America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?
America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?
The U.S. has hit peak therapy. So why isn't national mental health improving?
It's seldom covered in any decent capacity by most work or private health insurance unless you target it directly and lose out on other options.
Most offices are corner cutting so hard that the following week, you might have a new therapist/counselor that has no frame of reference beyond the former's patient folder on you.
A lot of therapy is just a gotcha for Christian and religious bullshit.
Therapy and mental health is often seen as a sign of weakness for men, who often times never open up or seek help to begin with due to the stigma.
This isn't a huge conundrum. It's pretty easy to understand.
That and therapy is treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause. Therapy can help you heal, but when every week brings a new trauma you're just treading water.
That and therapy is treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause.
As a therapist, I have to object and say that’s not good therapy. Even when the underlying cause is something external to yourself that you do not have control over, a competent therapist should be working with you on how you can minimize contact, manage contact better, or completely escape said external stressor. A complete fix may not be possible, but there’s usually room for improvement.
Regardless, it’s incorrect to say therapy treats symptoms, but not underlying cases. Underlying causes are focused on all the time.
Therapy can help you heal, but when every week brings a new trauma you're just treading water.
Damn, that’s.. depressingly poignant
Ok but therapy doesn't have to be a "crisis of the week" situation. A person and their therapist should be working together toward a set of goals that aim to address their needs (e.g. getting enough self-esteem, confidence, new perspectives, etc. to treat the cause (e.g. quit abusive job, leave a partner, make boundaries with crazy family, etc..). Good therapists identify when therapy is drifting outside of effective modalities and guide the sessions back to the overall goals.
Signed, a person who is in "crisis of the week" therapy but is also terrible at confrontation and is working toward bringing it up.
That and mental health awareness becoming more prevalent means that more people are becoming aware of mental health issues
Spoken like someone who's never been in therapy.
My therapist asked me about what stresses me out the most. I said "rent doubled". She said, "Yeah there's no therapy for that." Then we chuckled and sighed deeply while we looked for something more lighthearted to talk about, like my father's disappointment at me.
Our mental health is getting worse because life on this planet is getting worse. It's not rocket science.
I am shocked that a market based healthcare system that prioritizes profits manages to lock people into lucrative consumer cycles where they're conditioned to rely on medications or treatments that don't cure them. I am shocked.
Completely unrelated, it's very noticeable how everyone is medicated and has mental health problems since I've moved to the US, weirdly back in Australia where the health system is different it's less common. What are the odds of that...
As it turns out, stress actually increases if people have to trade their savings for mental health services
So it's that the treatment is intentionally ineffective?
It's not that the US is a worse place to live?
Without reading the article I'm gonna guess that it's because work, politics and culture have got you all so permanently stressed and anxious that you turn on each at the slightest upset like sharks scenting blood.
We live in a world that rewards narcissistic asshole behavior and nothing else. It's fucking depressing no amount of therapy will change that.
But some drugs might help you change your brain chemistry to be as narcissistic or just so singular focused that you can't think about being depressed because you are focused on repetitive task work.
And isn't that the fix that we all need?
Alternate reading of the headline: "We're using more bandages than ever- why are people still getting cuts?"
If your boat is on fire. And has been for a while. And you start throwing water on it - but at the same time someones at the top of the boat are actively throwing gasoline everywhere - you aren't going to put out the fire.
Is our mental health getting worse, or are we more aware of mental health issues? The article mentions how more people seek therapy now than 20 years ago and how more people are reporting their mental health as not good. However, I wonder how many people back then had mental health issues that they suffered in silence with. There used to be more of a stigma with having mental health disorders which led to people not seeking treatments (which of course led to less diagnoses). Someone with anxiety or depression would live with it or chalk it up to a character flaw or might think that what they're dealing with was what everyone dealt with, but they probably wouldn't seek therapy or tell anyone that their mental health is poor. So I do think that part of it is people acknowledging their struggles with mental health more now than ever.
I think this is a big factor in the uptick of MH cases being reported. It's more okay to seek out help, so it gets reported more. The cases were still there 20 years ago.
When the military started to crack down on sexual assault and made it more "friendly" to report being a victim the number of cases reported went up. The cases where always there. Now we have a better idea of what we didn't know before.
It's the same thing with more lgbqt+ people. They've always existed, but since it's more and more acceptable to come out more people are comfortable than ever before, despite the right screaming that kids are being "indoctrinated".
