I actually agree with you in many aspects. Something new that is being taught in therapy training is that we have to be aware of systemic issues that are contributing to someone’s mental health.
Example: someone is suicidal and feeling hopeless. Do they have clinical major depressive disorder? Maybe, but if we ask “how are your finances doing?” And they say they work full time at Walmart and get paid $10 per hour and have 3 kids… Yeah it makes sense why they feel helpless and suicidal.
For this reason, therapists and mental health workers have a duty to advocate for progressive social policies.
It would be like if were constantly maiming and injuring people and saying the problem was not enough people going to physical therapy.
In that I kind of agree with you. Many problems can be traced back to societal issues. Hell is other people. That’s why we need to do better.
Sending those, damaged by society, to therapy is necessary, but we wouldn’t be there if several root causes wouldn’t exist.
Like if we just took blackrock’s real estate and put homeless people in it the mental health crisis would just be like 80% solved. I’m not even kidding.
Oversimplification, imo. But this is surely a contributing factor.
In one of my psych courses the professor noted a study (not sure of the source, this was closing in on twenty years ago now) that while psychotherapy had pretty good efficacy for certain things, it was equivalent with “talk openly with your friends about it” in most metrics. A therapist is great for providing specific strategies to address particular challenges (for issues like PTSD, for example, a therapist can help to manage an exposure therapy approach) but after a point you’re kinda just paying through the nose for somebody to professionally emulate you having a healthy friendship with a well-adjusted person.
