Note: I believe there are genuine instances where medication helps. Coming from a family with a history of schizophrenia, I understand how hard it can be to survive without access to modern medications.

That said, I also believe that the Therapy Industrial Complex is myopically focused upon the individual, to the point where there’s often not even consideration of societal factors influencing our minds. It is not individual mental health leading to rising suicide rates, increases in mass shootings, and generalized depression. It is our society.

If you genuinely don’t feel regular feelings of climate anxiety that effects your ability to focus on the meaningless trash that is much of modern life, then it is you who need medication, not those who experience the entirely rational anxiety of knowing that life as we know it is very likely to come to a screeching halt, leaving us and our future generations infinitely worse off than the generations before them. It is sick to be healthy in a sick society. Instead of taking drugs to hide your emotions, use them to get angry enough to do something.

As long as people keep taking their soma and going to work, things won’t get better, they just won’t. Period.

  •  Umbrias   ( @Umbrias@beehaw.org ) 
    4•10 months ago

    Alternatively therapists focus on the individual because that’s not only clinically the best way to help someone get where they want to he, but it’s trivially true that dooming about the state of the world is not really the point of therapy, which can only serve to coach individuals in treating their own mental health and tending their internal space. Therapists don’t even often ignore external factors, but they ate principally focused with exercising your mental wellbeing and abilities. Going to the gym and hiring a trainer, only to complain about the fact that they aren’t addressing the sugar availability in grocery store shelves, but are instead focusing on your choices about your diet makes very little sense. They are there for you, it’s you who has the most ability to directly influence your mind and body, in spite of external factors.

    You can be completely healthy, fully aware of the state of the world, and live a happy life to the best of your ability. Your internal state is the thing you personally have the most influence over, unlike the world at large which progresses incrementally through the efforts of us all.

    What’s more, happy and mentally stable people are more likely to spark change and be more pro active about demanding and working towards change. Disorganized, stressed, depressed, people, and crushed morale, are all very good ways to keep someone from bettering their life in any meaningful way.