I’ve been to a few therapists now for my depression/anxiety issues. I’m still not sure what a therapist is even supposed to do. I’ve only ever left sessions miserable and it’s hard to see how it could even turn out differently. They can’t fix any biological factors and they can’t do anything about the environment that contributes to these problems. What the hell is going to get better from paying someone to talk to you for <1hr a week so they can tell you that the problems you have with the world aren’t real.
When I explain to people why I don’t want to keep trying therapists, they always just say something like “oh you just haven’t found the right one.” What? What would be the right one? Why are there right and wrong ones? Aren’t they supposed to be professionals?
Perhaps more precisely, they’re all about your reaction to problems. A lot of “lots of people deal with these problems, it’s about how you handle it.” But to me, this kind of advice feels wholly detached from the realities of the problems I end up encountering.
The example I go back to (not my only problem, but illustrative of something) is when I was in college, I’d often find myself with unbearable amounts of work. Multiple pieces of homework and projects with different duration and due dates, tests to study for, classes to attend, groups to meet with for projects, etc. With how little time I’d have, it got to the point where I wasn’t sleeping enough, I either missed meals or ate some quick, unhealthy food just to get it over with quickly, what little exercise I got dropped to almost nothing, etc.
This is more work than any reasonable person should be able to handle in a healthy way. And there’s the added pressure that if you don’t keep up with it you’ll fail the class and it’ll make it take that much longer to graduate.
You could say that other people went through the same experiences and turned out fine, but I’d challenge whether or not that’s actually true. Most of the friends and classmates I spoke to in my time there were either just as depressed/stressed/anxious as I was, or were coping with it in ways that were just as unhealthy. Massive amounts of coffee, energy drinks, all nighters, alcohol, and I’m sure a non-zero number of them were on the various focus/productivity drugs people sometimes use for academics/work.
The rate of depression and other psychological problems on campus was really high. Personally in just my friend group, one person I know cried over a particularly bad HW assignment, one was doing self harm, two friends had to go home in the middle of a semester, one of them ended up transferring, and one friend disappeared for a few days during a group project and it turned out he was so stressed he was hiding in a shed on some other part of campus.
And yet the school was woefully understaffed on mental health professionals. All we really got were some platitudes about taking time for ourselves. What time? Did I miss the part where the school made the professors keep a reasonable limit on the work they gave out? Or is there some magical work free time set aside for us? No? Then this is useless “advice” that just shifts the blame onto us.
So what good would it do me to change how I was thinking about all this? Regardless of how I thought about it, I needed to get that work done or suffer the real life economic consequences of failing to do so. If I do get it all done, it comes at the very real cost of the physical strain it puts on my mind and body.
The only real “solution” ended up being me dropping out like halfway through my grad program. I had to completely separate myself from the source of the stress. But of course note how this is a burden that is entirely placed on me and my family. Even if I wasn’t a mental wreck, my job prospects are pretty bad.
How is a therapist supposed to fix any of that?