I don't want happy pills to tolerate a shitty situation, i want the shitty situation to end. Therapy can't talk away the material conditions that cause my suffering. I want better coping mechanism and that's why i'm here but jesus does it feel like a friendship i pay for.
What do you think? Is it overprescribed as an answer? When deaths of despair rise it's always "we should fund more mental health institutions", yes then what? Does mental illness just drop from the sky? Does it emerge from your head fully formed? Do these talking points sound overly medicalist to anyone else?
I'm just so, so tired
This article went semi-viral in the social work world recently, so you're not alone.
This is a constant struggle within social work. There's value in helping people cope with a shitty situation, but that can't be all that mental health providers do or else it just becomes reinforcing societal oppression. This is something that social workers in particular have dropped the ball on, because both helping individuals cope and fighting to change oppressive systems is supposed to be our mandate, it's something that supposedly makes social work different from the other "helping professions", but for a variety of systemic reasons that's just stopped being what social workers do, outside of performative yearly "social work day at the capitol" type events.
That's how I feel about mental health services in general, but also how I feel about medication specifically. I'm medicated myself, and it helps me function. There is value in that. But it's much more valuable as part of a larger program to challenge oppression and change our material conditions than it is just as its own individual thing.