News

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.

It’s capitalism. It’s always capitalism. Explained here and here.

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.

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.

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'll choose "every politician is a lying grifter" for $500, Alex.

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.

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.

The part I found most interesting after several years of hearing statements to the contrary: the pandemic lockdowns reduced, significantly, the suicide rate, which shot up again after businesses started demanding RTOs two years into it.

Time links to this article which goes into more detail - doesn't explicitly mention WFH/RTO, but the years line up: https://time.com/6271257/suicide-rates-increased-2021/

After being told for so long that the lockdowns had caused problems with mental health, it's interesting to see the exact opposite appears to have happened. COVID, sure, it's caused problems (which would explain why rates went down then up once COVID had infected people and WFH started to end for so many people) and suggests the WFH-damages-mental health thing might just have been a bad faith meme introduced by our incompetent overlords...

Because we haven’t exterminated the conservatives.

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.

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

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.

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!