IME, psychiatry is absolute trash. The only reason I've kept going back is because if I'm not in some type of mental health treatment, they use it as another excuse to make me fail my disability benefit assessments/appeals. You would think being in cancer treatment, recovering from a stroke, being partially sighted and all my other physical shit would be enough to qualify for disability benefits, but nope. If I'm not receiving mental health treatment too, I will lose the appeal.

Firstly what is the point? Therapy wouldn't cure my problems even if it was good therapy. But as it happens, NHS therapy is shit. I've been on the waiting list for up to 5 years at a time for treatment, and then I get some shit like DBT, which consisted of a silly little girl just out of college telling me to make lists of why I shouldn't feel suicidal, depressed and anxious, and whenever I do feel depressed, suicidal and anxious, just read the lists and then I will feel fine! Surprisingly this ground-breaking therapy did not work.

I had one therapy, just after making a suicide attempt, which consisted of an NHS hippie therapist, dressed in long flowing purple robes, telling me to buy a copy of the New Age book The Secret, about the law of attraction, and use it to attract whatever I want into my life. Then I won't be depressed any more. Again, didn't work, and is this really suitable therapy for someone who's just got out of intensive care after a suicide attempt?

My most recent therapist apparently does EDMR, and I asked for that. She refused to give it on the grounds that I'm still in a bad life situation and EDMR is only for people who aren't in that situation any more. So she spent my sessions doing a shitty guided meditation and making me draw pictures of how I feel each week. Utterly useless trash. Literally just box-checking so she can get her paycheque and I can use the fact I'm in therapy as grounds for my benefit appeal. And when I told her her therapy wasn't helping me and I wanted to quit, she said (in fear of losing her paycheque) that if I quit she would inform the DWP so I would fail my benefit appeal. I pointed out that that would leave me permanently destitute and I'd end up homeless, and she didn't care at all. She said she'd just give me a leaflet for a homeless shelter. Just an evil person.

Mental health is inseparable from worldview, so it gets co-opted in various ways to push the dominant ideology and that means a corralling effect under capitalism; if you stand out, it's meant to draw you back in and functioning "appropriately" under its world model.

But that doesn't mean all of the disorders (which are essentially repeating clusters of behavior and cognition brought under a specific label) are made up, or aren't observing real things. It just means that the way those labels get applied and categorized is tainted by the dominant model. A person who has chronic anxiety isn't bothered by this because capitalism, but because they want to stop feeling that way all the time. But capitalism could very well be the cause for them in various ways. But then there are things like ADHD which are shown to be at least partly the brain itself, not just a reaction to the environment. And there is also the transition aspect of things to keep in mind. If capitalism was replaced with fully automated luxury gay space communism tomorrow, there'd still be people acting like disorder categorizations that developed under capitalism and many of them would still be suffering in various ways because the ingrained behaviors and thought processes and belief systems are still there.

I made the initial thread in the peoples court to discuss my criticisms of that community and it ended in it being removed.

Its been a while and I cant find the initial thread for it.

If I remember right the main critiques I had was that 90% of the content was done by one poster, and that one poster was using quasi-social dwarnist/nazi adjacent ideology in a lot of their reasoning.

They also gave general conspiracy theory nonsense related to anti-vaccines and autism being linked to dubious things.

There used to be one, but the person who was mostly behind it was banned for a few reasons. Iirc the tone of the community was more "opposed to mental health science/research in any context" than "opposed to western psychiatric practices".

I think there's space to talk about issues with western psych, but I don't know that an additional comm is really needed.

Mental health fields, like any other fields really, suffered greatly due to de-communization. And naturally a lot of it did get liberalized, pill pushers are a real thing, over-prescription is a real issue, improper diagnosis, weaponized use of psychiatric wards, the way treatment approaches is shaped will of course be shaped by a Capitalist Society, which at best won't kill their patients: because they know it's better to keep the customer alive.

Which is what Patients are under capitalism, they're Customers, if there's no socialized medicine. One of the biggest blunders that's been ignored by psychoanalysts is well the fact that our society is structured to be unhealthy and how can an unhealthy society produce a healthy mind?

As a result there's a ton of misconceptions related to the field of mental issues, some valid, some are reactionary.

I've seen plenty of people claim that my ADHD can be cured by the ways of Stoicism and Disciplinary action and that's bullshit, it's a neurological condition. Ironically I'm more disciplined than most people who tell me I need to be Disciplined, because I've spent 20+ years bumbling around managing my disorder by sheer force of will.

