Personal Woes and Advice 2

[Saskia]

I swear, the next person to tell me to get mental health help, of any sort...I'm tired of going through a system that doesn't care about anything except following their little check-boxes and getting you to fit to their local model of a good girl.

The mental health industry is dysfunctional and brimming with incompetent fools. Most of the people in the field should have gone into engineering. Far too many try far too often to take an assembly line efficiency approach forgetting everything that they learned earning their degrees, and can't understand how human lives are not as simple as using the right size carriage bolt. It's always the mechanics that have to fix the foul ups the engineers make though, because what works on paper doesn't always work when you get into the real world where lines aren't straight and people make mistakes. The same is true of a lot of doctors and other healthcare providers. Instead of "I don't know what you're talking about" it's "you don't know what you're talking about."

Well, I know exactly what you're talking about, at least in that regard. For whatever reason I'm mostly immune to the numbing effects of opiates like morphine (just makes my mind cloudy), and always have been. It had no effect when I was a child, and when I had to have another surgery not much later that apparent inefficacy as evidenced by being lucid and capable of expressing pain was brushed off; "You can just hit the button if you start feeling pain again". That went on for a week during recovery because "people don't build resistance that quickly!" Sure, okay, but what if it's neverworked? Sometimes it's like working with programmer who doesn't understand conditionals.

Again, if in the US, even if you're not religious, there are a LOT of church organizations that help people who have hit hard times. These can generally work better than the government programs

The truth of this is largely dependent upon area. Most of the church organizations that run such operations around here will, for example, kick you out if it happens to come out that you're LGBT or if you've aborted a pregnancy or if they suspect you don't believe in the proper mysticism even if you participate in it. One of them that I know of even refuses to help people who've divorced. Seems likely that others might have other irrelevant prerequisites like having to impale yourself upon the wood of the true cross.

What documentation can I get, though? The dispute wasn't over whether I'd been seeing or taking certain things, but over their effects on me. If I feel depressed and unable to function after my therapy appointments, there's no documentation that I can present that will prove that. If someone wants to disbelieve me, there's absolutely no paperwork that can show otherwise. Nor can I prove that I made calls to different places that said they couldn't see me, if someone is disinclined to believe that.

To be clear: I don't think it's an intentional case of "we just want to make people measure up to our idea of normal." But what I've seen happen is more "I'm used to X and not Y. This person is presenting in a mental health practice with Y. Y isn't what I'm used to seeing, so it's a result of the mental illness. Therefore, as part of treating the mental illness, we need to deal with Y." I've seen that happen a lot - for example, I had it with my parents, where mental health professionals would rather believe that I'm paranoid than that an apparently interested loving mother can be quite manipulative and emotionally abusive. Had the same thing happen with the way I dress, even - they're personally disturbed by gothic fashion, so clearly it's a symptom of mental health problems that must be treated.

Well it's no secret that we're by nature tribal animals who don't like aberrant behaviors or opinions. We're kind of like really smart intelligent ants in that respect, in that we tend to unthinkingly assume anything different must be bad.

Sometimes some issues are just really hard to discern though. I'm not trying to diagnose anybody here, but just as an example if somebody suffers from borderline personality disorder she's very likely to be very good at manipulating people and probably does it unconsciously and can be very convincing because she ends up believing her own garbage. Diagnosing that particular trait isn't exactly a game of "find the virgin in the maternity ward" for that very reason, and it's my understanding that it's generally discovered when a number of family members are found to be paranoid and/or delusional--regarding the same individual. Again, I'm not trying to make a diagnosis or suggestion, just saying that there are a number of reasons that an otherwise competent psychologist might make a mistake. Like you said, "X is normal, therefore Y is abnormal" is also a common trap that people fall into. Unfortunately psychologists in particular have a nasty habit of assuming incompetence in their patients, though admittedly this is largely reinforced by patients assuming incompetence of their psychologists. It's just a big fat mess. I like red, it doesn't make me a slut any more than black makes you disturbed, but I've still been assumed to be promiscuous by otherwise intelligent people who normally take themselves very seriously.

If I may, I would suggest that you test this hypothesis by changing your word choice. Obviously I don't and can't know how you phrase things, but I do know that fluffless factual statements like "She does X" leave far too much room for interpretation for somebody who's had to take six classes on Freud's (mostly) incoherent rambling. You've got to express precisely what it is that you feel and why. It can be about as productive as talking to a cigar store Indian otherwise.

Also a tape recorder can do wonders. Never forget this. Not digital either, they're too easy to doctor. Old school magnetic tape cassette recorder. Ideally one that uses the small cassettes.

At the risk of sounding like an echo chamber though, it sounds like this individual may not be entirely capable of helping you, to say the least. I do wonder, because as a rule when a number of providers only make issues worse, it's most often because the individual seeing those providers hasn't actually got anything wrong with her. Medicine without illness still yields side effects, after all.

The nasty bit about the ones that hurt is that they had everything so pathologized that anything I said was "proof."

The moment a member of a scientific discipline that is not mathematics claims "proof" outside of like, rigid categorical logic is the moment I ask, not always politely, how much they remember from their epistemology classes. But then, that would probably wouldn't be productive.

It's sort of a vicious cycle. Most mental health professionals, I've found, don't want to believe that abuse exists in the profession. So frequently if you go in and report abuse, what happens is that you get labelled as "difficult" or "paranoid" or otherwise considered to not be credible.

Hmm. Maybe. I understand that a great many people in academic psychology believe that clinical child psychology is either the world's second or third biggest field for fraudulent activity, but it's certainly not a stretch to suspect that a lot of the same garbage can and does get recycled into adult clinical psychology. Most people in most fields don't like to admit that abuse exists in their profession though. Incompetence, sure; abuse? Heavens, no! That's not an excuse, it's just a fact. People in general are resistant to being told that members of their in-group, people they respect, are hurting people by negligence or by deliberate intent. It's just how people are, going back to the tribal tendencies we still hold.

I'm sorry if you've already said this and I just missed it, but why are you even seeing this individual though if it doesn't help you to do so?