Help me please

Got nothing to say that will help @Historylover but feeling your pain and hopelessness. Sitting with you if you like

@Bow ♥️xx

---

@Historylover wrote:

I've been reading on help sites that someone loves me, needs me, has an organization that can help me, but that's simply not true. No-one loves me, needs me or has an organization that can help me.

---

I keep wondering what I would say if I were summoned today to meet with the mental health minister or prime minister, to give them a briefing about what Australia needs to do to make the lives of the suffering worth prolonging. I know that I would be utterly tongue-tied at that meeting, because I just wouldn't know where to begin. I feel like I have spoken out and spoken out and spoken out about all this and we still haven't budged from square one.

I've been foolishly subdued into silence by confounding terms like "psychosocial support" and "peer support", that created the illusion of a new system that actually fixes peoples' problems and adheres to their values and aspirations. But the more you cut through the jargon to build a plain-English understanding of what's going on, the more it becomes clear that we're still dealing with the same old system, and there isn't any change envisioned for the future at all.

You are all too right, @Historylover , I'm afraid. The help just isn't there. I just don't know what people like you and I are supposed to do. I think it's just expected that we should just sit down, shut up, and wait politely for our tours of duty to come to their natural ends.

@chibam I think an unfortunate truth is that all systemic change is agonisingly slow. The movement toward psychosocial and peer support is coming decades behind the research that has shown how effective it is. I agree that reform is needed - badly. More services that focus on community and connection is needed - badly. Whilst individual therapeutic treatment is incredibly effective and necessary, it doesn't facilitate community connection - and often the push for only one-to-one services is in line with our cultural focus on the individual. So it's not just the systems that need to change, it's the social and cultural perspective too. The focus on the individual also means blame is also placed on the individual: if you're not coping with how things are, the fault lies within you, not with the lack of services, support, and connection available.

Which is why, to my mind, the shift towards peer support is such an amazing thing - but it is still stymied by being beholden to a system that is still many decades away from what we know will actually be helpful for people. But in utilising these services, we are demonstrating their efficacy, and thus providing statistical evidence that they are the better option, while we continue working towards bigger reform.

Just my two cents.

@chibam, I watched something for a few minutes earlier today that made me feel that I was in a really bad play, like everything is 'all pretend' and role-playing. Just pretend you're attending to your portfolio, your patients' needs, your students' education; start a group and subdue anyone who can really contribute to it... Life is a very unfunny joke, and I just can't take much more. There's no point. It will just be more of the same.

I wish I had never heard the word 'psychiatrist'. What a clique! 'Mental health' is the only field to go into today. And such a booming trade. What a farce! Words fail.

In the real world, @Jynx, I can't get peer support either. It's usually some little girl with a computer and she types and talks and pretends she can do both equally well, and she pretends that she knows what she is doing; even pretends she cares. I know what I'm doing and I can assess others' competence and intention very quickly.

You know that I had a psychiatrist who has taken me to the inevitable brink of suicide, and others watched him do it. (How many others have also trodden this path?) And three more whom I have seen once or twice to try to help me cope and fix this situation just covered for him. I could see a dozen more and the result would be the same. None will help me, and they all cover for each other.

I would be extremely grateful if anyone could find me a psychiatrist who was willing to help me undo this malicious, psychiatrist-made mess and save my life.

Systemic change is not agonizingly slow, @Jynx. It doesn't exist. Therapists were unheard of in my childhood. Today they are almost mandatory, and they are everywhere. Reform? It's just a game they play, smoke and mirrors. I have said time and time again, they do so much study and all they can do is medicate, hospitalize, say that they don't know what causes the problem, or that they don't have any treatment but medication etc., or that it is a 'chemical imbalance' in the brain. People's moods and personalities warp and twist according to their and their family's experiences.

'Reform'? Not in my lifetime.

How long does it take to treat any disorder? To make change? Or is the answer to both as long as you can make it?

@chibam and I are just calling it as it is. How much suffering can they all just turn a blind eye to?

Sorry @Jynx, but I'm just calling it as it is broadly experienced. People are supposed to be cured, not just treated and treated...

But wait, I think I've said this before. I think my suicidality is disinhibiting me. I don't mean to offend, @Jynx, but this situation is socially, medically and personally unacceptable. I think paying with my life will be too high a price to pay for my trust, so please forgive me if I don't cover for anyone.

@Historylover It is really awful that you've had these experiences. I wouldn't wish it upon anyone. I'm conscious of the fact that for most people, myself included, these services are actual life-savers, and I wouldn't want anyone reading along to hold back from accessing services because they think the system might never change, or that all psychiatrists will do more harm than good. We all have our own experiences, and not all services or MH professionals are the same.

How would you like the forums community to help you @Historylover?

Is that a sarcastic question, @Jynx?

---

@Jynx wrote:

So it's not just the systems that need to change, it's the social and cultural perspective too.

---

Yes and no. Many people are in an environment where the perspectives are pretty good, and the people around them will give them the help they need readily. But others, such as myself and @Historylover find ourselves in far more hostile environments. I think it needs to be acknowledged that there will always be people born into unhelpful communities, and so there needs to be a government backup there to insure that anyone born into such an environment can go elsewhere for reliable help.

I'm often told that nobody will ever help me, only to stumble upon stories from elsewhere of people who've gotten the exact sort of help I need freely from their family/acquaintances, ect.

---

@Jynx wrote:

Which is why, to my mind, the shift towards peer support is such an amazing thing - but it is still stymied by being beholden to a system that is still many decades away from what we know will actually be helpful for people.

---

---

@Historylover wrote:

'Reform'? Not in my lifetime.

How long does it take to treat any disorder? To make change?

Exactly. Where does that leave those of us who don't have decades to wait, @Jynx ? For those of us for who a decades-long wait means: "Never in my (effective) lifetime?" Isn't there something incredibly cruel about demanding that we hang around here, waiting, when everybody knows - in in some cases, freely admit - that our suffering is all for naught?

---

@Jynx wrote:

The movement toward psychosocial and peer support is coming decades behind the research that has shown how effective it is.

---

But what about those who it doesn't even apply for? Because it's such a jargony and ambiguous term that it takes a very long time, and a lot of effort, to discover just how narrow a band of people it actually applies to.

Apparently, it only applies to people who have a preexisting mental illness. Which obviously leaves out all the people who need that help but don't have any preexisting mental illness. But the term is so unclear that I think that most people who haven't researched it deeply might not realize that.

Now, you might say that "psychosocial support has very limited resources, and so we have to be very selective about the sort of people we offer it to." But as far as I can tell, there are no ambitions whatsoever to expand it to anybody who needs it, not even in the far-flung future. Every piece of literature I've been able to find seems to imply that it is - and only ever will be - for people with preexisting mental illnesses.

And it gets all the more confounding when you realize that this sort of service is very often provided free of charge by friends and family members, providing you happen to have decent friends and family members.