it stinks and it will grind us down until we become evil people. We are stuck there due to some kind of undeserved poverty which is not within our power to control. No amount of compromise or contemplation can escape you from a physical prison. It’s a cage that exists inside you rather than around you and it does nothing to shake the bars other than annoy the tourists who gawk as they pass by. I know that’s pretty dark, but people simply will never acknowledge that life long happiness is somewhat dependent on luck. It would likely cause society to fail if the lucky people realized evil people were actually equally self aware but just fundamentally less lucky and under the influence of random inexplicable pain, that’s just a result of human biology. People just reject this idea even though it’s obviously true. Therapists simply don’t understand this simple fact because it’s not their job, they are there to guide the tourists.
• nostrademons 1y ago
  > told me it take years to get to the core. So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction. The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them. Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them. Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
  • southernplaces7 1y ago