LUH 3417
Member
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2016
- Messages
- 2,992
While I agree that psychiatry is a disaster I will say that person oriented therapy is a completely different experience than traditional talk therapy and there are a handful of rogue psychologists working within the field who deny Freudian concepts like transference and even go so far as to say that thinking you know more about the person’s experience is invalidating and harmful. I think the entire point of person oriented therapy seems to be like this is a place where you can talk about how you want to be if society never infringed on you to begin with. That can be therapeutic in and of itself, just to experience emphatic listening from another human being.I would guess that people with chronic health problems who see psychiatrists probably have a similar experience: try every pill and other treatment they use, maybe get a bit of relief but often at the cost of a bunch of hideous side effects. Once those options have been exhausted you're sent off to a psychologist because it's obviously your attitude or your lack of effort or that argument you had with your mum when you were 15 that's behind all your problems. Either way it becomes somebody's problem.
Probably most of the psychiatrists I have encountered in my life have a dejected and detached look about them and develop a somewhat pejorative view of you if you keep going back to them complaining of a lack of results. They don't want to be reminded of their failure. Same with gastroenterologists. They must be the two most disappointing fields of medicine to get into. Nobody is ever cured, just a bit of temporary relief here and there. After I had ECT the psychiatrist carrying it out was desperate for me to confirm that I'd improved. I've never seen a medical professional so in need of proof that what he was doing was actually working. I guess he was used to a lot of disappointing results.
From what I can gather most psychiatrists have the view that pills they prescribe do something, at least some of them time, and often with a lot of bad effects, but don't really understand why and figure it's better than having to deal with suicides. I feel sorry for them a bit I guess. They've bought their training on good faith that it was the best available practice and all they can do is apply it. Of course there are some really bad ones who just sit back and enjoy the large amount of money they get.
An unfortunate result of criticizing psychiatry's medical models of mental suffering is that another field that is mostly quackery, psychology, fills the void. Largely I suspect because people know it won't cause the harm certain drugs can, even if it doesn't actually solve anything for the patients. What a mess. Hopefully hormone therapy gets more proponents in the coming decades, the safer psychedelics seem promising.