Ironically, now that people who don't have ADHD see how well I'm doing they think they can replicate my improvements, in productivity or life in general, by consuming the same substances. That's not going to work. Those meds tend to have the opposite effect on those who don't have the disorder. You're essentially giving yourself like a version of ADHD by doing that, which is why it's used as recreational, induced hyperactivity, impulsivity, restlessness.

But you know what? Psychiatry might be able to develop a more permanent cure to my conditions, capitalism won't allow it to happen

Capitalism also won't allow me to go further into detail, because I got to make bread somehow and so if i really did the research I'd want to put that in a book and sell it, because i want to eat. And it's not like I'd give a shit if people bought the book or not. I'd make it freely avaiable, but there's only so much unpaid labor I'm willing to do.

I remember it, they were pretty prolific and pretty aggressive poster, and any argument not even propsychiatry but sceptical of antipsychiatry were attacked by them. And the entire topic of antipsychiatry just basically disappeared after that person went away, so it was really an case of how one person can artifically pump some topic in community.

About meritum, despite having some point on topic it was clear that this person bordered on total denial which don't strike me as fair but maybe i'm biased as someone who got real help from psychiatrist. I just don't think it's correct to completely disavow this entire field of medicine over some abuses and mistakes.

Yeah there was such a thing, made by a user who was very much against standard psychiatry/psychology

I think the user is gone from the grad now

Edit: I see the user was from Lemmy actually and got banned from there, so if wasn't even us who did it lol

I'm just speaking for myself personally but i don't like psyche altering substances, regardless whether they are prescribed or not. I live a pretty sober lifestyle. I stay away from drugs and i drink very little alcohol, mainly because i prefer to feel my feelings as they are, unaltered and undulled, whether they are negative or positive. I think of it like a pain response: if you are feeling pain it's an indicator, a signal from your body, and it might be better to pay attention to it rather than shut it off (within reason). But that's just a personal choice. If other people find medication or self-medication helpful that isn't any of my business.

As for therapy, it can be helpful for sure, and for some people it genuinely makes their life better. But we also have to recognize that there is now an entire industry built around it with a lot of money involved which creates certain incentives. And to some extent the necessity for therapy has grown out of the fact that we as humans need community and social interaction, we need family and friends to keep us emotionally and psychologically healthy. Unfortunately modern lifestyles under capitalism are often alienating and isolating and this creates a need for a replacement. And of course that replacement has been commoditized as a paid service.

So yeah, psychiatry as a whole, i'm not against it. It's just something we have to analyze critically.

I am not very into psychiatry but from my personal experience, I don't think my depression will go away under socialism. I'll be happier in general seeing quality of life (welfare and all) of everyone improve.

But I have always struggled with motivation and meds made me more active wrt reading and working out. I dont think that'll change.

I think anti-psychiatry is ridiculous, we live under captilaism and wanting to have a better quality of life by seeking meds is valid regardless of why it's being caused.

there are some anti-psychiatry movements i deplore, and others i admire. my relationship with psychiatry and psychology is complicated and messy, given how embedded i am with it at different levels, lol.

And you might be familiar, but the Socialist Patient's Collective, or SPK for short, provided a marxist critique of capitalism and psychiatry with some really cutting stuff in it. my favourite exerpt (translated from German elsewhere online + emphasis is mine):

Illness is the essential condition, the presupposition and the result of this capitalist process of production. The capitalist production process is at the same time a process that destroys life. It continuously destroys life and produces capital. Capitalism is dominated by capital’s primary need of accumulation (Marx). *Illness is the expression of the life-destroying power of capital. Illness is collectively produced: that is, in so far as the worker creates capital in the work process, which encounters him as an alien force, he collectively produces his own isolation. It’s therefore only logical that healthcare produced by capitalism perpetuates this isolation in that it doesn’t treat these symptoms as collective but rather treats them as individual bad luck, fault, and failure. *However, capitalism produces, in the form of illness, the most dangerous threat to itself. Therefore it has to fight against the progressive moment in illness with its heaviest weapons : the healthcare system, the legal system, the police.

Yeah.

A while back, there was an anti-psychiatry community. Looking through the modlog I couldn't find reasons for why the community was banned, but the user who ran it was banned and so it got removed. Reasons for banning the user apparently were constant ableism, being too combative with other users regarding anti-psychiatry.

Since I haven't spent much time researching psychiatry I can't really speak on it so maybe other comrades can help?

This sounds like the start to a creepypasta lol. But what probably happened is when you ban someone you get the choice (on lemmy) to also delete their content, and depending on the version of lemmy you are on this deletes the communities they created or are head mod in as well. Not sure I like how wide of a net the delete content button does but that's how it is (it's useful against spammers and trolls that you know can be safely purged)