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Has anyone here ever been to therapy?

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Less searchable M0rd4nt

14:09 / 04.02.07

Start here.

A recent Temple thread, Psychological Reductionism, although this is not such a great example as the basic premise met with a fairly lukewarm reception. There were more pungent examples but I guess that must have been pre-shakeup. Trouble lot of this stuff isn't in dedicated threads but scattered hither and yon in isolated posts.

My Mom Thinks I'm Cool

14:19 / 04.02.07

uhm, back to the earlier question of money and psychotherapy/counciling in the US: my old roommate had a therapist and a psychiatrist (? which is the one that prescribes drugs and which one...anyway) for free. with Medicaid. some take it, some don't. also, you have to be on Medicaid, and I don't know if you're *that* hard up for money, but you could check. she qualifies as a student with financial aid and stuff or (earlier) as an Americorps volunteer.

17:27 / 04.02.07

Not the same issue, but I never saw a therapist and managed to cure my OCD on my own.

However, that meant losing about two years of my life to a crippling form of agoraphobia and social phobia which I'm, thank fuck, now cured of too.

Looking back I should have at least given seeing a professional a chance as it may have short-cutted the two years in the desert by a large margin.

17:47 / 04.02.07

My point, essentially, is don't let mental/emotional shit fester or you might find large parts of your life rotting and falling off.

21:38 / 04.02.07

Has anyone here ever been to a psychologist or a psychiatrist? Did you get anything out of it or was it a waste of time?

Yes I've seen a psychologist for something like depression but no, it was not helpful - looking back, I realise that I was over it by the time I started to look for help. Would you believe I'm not patronising you if I said that posting about this is probably a good thing? Have you told any RL friend or relative about this? I'd take that route first anyway.

I kinda feel silly because i know a lot of people have real problems...

Well don't, persistant sadness can be a problem - a real one - you need to believe that. If it gets to the stage of I CAN'T GO ON! then you will need help. I don't know if you've ever taken street drugs, but antidepressant medication is probably not as bad for you, and not worse for you than not taking it can be (in the most extreme circumstances).

I personally understand your fear of being "not me", but I believe one's personality is stronger than drugs - as far as anyone knows what the drugs do, they only treat the symptoms. By the way, I hope you realise the irony of this fear on this BBS in particular?

Anwyay - just know that lots of people go through this, it's so common...

Leigh Monster loses its cool

22:14 / 04.02.07

there's an increasing tendency, in the western world, to frame any situational or existential unhappiness in (at least semi-)pathological terms, whether or not this is helpful

from a medical standpoint (er, speaking as someone who's taken a couple of undergrad bio-med courses), part of the reason for this increasing tendency is the increasingly evident link between depression and heart disease (see here), and doctors are becoming more anxious to get a patient's depression treated before hir risk of heart disease is increased. So, looking at it one way, who cares if it's "legitimate" or not--your body is actually suffering from it either way, and the sooner you can reduce the stress that depression puts on you, the better.

Course, down that path of thought lies a pretty sketchy and symptom-oriented approach to psychiatric care, so I'm not saying OMG GO SEE A SHRINK THIS SECOND, just that whether or not you see your sadness as having legitimate causes is probably less important than the sadness itself.

22:32 / 04.02.07

Heh... healthy mind, healthy body.

However, there isn't proof that treating depression will reduce the risk of heart disease. Except maybe for cases where the treatment is the same - i.e. physical exercise. It could be the heart disease causes depression, or vice versa, or there could be something which causes both, so that treating/suppressing the symptoms of either doesn't affect the other.

Anyway - if someone came and told me they were depressed, probably around the last thing I would tell them is that they're at increased risk of heart disease

Not that I'd hide the fact, but come on...

Leigh Monster loses its cool

22:41 / 04.02.07

haha. no, i wasn't saying one should go see a shrink or die of a heart attack. i was saying that not doing anything about your sadness because you're worried that there's no legitimate reason for it is probably a bad idea, even to the extent that its physical negative effects are recognized by standard medical practice.

23:50 / 04.02.07

Ok, you've convinced me, guys.

As of tomorrow, and as a direct consequence of this thread, I'll be going into therapy for substance abuse and depression.

Closed for Business Time

00:00 / 05.02.07

Be brave. Hope it turns out well for you.

00:02 / 05.02.07

She's lying, of course. She's already on the substance abuse track at the Twilight Home for the Criminally Damaged.

Bad Granny.

Lagrange's Nightmare

00:30 / 05.02.07

I have never been in therapy so i can't vouch for that, but there may be other options. Feeling sad could be a sign of serious problems requiring therapy, but i think ultimately that is your decision to make.

