Our stories
@Historylover wrote:As regards the good he did - no, I don't think it is wishful thinking that other therapists should do what he did. Patients have a right to expect it. That's what they are there for. That's what they - and the government - are paying for. That's what their training is supposed to equip them with the skills to achieve.
That's what the industry wants everyone to believe. But they work very hard and very deliberately to make sure that isn't the reality.
I'm sure I've mentioned before that therapists all share a "golden rule" to not actually help their patients? It's not just a case of the industry being pockmarked with a bunch of errant lazy members who aren't willing to stand up and shoulder their portion of the system's workload; it's a case of the industry conspiring on a unified front to not actually provide the desparately needed help that they continue to promise to the most vulnerable!
But this is all kept very quiet, because the industry doesn't want their stockyards full of future prey to know that they don't actually offer any help. Because then they would lose a great deal of business and, even worse, a great deal of future influence.
They don't want the person who is about to end themselves because they can't bear the neverending loneliness of their solitary life another minute that they won't actually unite them with a kindred lover or family who will give their life substance and value! They don't want the person who is about to end themselves because they are sick and tired of being long-term unemployed that they won't actually get them a good job! They don't want the broken and traumatized bully victim to know that they won't actually make the bullies stop! They don't want the homeless (or practically-homeless) person to know that they won't actually direct them to their true home, or true housemates! They don't want the people trapped in domestic or professional nightmares to know that they won't actually extract them from those hell-holes and relocate them to an environment where they'll be much more at home! Because if all these poor souls knew this terrible truth, who would ever turn to the mental health industry?
Instead, they willfully market this obsence lie to thousands of poor, desparate people like this every single day! Every time someone trapped in a living hell, like those I just mentioned, is notcied by a regular bystander to be on the verge of committing suicide, they are explicitly promised that "there is help available for you!" But it's always a lie. The golden rule of the "helping" industry is that no help shall ever be given. That promise is just a ruse to sucker in the rubes with their vulnerable rube brains, primed and ripe for manipulation and exploitation.
@Historylover wrote:If they can't - then they have no right to be practising. They are all bluff and bravado. And they are costing patients dearly - in every way.
No argument here.
@Whitehawk wrote:Hi there @chibam
You sure do have strong opionions about the inadequacies and failings of the mental health system and good on you for voicing them so emphatically here on the forums.
Thanks, @Whitehawk!
@Whitehawk wrote:My major concern though is your opinion that there is no professional help available for people who are suicidal. There is compelling evidence from many forum members and others who have been helped when they were in dire need that this is simply not the case. Help is available and can be life saving.
regards
Whitehawk
Well, my opinion is based off personal experiance, of a long, deeply harmful experiance in therapy that didn't even attempt to offer any genuine help for the nightmare that is my life. It is also based upon countless testimonies I've encountered in subsequent years in places just like this forum, of fellow patients/former patients who likewise recount stories of lengthy treatment runs where their therapists gave them no real help whatsoever and often even did them harm.
But perhaps most importantly, it is based upon numerous re-confirmations I've read from therapists themselves that it is a "golden rule" (their words!) of the therapy industry to not offer patients any actual help for their inhumane problems! So if, as you say, there are indeed real cases of patients being helped by the mental health system, then by definition, these cases must all arise from rogue therapists flouting the rules of their own profession! Because the rule is not to help!
Obviously, I'm not going to deny that there are rule-breakers in the world, so your claim that some patients do get help from the system is indeed likely true. But the scarsity of these happy endings is, I believe the dominant talking point of the mental health system, not the fact that they do actually exist if you dig hard enough to find one. When the achitechture of the system is designed to not help, that is a major problem. When that achitechture occasionally breaks down and some measure of help inadvertantly slips out between the cracks, that is not a significantly redeeming accomplishment.
@Whitehawk wrote:Help is available and can be life saving.
This, I believe, makes a significant point; because it's important to know who's measure we are working off when we talk about whether something is "helpful" or not.
Do we define a therapist's intervention as being "helpful" simply because they prevent a death? If they took a visably suicidal patient and somehow managed to subdue or restrain those suicidal inclinations well enough that we can now trust the patient not to behave or speak suicidally?
