Homelessness and suicide

@chibam I hear you're frustrated that mental health professionals don't try to solve their patients' social and financial problems.

But I'm troubled that you don't think mental illness is a real-life problem. It certainly feels like a real-life problem for me and perhaps thousands of others including on these forums.

For me being treated for my mental health problems has meant I could re-engage with my other problems not once, but many times. I'm not dismissing the seriousness of those other problems- they feel difficult too but I'm looking to other ways of dealing with them. I'd probably be permanently incapacitated without the mental health expertise of those who've helped me over the years. As a senior I didn't have NDIS help as an option during my working life, but I cycled between jobs, sickness benefits and unemployment benefits and worked to capacity even it was part-time.

My treating doctors were aware of my social and financial difficulties and by treating my acute mental illness relapses they have in fact assisted me greatly.

The problems you speak of are encountered also by the worried well, but are felt more acutely by those of us already disadvantaged by mental health concerns. That doesn't mean that our mental health concerns can or should be ignored or belittled.

Thanks for your comments @Bow

I'll tag @chibam

Like what you shared @Dimity

For me if I didn’t have all my mental health problems then I wouldn’t have all these other life problems. I mean if I didn’t have CPTSD, depression, and eating disorder or any of my other diagnoses then I could work. I’d love to be able to work. I’d have better social connections. I wouldn’t be facing potential homelessness.

it’s like those sayings that I won’t get right but hopefully you’ll understand…… leading a horse to water but ya can’t make it drink. And also give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and you’ll feed him a lifetime.

if our therapist do what they are primarily there to do and that’s to address our mental health issues and get us to a point where we no longer need them…. Then hopefully…. Surely… all those other issues will fall away.

@chibam

@Bow personally I think we need homelessness services and social workers and all the other community welfare measures AS WELL as our overworked and underresourxed mental health professionals...

Absolutely @Dimity sorry if my last comment came across stating otherwise. I’m very fortunate that I am connected in with some great services that do provide so much more. We certainly need a roof over our heads and connections on our way along the journey 💜

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@Bow wrote:

I’m confused.

a therapist to me is a psychologist right?

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Well, there's a thousand differant names for those jobs, isn't there? Psychologist, psychiatrist, councillor, analyst, therapist... I only use the blanket term "therapist" because I got told off once for calling them "shrinks".

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@Bow wrote:

And I would actually not expect my psychologist to find me housing. That is not her job.

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I respectfully disagree.

Therapists are the ones who's job it is to cure people of things like their depression, their suicidalness, their anxiety, ect., right? So if the cause of someone's suicidalness (or depression, ect.) is the fact that their homeless, then I would argue that it's the therapist's job to do whatever they can to cure that person of their homelessness, i.e. assign them a home. Otherwise, anything they do is just treating a symptom instead of the real problem.

If we start saying that "it's not a therapists job to treat the problems that make the depressed depressed, the suicidal suicidal, the anxious anxious, ect.", then I think we need to ask: "Well then, who's job is it?" And if the answer to that question turns out to be: "Nobody", then I think we need to start being honest with the suicidal and depressed communities and admit that all those platitudes we so readily dish out: "Don't do that thing! Whatever your struggling with, there is help available for you!" is actually a lie.

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@Bow wrote:

I think we need to be really careful putting everyone in the one box and saying they are all bad when we have had a few bad experiences. Cause there are most certainly some very wonderful therapists out there that would do everything they could to help clients…. Within the perimeters of their work.

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Well, I respectfully suggest that it is fair to put everyone who is part of a system in one box, if the faults you are criticizing them for are faults born of that system. Specifically, if we're talking about a system that decrees:

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@Bow wrote:

I would actually not expect my psychologist to find me housing. That is not her job.

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...then I think it's fair to criticize the therapists who belong to that system (and uphold it's doctrine) for not treating the actual problems that are making their patients miserable, while maintaining the general public reputation that they actually do.

When I criticize therapists, I'm not trying to muddy the waters between the "good ones" and the "bad ones"; I'm attacking what you describe as "the perimeters of their work", which I believe are incredibly faulty, and woefully out-of-touch with the role that society expects these therapists to fulfill.

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@Bow wrote:

Therapists can not be expected to do everything otherwise they would have tiny caseloads and we would all be waiting years for therapy!!

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Again, I respectfully disagree. I think one of the things that is really choking up the mental health system is the fact that people aren't getting the help they really need right off the bat.