Feeling sad however can also be caused by being trapped by your own "warped" thoughts (You are what you think), which can be overcome in most instances if you are willing to work on it. Programs like: MoodGYM are available for free and are worth looking into before paying for anything. That being said if you really need to talk to someone this probably won't help.

Disco is My Class War

01:42 / 05.02.07

Given the discussions above about various parts of the board being 'anti-psychiatry', I think I'd like to qualify my comments by saying, y'know, just because I found a decent therapist sne she helped me a lot, doesn't mean I don't have a pretty huge critique of psychiatry as a discipline. This includes some anti-psychiatry theories -- mostly via Deleuze and Guattari -- and some really shocking experiences with psychiatrists. I don't see the experiences I've had with psychiatrists as germane to this thread: I wasn't attending appointments by choice, and it was about being diagnosed with something, not getting emotional support. (Indeed, emotional support was fundamentally lacking.)

I realise that people bring their own experiences and deeply-held opinions to an advice thread like this, and also that someone like Ganesh is talking from a position of therapeutic experience. But it seems important to differentiate between the various 'mental health' disciplines, because we're in danger of it becoming hopelessly unclear. Psychiatry is quite different from clinical psychology, which is different again from various kinds of therapy it's possible to obtain. A psychiatrist generally does something very particular involving diagnosis of mental disorders, resulting in various treatment options. So do some clinical psychologists. You can go to a whole bunch of other people whose job is not to diagnose-then-treat, but to figure out problems in other ways. Some of those people, maybe most of them, are bound to be idiots. Some aren't.

Moodgym, on the other hand, really sucks and its makers should be hung from the nearest tree for normative tackiness. (My opinion!)

05:29 / 05.02.07

from a medical standpoint (er, speaking as someone who's taken a couple of undergrad bio-med courses), part of the reason for this increasing tendency is the increasingly evident link between depression and heart disease (see here), and doctors are becoming more anxious to get a patient's depression treated before hir risk of heart disease is increased.

You may have encountered this but I've never had a referral marked "? depressed, possible heart disease" and am not convinced it's central to what I see as a much wider tendency to pathologise aspects of human experience. I think there are more general factors at play.

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:17 / 05.02.07

Programs like: MoodGYM are available for free and are worth looking into before paying for anything.

Moodgym might be free, but it's still not worth the money you pay for it. Still, if you didn't feel depressed and alienated by early 21st century western capitalist society beforehand, it'll sort you out.

Leigh Monster loses its cool

12:58 / 05.02.07

am not convinced it's central to what I see as a much wider tendency to pathologise aspects of human experience. I think there are more general factors at play.

Well, yes. But in medicine, how do you treat something without pathologising it first? I suppose there are couple ways you could see it--doctors are finding it necessary to have a "real" reason, i.e. something as serious-sounding as heart risk/any physical manifestation, to treat depression; or, drug companies are emphasizing the physical factors of depression in order to sell Prozac. It's probably not just one or the other.

I've never taken antidepressants, but I have had counseling, and while my counselors haven't been the greatest I've still always found that the suck-it-up approach does me more harm than good, especially if the reason that I'm sucking it up is because I'm worried that it's not real enough to seek help with.

My emphasizing an evil-sounding but relatively arbitrary physical consequence of spiritual malaise may have confused this point rather than helped it. All I meant to say was, whatever your mind is doing to your body is real; whether you look at that as pathological or just as how your body works, I think it's something that's best attended to.

15:33 / 05.02.07

Similar thread?

17:17 / 05.02.07

when I was going through a rough patch, nearly a year ago, I found that attending councilling was a great help. Having someone external to the my life that I could talk through my anxieties with was very useful.

Are there enough differences between councilling and psychiatry that might make one preferable over the other?

18:15 / 07.02.07

Pardon my silliness, but I thought this was very nice.

01:36 / 08.02.07

I've been in therapy a couple of times. I remember thinking at the time that it wasn't doing me much good, but several years later noticing behavioral and belief changes directly associated with work that I'd done in therapy. In general, I don't think it hurts to have someone to talk to, even if you're paying them for that.

Like someone else said, it's been really useful for me to have a sounding board. It's good to have an outside check from someone who can tell me that yes, I'm being reasonable, or no, I really am kind of crossing a line.

When I'm angry with someone in my life, I don't like talking about it with friends because I've found friends either feel put on the spot or they take sides even when they've said they don't intend to. I used to vent to friends when upset with someone I was dating, and then I realized that my friends were slowly starting to dislike my partner because of things I'd said when I was angry.

If someone wants to give you meds and you don't want them, say no. Unless you're crazy enough to be put in the institution, they're not going to force you to take anything. If you think they might help - and they might - talk to the doctor and do your research first. Be aware of what you might be getting into, and say no if you're not comfortable with it.

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