It's an interesting article and worth a full read. But I'll bullet point the main problems with mental healthcare it describes (based on my comprehension of the article):
- Over and misdiagnosis - since mental health disorders are based on symptoms which often overlap with other conditions, misdiagnosis is common. Also, diagnosis is inherently subjective and depends on the therapists impressions and the quality of information the patient gives
- Therapy itself doesn't work for everyone, and when it does it often takes a lot of time. People expect to head into one or two therapy sessions and have all their problems solved. Also, some forms of therapy have less evidence of effectiveness.
- Since therapy is hard, time consuming, and costly, therapists often resort to prescribing meds. Antidepressants in particular are far less effective than people perceive. At best antidepressants can slightly help improve your mood, but the hard work of therapy is needed to address the underlying issues, which often doesn't happen.
- What often has the biggest benefits are strategies that help people manage the stressors, habits, and circumstances of their lives. Traditional therapy often isn't geared toward that, and there is only so much any therapy can do because...
- A lot of our mental health is based on societal factors and our circumstances, and you can't just talk your way out living with all of this gestures vaguely at everything
- The rise of app based mental healthcare is good in that it expanda access, but the quality is shit.
and you can’t just talk your way out living with all of this gestures vaguely at everything
Chad analysis
The rise of app based mental healthcare is good in that it expanda access, but the quality is shit.
Careful peeps, they leak data too... which could cause a lot of mental health stressors. So got to keep that in mind when dealing unreliable tech merchants or really any of them.
It seems to me there is a very simple answer to the issue pointed out in the article—mental health problems are out of control, and no matter how many therapists and doctors we employ to combat it, there’s just no stopping it.
I'll choose "every politician is a lying grifter" for $500, Alex.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong because I have trouble understanding this. But someone told me the other day that I’m the height of the Great Depression,1931(?), that the average American was making 88k in todays dollar.
Today the average American is making 33k. Is this true?
If this is true that would totally explain the amount of mental illness on top of climate change concerns. If it is true I don’t know why more people wouldn’t be talking about it
A lot of those claims are based on tax return numbers, which radically overestimate the average salary back then because only the richest people actually filed taxes during that time.
Don't get me wrong, we're not in a good place, but it's not peak great depression bad.
Idk anything about that, but I have heard that the wealth disparity is worse than pre-revolution France
As far as a percentage of your annual income goes, during the Great Depression houses were cheaper than they are today.
Shit, buying a house then was cheaper than RENTING today.
Every aspect of life demands 110% from us at all times.
We are all having to clean an entire house, cook every meal, pay huge mortgages or rents, pay loans, daycare costs, and insurance...for what? We've removed all economies of scale for ourselves, and made it to where it's easier to spend the cash to have someone else do it. They then get the economies of scale that we used to have when we lived with extended family and didn't have to pay for every basic service multiple times.
It's exhausting, and there's no slack left in the system. You can't cut back on much to make the rest float, because everything is the maximum cost it can be for even the shitty versions, and prices on everything go up continually with no real raises available for the vast majority.
We are one major catastrophe away from huge swaths of our population becoming migrant refugees to other states.
We've removed all redundancy and forgot that it's synonym is resiliency. We are absolutely fucked, it's just a matter of counting the time before the house of cards collapses.
Absolutely correct with all of this.
It's pretty simple...the people that really need mental health services can't afford it.
Antidepressants aren't cheap if you're on the designer drugs...and they're the first ones recommend by most doctors.
It's because it begins very young. I've seen my friend hit her SIX MONTH OLD because they reached out to grab glasses that she puts in front of her. To train up a child? some bullshit religious "child training" program is often used in religious communities.
More frequent parental punitive discipline was significantly associated with smaller dorsal striatal volume in children, consistent with research demonstrating striatal differences following exposure to severe early life stress. Moreover, these results are consistent with a growing body of research linking normative variation in parental care with children’s brain structure. They align more specifically with recent work linking negative parenting (e.g., aggressive behavior, hostility) with reward processing neuroanatomy in adolescents and frontal-striatal functional connectivity in children.
Smaller dorsal striatal volume was significantly associated with higher depressive symptoms in children, consistent with previous work that has mainly focused on MDD in adolescents or adults. Thus, this study extends previous work by showing similar associations in a community sample of children who did not have psychiatric diagnoses. These findings suggest that changes in striatal morphology may precede the onset of MDD, [Major depressive disorder] which typically occurs in adolescence or adulthood
Parental Punitive Discipline and Children’s Depressive Symptoms: Associations with Striatal Volume
People are literally damaging their children's brain by using punitive discipline / stressors.
