Finding a good therapist both sucks and is expensive, because every appointment with a bad one is a complete drain of money that can fuck you up more than you were when entering, but ideally does nothing for you.
So now you have a sunk cost situation when you realize your therapist is bad for you. Thing that helped me most to stop self hatred was a book with exercises in it that I read because I could crack it open as a crutch any time instead of going to a therapist once a week, realizing my self hatred was dumb, then doing it again for a week.
every appointment with a bad one is a complete drain of money that can fuck you up more than you were when entering
yeah, that's why I'm afraid to try it. but I need to get diagnosed so I can get on disability so I guess I have to eventually.
what was the book called?
Not op but for me this book was Feeling Good by David Burns, can't recommend it enough
That's actually the one that worked for me.
I tried 7 pillars of self esteem by Nathaniel branden but it wasn't very helpful. I later found out the guy who wrote it was an objectivist who most likely had an affair with ayn rand so that's a thing. It didn't even seem like it was that rand-y, it's not like Jordan Peterson's book which Philosophytube accurately called 'self help for tories'
The book is feeling good by David burns,
And you should be fine as long as you aren't afraid to switch therapists if you think one isn't working out for you. I didn't know at the time that I should switch if it's not working so I have stayed with a therapist too long before.
I was semi-functional (worked out, cooked, kept things tidy, did all the work I needed to do mostly) and because of that they didn't really know what to do to help because they thought mental health should follow from that but it doesn't always.
I was semi-functional (worked out, cooked, kept things tidy, did all the work I needed to do mostly) and because of that they didn’t really know what to do to help because they thought mental health should follow from that but it doesn’t always.
yeah, I'm really suspicious of all these mental health professionals who seemingly don't understand that trauma exists and effects people in ways that can't be remedied by concentrating on happy thoughts or w/e
I think Fischer in capitalist realism talks about how liberal world order refuses to acknowledge the rise of mental health issues like depression with the societies we exist in.
Yeah exactly, I was meaning to say that they indivudualize it and deny a social causation for it. Fisher puts it way better than me.
"The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism"
A good portion of psychological issues will be fixed by better living conditions
Absolutely. Imagine you have a mentally disorder that makes you depressed, you feel worthless, you feel worthless and anxious. This sucks and would suck under all economic systems.
But then, because you live under capitalism, your disorder means you can't make money and you end up unemployed.
This means you don't have any money and under capitalism we measure the worth of individuals in money. Besides the odd psychotic libertarian nobody wants to say this quiet part out loud but it is evident that the capitalist world works this way. Seeing the stuff you can't do that other people can because they have money, dealing with the nasty shit other people with more money can buy their way out of gives you a concrete material foundation for your feeling of worthlessness and exclusion.
Then everyone from random assholes on the internet to government bureaucracies to your child family members feel obliged to tell you how bad a person you are, how you are lazy and stupid and the only person to blame for your misfortune, how you could have just pulled yourself up by the bootstraps and how you deserve to suffer. Everyone seems to go out of their way to tell you stuff that confirms your worst and most destructive thoughts, the system seems set up to keep you sick.
And even if you can hold on to a job doing so is hard when you have to deal with a faulty brain at the same time. You get stressed and anxious just doing normal stuff but you have to keep going as you can't afford to slow down and just do the amount of work you can manage while also maintaining your sanity.
Capitalism is a fuck. It is to our mental health what lead paint, asbestos and coal dust is to our physical.
the moral imperative to "go to therapy" is a product of a sick society lmao
I “go” to therapy, by which I mean my therapist zoom calls me three times a week to tell me to eat more and not kill myself. It’s incredibly useful and not at all a waste of my time.
Are there good therapy practices in more leftist countries? I'm so curious to see how psychological treatments are done when divorced from capitalism and its normalization.
I don't know if Denmark counts as socialist but here seeing a psychiatrist is free, so is receiving care at a psychiatric hospital. This is all well and good but waiting times are long, over a year often, as psychiatry is not considered a prestigious specialty for medical students, leading to a chronic shortage of psychiatrists. Psychiatric hospitals are chronically underfunded as there are no votes in improving mental health services and often you hear horror stories about them having to discharge patients who still need care, because they need the bed to take in patients who are more sick.
It is a lot better than privatised US healthcare but it is certainly far from good.
Imagine paying money to complain about capitalism to a ridiculously wealthy PMC lib for your mental health instead of just posting on hexbear :data-laughing:
Nah, you are being a sussy baka about it.
Men as a population have systematically undersuported emotional development and as a species we need remdial training in the area.
Like everything else in the US it is overpricex and sucks but the hyperbolic reframing of the overton window gimmick is proven effective