As I said before, if a therapist isn't fixing the patient's actual problem, then at best they are just treating the patient's symptoms, which will never go away so long as the root problem goes uncured. So these patients end up choking up the system for years, waiting and hoping for help that's never gonna come! Imagine how much more room there would be for new patients in the therapist's calendar if they just dealt with the real problem(s) right off the bat, and had their patients' satisfied and finished with therapy in just 5 or 6 sessions!

Anybody will tell you that just treating symptoms instead of underlying causes is almost always a grossly inefficient approach. That's the approach our system is adhering to right now, and I believe it goes a long way towards explaining (among other things) why the currant wait times for therapists is so high.

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@Dimity wrote:

But I'm troubled that you don't think mental illness is a real-life problem.

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Apologies, @Dimity . I just don't know how to talk about these issues in a way that everybody can understand; and I am so damned sick of being constantly misunderstood in these discussions (I acknowledge that the reason for the confusion is probably me not expressing myself very well).

I use the phrases "real-life problem" or "real-world problem" to try to distinguish such problems from "mental problems", which are problems based within the sufferer's brain, as opposed to the circumstances of their life.

It's important to make this distinction, as it determines what the proper remedy to the problem is. If the problem exists in the sufferer's brain, then logic dictates that the solution to it probably relies on doing something to the sufferer's brain (either via drugs, "talk therapy", electroshock, ect., ect.). But if the problem is in the factors surrounding the sufferer, then logic dictates that the solution is to correct whatever's wrong within those factors, and leave the sufferer's brain alone.

Unfortunately, our mental health system doesn't seem to understand this simple truth, and tries to deal with every single case of suffering it encounters by trying to mess around with the patient's brain. In an abundance of cases, this is grossly inappropriate, as the patient's brain is fine; it's their surrounding life that's a mess.

I don't mean to belittle the suffering or turmoil of people with actual mental illnesses; I'm just trying to emphatically point out that there are other causes of major suffering out there, and they need to be treated radically differantly.

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@Dimity wrote:

For me being treated for my mental health problems has meant I could re-engage with my other problems not once, but many times. I'm not dismissing the seriousness of those other problems- they feel difficult too but I'm looking to other ways of dealing with them. I'd probably be permanently incapacitated without the mental health expertise of those who've helped me over the years.

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I'm not denying that there aren't people suffering both types of problems; real-world problems and mental illness. And yes, ideally, people such as yourself should be able to get all the help you need for both types of problems: mental health treatment for your mental illnesses, and real-world assistance for your real-world problems (i.e. the problems that aren't in your head). I apologize if I haven't phrased that well. I don't know how else to say what I'm trying to say.

But at the same time, I feel it also needs to be noted that many people only need the real-world assistance, because they don't have any mental problems.

I also feel it needs to noted that the absence of mental problems doesn't mean that a person's real-world problems are not serious. Severe real-world problems can potentially make their sufferers gravely depressed, suicidal, anxious, ect. By contrast, not every mentally ill person is suicidal; many of them actually like being alive.

I think we just need to be clear that the need for real-world assistance is, in many cases, just as dire as the need for mental health treatment in many of the worst mental illness cases.

I don't like your trying to segregate people you think have some sort of brain malfunction from people reacting to life circumstances @chibam . Many mental illnesses may result from or be exacerbated by environmental factors such as childhood abuse or exposure to traumatic events. And I object to your implying that people with mental health difficulties who experience times of happiness are therefore undeserving.

Perhaps in your world it could be argued that the worried well shouldn't be clogging up the mental health system rather than diverting resources from people needing clinically informed care.

Holistic nonjudgmental care within the community that accepts people as individuals at point of need is what I'd hope for.

I remember our state Council of Adult Education offering classes in many areas including training in workplace and social skills. Perhaps you could explore local offerings.

Unsure why you feel you have a right to say what MY psychologist can and can not do. What I expect of MY psychologist.
Can guarantee that if you were to rock up to my local community mh centre and ask for a psychologist to find you housing, they would redirect you to the local housing office.
you say that a psychologist should be able to just ‘assign you a home’. Where are you pulling this home out of? Thin air? They are not real estate agents. They are not the department of housing. They don’t have their own backlog of houses that they rent out to clients. So where? This is where they encourage you to walk on down to the department of housing who will then be able to help you.

Not going to keep engaging in this thread as I respectfully disagree with everything you say. I stand by everything that i said in my first comment.