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.
While I’m sure that there are some therapists out there who don’t focus on this much, I assure you any modern day therapist worth their salt has had extensive systems training and is VERY aware of the environmental pressures their clients are facing. There are even entire theories that operate from this perspective. Look up the Liberation Health Model.
What might be fair to claim is that the PHARMACOLOGICAL industrial complex is myopically focused on the individual. But given the nature of big pharma, I would express doubt on this as well. They are also very systems savvy as they created the system itself.
They may be aware of it, but they don’t seem to be pushing the appropriate solutions. If someone comes in with severe climate anxiety, the immediate solution may very well be to medicate in order to bring down the anxiety level, but the overall solution should not be to continue therapy and medication, but to embrace that anxiety and utilize it to educate and agitate for change.
In essence, I’m saying that anyone positing to be working on climate related mental health that doesn’t directly advocate for mass movement style populist changes to their charges and the society at large is a charlatan, because nothing they can prescribe will ever make things better in the long run, only make their patient care less.
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If your issues are specifically with the way medication is prescribed, then your arguments need to be focused at psychiatrists/ general practitioners. Therapists do not prescribe medication. We do therapy.
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I cited a type of therapy in my last post that literally helps empower clients to seek systemic change in their environment. Look it up and read up before you claim that therapists “don’t seem to be pushing the appropriate solutions”.
While it may seem like semantics, the myth that therapists are pill pushers is widely circulated and often cited as a reason for people not getting help sooner. It’s important that people understand that there is meaningful help out there, and statements made in your comment are not helpful to them.
Thank you, I appreciate that distinction, and will be sure to clarify in the future.
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This is a super hot take but if someone wants to be medicated to deal with a dying world than I’m okay with that. I think it’s better than hitting the bottle tbh. Obviously companies shouldn’t force pills on people but we live in a fucked up capitalist hellscape, so yeah.
No, i feel that entirely. My issue is with supposed doctors prescribing pills like Candy for any little thing. The US has ridiculous rates of anti depressant use. We don’t release the data, but one study found 110 pills consumed per person. Our system isn’t set up to heal people, it’s set up to cover their gaping wounds with paper mache and send them back to work. I can hardly fault the people who went to a professional for help, nor their desire for some sort of salve against our toxic, corrosive society.
That makes perfect sense. As someone who has had genuine chemical imbalances I’ve had to wrestle with, another thing that’s really interesting is that people who are obviously in the depths of delusional/paranoid hell are so afraid of the mental system that they never seek help. It’s so sad that its in the state its in, if things were a little better than maybe those people wouldn’t balk at therapy while they are in the throes of schizophernia or something.
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.
❤️❤️❤️❤️ What a beautiful response, thank you for taking the time to write it up and share it.
Workaholism and excessive resource consumption are the diseases of our time.
There have been reports from the psych sector about the shortcomings of the medical model of treatment, namely that it’s much less effective to treat the physiological aspects of mental illness when the patient cannot escape the toxic environment that is exacerbating their symptoms. And such environments are commonplace in our society. Among the elements that trigger symptoms are the very real threats to humanity that are not being addressed by our leadership.