Again, these concerns are based off personal experiance. Some people might claim I've been "helped" by my therapist because she very effectively constrained any preparedness I had to actively end my own life while I still have living close relatives who might be distressed by my death. Yet every time I have diahrea, I hope it is a sign of terminal bowel cancer. Every time I feel a chest pain, I dare to hope that it is the fatal coronary I've long prayed for. Every time I see a news story about someone getting gunned down in the street, I think: "Lucky bastard!" So yes, my therapist may well have saved my life. That life-saving was most definitely "available", as you say. But the reality of that life-saving, that supposed "help", is to be trapped in a life that I utterly despise and can't wait to be rid of.
I can't help but wonder how many people who speak of there being "help" willfully brand the inhumane nightmares like my own as such. Because when it is others' deaths that distress you, not their anguish; when it is the fact that they harbor a value system that gauges their currant plight to be a fate worse then death that you take issue with, not the horrendous plight itself - it is so easy to rewrite the rules and to redefine the term "help" to mean transforming the sufferer's picture into what the 'normal' world wants it to be - not what the sufferer themself need it to be.
I can't help but see parralels between the "help" system and domestic abuse, in this issue. How often do we hear about abusers punishing/coercing their victims into adhering to a standard that they themself have imposed, and claiming that that punishment is really "helping" their victim? Think of the husband who beats his wife for laying out the bedsheets a little croockedly. "I don't like doing this. I only do this to help you learn that you must do it properly!" he might say. Spend enough time in that sort of environment and the wife may well come to believe that it was her husband's dutiful tutelage that truly 'helped' her to become an immaculate housewife.
Is that what the mental health system does? Does it bend and break people who believe that it is better to die then it is to live as permanently lonely, or unemployed, or bullied, or poverty-striken, or homeless, or disabled, because it can't abide such values and sees them as defects to be "corrected"? Does it reshape the "defective" suicidal as an abusive spouse might reshape their "defective" wife, all the while schooling their victim into believing that they are actually "helping" them?
Do we only say that the mental health system has helped people with appalling lives, because it is so good at brainwashing people into believing that prolonging an appalling life is admirable and "helpful"?
Because lord knows, that's what they tried to do to me.
You can call it "help" if you like. I call it abuse.
Having your life saved is not praiseworthy when you would still be better off dead. I have a right to believe that a life like mine is a fate worse then death, and I am not "defective" for believing so. Nor am I in need of coersion to believe that being alive like I am now is better then being dead.
For me, "help" doesn't mean coersion or brainwashing. It doesn't mean being pressured to "cope", "accept", or "be resiliant" towards living in hell. It means actual practical help to get me out of that hell and into an environment where the statement "life is worth prolonging" is actually true.
@WhitehawkSorry if I responded to your last post a bit agressively. I didn't mean for it to seem as if I was lashing out.
It's certainly a 2-sided issue and, as you can probably guess, I've been stuck on the bad side of it.
Hell, maybe I'm in the wrong. I don't know. Certainly doesn't seem that way from where I'm sitting; but that's just opinion, not fact. And biased opinion at that. Maybe I'm in the wrong.
Either way, I can only speak about things the way I see them. I don't like the idea of pretending to buy into something I don't. So I don't know. Maybe I just shouldn't say anything at all.
Anyways, @Historylover, and anyone who might be interested/concerned - I have work I have to do tomorrow that will probably keep me tied up until tomorrow evening at least, maybe longer. So don't fret if I drop off the radar for 24hrs, give or take. 
Sorry, @Historylover .
I've always felt like it was important to try to fight to fix the parts of the world that are broken. But maybe it is time to stop complaining about the system. I have to admit, it does seem like I just get myself worked up moreso then spurring any improvements.
I'll try hard to keep my lid on from now on.
Hey there @Historylover,
If you wanted to put a link in your post you could copy and paste it in. Or you can highlight the relevant words of your post then click the symbol I've circled in orange to paste in the webpage URL you would like to link to. The person can then click on your highlighted words and this should take them to the webpage.
We only ask that people provide references from trustworthy sources for statements about things outside of your experience such as statistics, data, studies or medicine. So your post about appreciating this documentary would definitely not need a link. You can read more in the Respect part of the Guidelines.
I hope that helps, thanks for asking questions. It helps everyone who is unsure 😊