"I got spanked and I'm ok" just is not true.
People were far more abusive to their kids in the past, so that doesn't really explain why depression is getting worse now.
Because they were depressed and had a litany of other issues. Since it was taboo to talk about (and confront) those issues they developed fucked up coping mechanisms. Like hitting their kids/spouse. Explosive tempers, or just being an asshole. Drinking, gambling, cheating, etc.
Two of my grandparents were hardcore alcoholics that drank themselves to death after attempting suicide multiple times (which I only heard about as an adult). The third succeeded in hanging themself. The fourth lived to old age and was one of the nastiest, most narcissistic people I've met.
Actually that makes sense. studies show epigenetic gene expression and its connections to depression. Conflicts like world war 2, that happened 80 years ago could be affecting us today. Abuse our parents, grandparents, great grandparents had to deal with could be the reason why we are more depressed.
I come from a family who lived in okinawa in 1945, my grandparents was part of children who were made to fight/work by the japanese imperial navy. They came here to the US for a better life. It was better but that didn’t change the fact that my grandparents went through that.
My entire family (3 generations) suffers from depression. My kids have never been abused so they don’t have depression but they are one stressful event away from being depressed.
Back then everyone smoked 100 cigarettes everyday.
Because we haven’t exterminated the conservatives.
Conservatives or their ideologies that no longer serve us
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On top of the other comments, I'm also depressed because I don't see myself having much of a future. I'm likely not going to be able to retire because I won't be able to afford it. We are already seeing people reite later and later. It's a slow build, sure. But where are we gonna be in the next 30 years when I should be at that age? Am I gonna be working till I'm 75? Can we even retire at all? Most of us can't get enough money to build a retirement fund. We are way behind fancially where we should be. That's not only harming us now, but at this point I've seen a lot of people say they just don't have any hope at retirement. It's just no longer a thing people are striving for, because it doesn't look like it's gonna be possible. Right now you're looking at needing around a million for many people, and we can't even get a couple thousand saved up.
On top of that, I have to worry about global warming. Which not only will fuck up things even more for the stuff in the first part, but I don't even know if I'll be alive to retire. And living is gonna fucking suck in so many ways. I'm in Oregon, and we have fires every year now. Last year we had some days reach 115°F. Things are going to be fucked.
It's sometimes hard to be happy and optimistic when there's not a lot to look forward to in the future.
I'm old enough to remember a time when the future seemed bright and optimistic. It felt like everyone was excited about what's next, and we wanted to get to the future more quickly. In the late 80's and part of the 90's we had tv shows like "Beyond 2000" that painted this utopian future, and all the promises of the democratization of ideas and information were promised by the internet.
Now it's just wealth gaps, social media poisoning society at large, climate change intensifying, and the consolidation of the social middle class into a uniform lower class. We don't see the seeds of any positive change, and only expect things to get worse.
The one thing I can say is that the future also looked bleak around WW2. We had come off a world war, pandemic, the Titanic sinking, and then went right into WW2. I could understand why people back then had even more dire survival types of concerns. Not that it makes us feel any better today, because the catalysts for progressive changes back then were horrifying events.
If anything that makes me feel worse, as the true fix for today's issues mean we have to be super-fucked before it'll get better. Right now we're just fucked.
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How do they think we've hit peak therapy? I can't even find a therapist for my autistic son, and it takes months to find a therapist willing to take on new clients, mental healthcare in America is at least twice as broken as physical healthcare, with the exception of dental care, which is absolutely horrendous.
America! F yeah!
🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
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Tldr; it's all "capitalists" fault, like always
Uggh it's so reductive I'm tired of it. There's so much more wrong with us than just capitalism but nobody likes being called out or needing to take themselves down a few pegs so, let's blame it all on capitalism yeah!
The greed and selfishness rotting at our societal core is bigger than just capitalism, and we need to stop pretending we don't all need to change in some BIG ways, if things are going to start improving. Capitalism or not.
We could start by not incentivizing people to be greedy. But that would require some sort of structural change somehow. Maybe to the financial system.
What do you perceive to be the primary driver(s) of the greed and selfishness epidemic in which we find ourselves?
In what big ways do you think we should all change?
