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@louis What is?
Sounds awesome, right? What is the secret? Swedish society and physiology is not all that different from the USA after all. How do they manage it?
Maybe Swedish society is a bit less stressful? After all, there's parental leave and vacations on a whole other order of magnitude than in the USA, and there is heavily subsidized medical care and no crime-ridden megacities. Life is just better, and Swedes compete with the Danes on being the happiest people on the planet.
Swedes kill themselves 20% more than US Americans.
I did hear later on too late for me that the drugs only work for a minority of people. They also have the potential for awful side-effects like causing the problems you go into it for. It's all experimentation. I don't think the people giving them to me were even qualified for that position, and it was hard to convince them to get me off it when I realised it was detrimental and gave me what I'd call withdrawal for my brain.
Its hard for me to respond to that because i wasnt there, we just have your opinion. While i completely believe it is an honest opinion you hold, its still tricky on a few accounts.
For example if i take everything at face value then it sounds like you just had some really shitty doctors. From what I know of UK healthcare that is no surprise your system is horrific and you will have a hard time finding qualified doctors in general.
If that is the case that is not an argument against psychiatry it is only an arguments against unqualified psychiatrists. Which i agree are likely to do more harm than good.
The other side of the coin is that depending on the nature of your mental health its hard to gauge what sort of mental health issues you have and if that prevents you or not from being objective about your own treatment. Not saying this applies to you, I dont know you. But it is common for many with mental illness.
I once helped someone I cared about who as he got older developed Paranoid Schizophrenia rather severely. When untreated he couldn't sleep, believed people were beaming thoughts in his head, telling him to kill himself, i would often find him just crying in his room alone due to all the stress.
Despite this he refused treatment of any kind. He felt everyone was part of some grand conspiracy, doctors, me, everyone, so he naturally refused. Ultimately i told him the only way i would continue to help him is if he was getting treatment, otherwise he had to go back and live with his parents. This was enough for him to seek his treatment and take medication.
The thing is on medication he gave me a huge hug and cried as he told me how much happier he was and how grateful he was to me for forcing it on him in his otherwise incoherent state. Thing is after a few weeks he told me he was stopping the medication as he didnt feel he actually needed, he thought he was healthy again and the meds just "made him tired". So he went off of it and back to his old self in a few days.
The thing is when he isn't on the meds he would say things that sound similar, that it was all horrible and just part of the torture and "mind games" of the conspiracy. Despite the fact that clearly when he was on it and rational he felt it was helpful.
Long story short its hard to know without knowing someones mental health history if that may not apply or not.
I checked myself in each time when I realised I was getting out of control. It was only after all that that I realised how bad it was for me. The people were nice enough but the treatment wasn't what I needed. I've had to manage myself. I needed help because I was depressed, suicidal and attempting self-harm although it wasn't permanent with scars.
The meds were given to me by the GP. It was only meant to be temporary but it turned into over a year. I mentioned even being suicidal on them. It didn't help me and put me out of pocket. When I mentioned it wasn't working, the dose was put up. No one put me on anything else. Honestly, lifestyle changes have been the best for me... and I think a good support network would have worked. It's hard to have these in the modern day.
I beleive you. I have had some pretty horrific expiernce in American hospitals (not so much mental health but id imagine they can be pretty shitty too).
But i maintain my point, the issue you had was shitty doctors, not so much the whole principle of mental health, treatment and medication, just the more specific case of how it applied to you.
I'd also agree that we should strive to make sure that doesnt happen. We need to make sure we have well trained, high quality psychiatrists. That is so critical.
Sadly I find that is a fairly universal problem with all single-payer healthcare. You get severly underpaid healthcare workers who need to diagnose you in 10 minutes and are paid so low no one wants to enter the industry either.
Dont get me wrong I'm not arguing for a purely free-market healthcare system either. I have a pretty solid solution IMO that is neither of these.
The term "mental health" is double-speak. It indicates, that if you are disgruntled with something, politicians and psychiatry have got a loophole to label you as "not normal" and remove you from society.
I do hold that there are evil people in society. But term itself is used to label everyone not-healthy, starting from babies being 1 year old to aged people, all for the sake of profit.
Thus if politicians promise "better mental health" I know they made open or hidden contracts with the largest industry in the world, psychopharmacy.
PArtly, but i agree a politician isnt likely to do a very good job fixing anything. We do admittedly have pretty shitty politicians in the USA.
That was my whole point with single-payer. It doesnt work (that is just the government throwing money at something). As I said, just as a pure free market doesnt work.
You can have neither of these in several potential systems.
Well, that and I take issue with how the medication is done. It's all experimental since we don't have a test to determine what levels things are really at. It's not good to mess about with that. I didn't realise at first that it could make me more suicidal to be on them. I didn't really have anyone keeping an eye on me. I had to manage myself and preferred that in the end. It's still a struggle. I'm just fortunate that I'm so self-aware... it is both a good and bad thing. It makes people less likely to think I need support... but it does mean that I am better placed to be able to support myself.
I would say that if you know someone with depression or suicidal, then the best thing you can do if they are close is to be there for them. Talk to them about it and see what they think you can do to make things less stressful. The support of people around is so important. Depression is isolating. You need people who will stick with you that will form a healthy connection with you. It doesn't stop the pain but it helps with resilience.