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Know Thy Self: Navigating the Mental Health Industry
Know Thy Self: Navigating the Mental Health Industry
- Are you in treatment for mental health and find yourself spinning your wheels and not moving forward?
- Has therapy become a place to vent while life goes on unchanged?
- In addition to psychiatric symptoms, do you also have multiple other physical symptoms with no seeming answers despite seeing numerous specialists?
- Do you have multiple different diagnoses being managed by multiple specialists?
- Have you had multiple medication trials that either don’t work or come with difficult side effects?
- Do any of these ring true despite seeking help in both the “conventional” medical world AND the “alternative” medical world?
As a practicing physician for over 25 years and seeing people at various parts of the human lifespan, a solid, consistent, enduring set of questions and observations have emerged for me. Prior to “psychiatrist”, I am a fellow human and quite passionate about sharing what I know about the mental health industry and the medical industry as a whole based on this simple premise: I’d want for you, your family and friends, the same thing I’d want for me and mine.
What information would I want people to know before they even begin to seek help to avoid the many pitfalls I’ve encountered that keep people stuck in a fear based cookie-cutter system? Where might you also unintentionally be a barrier to your own care?
Why is it that we’re still dealing with chronic psycho-physiologic dis-ease despite a myriad of interventions? Why are we still separating brain body mind and spirit through a fragmented understanding and approach?
While symptom control has its very important place (phase one 1 we’ll call it) why are we then not going further in emphasizing the goal of and ways to shift into psycho-physiologic homeostasis - a sustained self regulating healing state (phase 2)?
Why is one “camp” shaking its fist at “conventional medicine” and the other “camp” shaking its fist at “alternative” approaches? There should be no such positions. “How can we make best use of the interventions we have?” for this person in front of me is ultimately the most loving and responsible position; not population health, but individual health.
To answer the initial question, I’d say it’s mostly a well-intentioned friend. individual psychiatrists and other practitioners can be of great service but the Mental Health Industry as a whole, like any other Industry, can be highly problematic. I suspect that the importance and impact of learning how to navigate one of the most quality-of-life effecting decisions is something we’d all agree on. Who to go to? What to expect? What’s the goal? Is this therapy or treatment fostering dependency at the cost of agency? So many questions. Given my background I’d say the process is equally important as the content and is not something the average person knows to even ask.
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