Comment on Pills here!
A_Pile_of_Frog@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Oh no, a solution that helps me to not be a blob, laying in my bed, womdering if should i even get up. The horrors of therapy actually helping me to get shit done.
God, i hate anti-therapy or anti-meds posting.
Nothing here is anti therapy.
And I wouldn’t interpret it as anti meds either. It’s just pointing out the absurdity of a society that’s so miserable it forces people to seek medical attention just to exist. Any rational society would change until people are happy.
The problem with portraying it like this is there is no room for nuance, it pits medication against society with no room for both. Maybe it wouldn’t read like that if there wasn’t a societal stigma against mental illness and meds, but that’s ironically the world we live in.
I don’t think it’s either of those things. We all need to cope. The meme just laments that coping is necessary
The problem is that those it doesn’t work for just get told to keep trying. Just keep throwing money at something that doesn’t work. “Try therapy” is almost a thought terminating response to any problem.
It’s wonderful that medication and CBT work for some. They do not work for me, and that’s something I know because I’ve tried and tried and tried. But the only response I’ve gotten when seeking support is the “try therapy and meds!”
There’s also a substantially amount of privilege in being able to access therapy and medications. They are not universally accessible. If you are LGBT in a rural area, the “problem” that they will try to fix and medicate you for will be that you are LGBT. Most therapists in my area do not take insurance because getting it covered is complicated and my state is attempting to get therapists notes entered into a publicly accessible database. I’m losing insurance this month, but even with insurance before $500 or so a month to try to get my brain working, especially when it hasn’t been fucking working because my problems are external - like what’s the fucking point?
I mean, I’m anti-meds for treating exogenic issues when something can be done for those exogenic issues.
If I’m sitting at home with the heater on and I start feeling warm and flushed, I wouldn’t take an ibuprofen (as an anti-pyretic) to bring my temperature down, I’ll turn the heater off.
It’s the same for mental health, if the sole source of the stress/sorrow is external, medication is nothing more than a bandaid, which is better than nothing if the exogenic influence is outside your individual control (which it often is)… But we are at a point where the majority of people with mental health issues are experiencing a level of exogenic influence and there are enough of us that if we organised we could change the factors that are causing or worsening our mental health symptoms.
So it bears talking about, is medication always appropriate?
Medication is important, especially for endogenic conditions, and medication is life saving. But if you have exogenic depression and the meds aren’t working, the new prescription is protest.
Medication isn’t just a bandaid on outside factors, it can serve as a short term treatment tool to help someone face the issues they are struggling with. I would bet most people on some kind of antidepressant were not on them permanently, just long enough to get stable and see results from therapy and work. That’s the problem with being anti-medication without much nuance, it stigmatizes the tools people use as being unnecessary bandaids or crutches. It just screams “you don’t need meds, just deal with your issues”.
khaliso@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Both can be true at the same time. Therapy and meds can be wonderful to help create a better world than the soul-crushing dystopia we’re currently heading for.