Like, I’ve had several therapists/psychologists/psychiatrists/counselors throughout my life who either seemed disinterested or flat out unfit to deal with people like me, and I don’t even think I’m the worst case scenario (who knows, maybe I am?).
What’s their main demographic, who do they even help? Yuppies, professionals, people in manager positions who already have had successful professional, social, and dating lives?
They’re already too expensive for most of the population, they seem to be absolutely oblivious to the problems of most men of color or trans folks or most gay folks, they can’t help early career young people, definitely not working class people, like what the fuck are they good for? And can people just shut the fuck about ‘just go to therapy, honey’, ‘men will do anything but go to therapy’ like fuck off. I went to therapy, and holy shit yeap, the world still sucks and society is still extremely hostile to me.
Oh I can change my reaction to things? to live in delusion is almost what they seem to be prescribing and nah, I’d rather just save the 100 dollars per session and spend it on 2 months supply of fucking OxyContin.
And motherfucker, if you’re a psychiatrist, and I’m here for adderall or anxiolitics or fucking laxatives, you had better fucking give it to me. I didn’t fucking pay 150 to prescribe me children’s medication or to be lectured about the importance of therapy.
when I went in the psych ward I got to see an actual psychologist and the difference between that and some regular talk therapist was night and day. I made progress at a rate I would have never thought possible before. I was also able to enter a DBT program which I consider by far the most successful mental health intervention I have ever undergone. regular talk therapy with some guy with a bachelor’s degree isn’t very useful in comparison, I see it as akin to writing in a journal basically but with some accountability. for reference I am autistic, have had severe depression for almost a decade, and when I went into the ward I probably could have qualified for a personality disorder diagnosis like BPD. regular therapists can’t meaningfully help people like me but seeing the real brain docs did make a difference. obviously the shit part is that’s unaffordable for most folks, I was lucky enough to have my insurance cover it and I also don’t live in America where the whole system seems waay more hellish.
I don’t know anything about DBT. I did a self conscious giggle about the dialectic part when I read about it though. How do you feel the process of it was?
the one i did was kinda a condensed crash course, 12 weeks of two group sessions and one individual per week. some of them are more stretched out over like 6 months or a year. yeah, knowing a thing or two about dialectics was something of an advantage lol. a lot of it is learning how to recognise your emotions, allowing yourself to feel them instead of e.g. dissociating, and then learning healthy coping mechanisms to control the emotions if they’re overwhelming. i found a lot of the “let yourself feel the emotion” stuff hard bc autism makes it hard to identify emotions sometimes and also i dissociate a lot from difficult ones which i still haven’t fully unlearned. there’s other stuff too like interpersonal skills. overall applying the dialectical method to your own perspective of yourself and your environment is pretty powerful, all about getting away from binary thinking which comes up a lot when you’re suffering with mental illness or whatever. i’d recommend it to anyone who has trouble with emotional regulation, i’m pretty cynical about therapy but i really bought into DBT and found it actually helped me.
That is really interesting and cool. That is really fascinating to see another dialectics application