That seems a pessimistic view of parenthood. Certainly there are better parents and worse ones, but the idea that what drives parents is wanting to pass on humiliation, fear of freedom, wanting to manipulate, etc. is pretty insulting to parents. It’s true that parents often teach conformity, but a great deal of that is from the fear of what will happen to the children after the parents die. Parents probably feel helpless to change the world their children live in so they do their best to make the children adapt to the world as it is. The goal is the survival of the children. I see this fits in with the theme of doing things to people “for their own good” but I resent your comparison of children to adults. We don’t respect the freedom of a child to run into a busy street, and stopping them is actually for their own good. Forcing children to sit still for hours a day in schools that don’t know how to keep their interest is sometimes argued as for their own good, but enough more beneficial education models exist to question this, and alternative schooling is for many available. Keeping the psychiatric industry from drugging everyone is a good goal that this page shares. Suggesting that parents are all driven by hurtful impulses is not an equivalent. My parents neither shielded me from psychiatrists nor compelled me to go, but I told them I was suffering and they paid for what they thought was help. Most parents love their children and want them to thrive. I would suggest that it’s damaging to be such a pessimist about the motivations of those that love us. Maybe their techniques aren’t great, but the motivations are often wholesome, except for those that are unlucky as to which parents they got.
After twenty years of both multiple therapists and psychiatrists I do not believe in either. Therapists can absolutely do harm (not all) and their harm isn’t just referral to a psychiatrist for drugs. My diagnoses can all be explained better by a lack of a support network, the kind that can be active in my life. A therapist lets be get all my talking out of my system and then shoves me out of the door after 50 minutes, even if the talk has left me rattled, and always without establishing a network of people that can actually do the active things that friends do together. No therapists show up when my car breaks down, at a funeral when a parent died, when I need someone to come over and take me out of the house for lunch so I’m not so isolated. Not only that but no therapist in twenty years ever caught on to the fact that my support network was so non-existant. That after moving so often and being an only child of dead parents I was alone all the time. Instead we worked through my childhood and techniques like DBT teaches. Or did the unscientific silliness that is EMDR. Until I met my husband and made friends of his friends and had his family be my family I had no idea what was wrong. I couldn’t say I was lonely and afraid because I didn’t know it myself. I felt safe to tell my therapist anything, but self reporting can’t work when you don’t know what to report. And even then, therapists are still a pathologizing authority figure that instill a feeling of dependency in too many of us. They still treat us as unwell individuals in a normal world instead of normal individuals in an unwell world. I didn’t need an hour a month of talk, I needed friends. I needed family. I needed financial stability. I needed community. I needed to be a loved person with a normal life. Therapists can’t provide the active loving situation that those other things do. Friends, family, financial stability, community are the loving environment where people actually heal. I could have talked for another twenty years to someone who listens for money and it never would have helped me. My friends are people who I can give back to. That makes me feel good. I can only give a therapist money. It’s a terrible model for a healing relationship.
Regarding the other commenter who wrote about the idea of lithium being added to water: I get that trace amounts of lithium are naturally found in water but there’s lots of things that are naturally present in water supplies. Many of these things we have determined to be bad and so we filter them out. But rather than re-adding an impurity to make it so that unless a person can afford bottled water they get drugged against their will, we still need to go back to the real causes of depression. People don’t have support networks because they can’t afford a stable home and a big group of family and friends. Even the wealthier among us are moving away from home to chase time consuming jobs, leaving them littletime for a family, and no extended family nearby to help raise children. Modern capitalist society is sick and some of us suffer more than others. I don’t want drugged water or drugs of any sort, I want a stable home and family. At my increasing age I think the best I might get is a few years with my husband before he’s worked to death, and if I’m lucky the other people in the senior home with me for poor people will be nice.
Very little about any “help” I have encountered with the medical model has focused on a good external support network. There have been times in my life where the only time I had anyone to talk to was a paid therapist, and even those therapists focused on the things that haven’t been shown to improve well being. It was about making sure I kept my job and health insurance so I could keep being treated. It wasn’t about finding community and meaningful work. Everyone was dispensing things at me, meds or a timed fifty minute block of assistance, but I was still alone almost all the time. My last therapist was the most depressing of all of them, she was on eight different medications before “they worked” for her. She was clearly gaining weight and then stopped working suddenly. I needed a better world to live in. I’ve got a better network now, but I’ve gotten used to be isolated and it’s hard to interact with it.
This is terribly ignorant of the role that suffering takes up in religion, including Christianity. The idea that suffering can be learned from and can be used to provide spiritual development is well documented in many religions, including Christianity. That we can learn from an experience doesn’t mean that having to go through that experience was ideal or was God’s choice. I cannot imagine Jesus wanting us to not learn from things, even diseases.
That seems a pessimistic view of parenthood. Certainly there are better parents and worse ones, but the idea that what drives parents is wanting to pass on humiliation, fear of freedom, wanting to manipulate, etc. is pretty insulting to parents. It’s true that parents often teach conformity, but a great deal of that is from the fear of what will happen to the children after the parents die. Parents probably feel helpless to change the world their children live in so they do their best to make the children adapt to the world as it is. The goal is the survival of the children. I see this fits in with the theme of doing things to people “for their own good” but I resent your comparison of children to adults. We don’t respect the freedom of a child to run into a busy street, and stopping them is actually for their own good. Forcing children to sit still for hours a day in schools that don’t know how to keep their interest is sometimes argued as for their own good, but enough more beneficial education models exist to question this, and alternative schooling is for many available. Keeping the psychiatric industry from drugging everyone is a good goal that this page shares. Suggesting that parents are all driven by hurtful impulses is not an equivalent. My parents neither shielded me from psychiatrists nor compelled me to go, but I told them I was suffering and they paid for what they thought was help. Most parents love their children and want them to thrive. I would suggest that it’s damaging to be such a pessimist about the motivations of those that love us. Maybe their techniques aren’t great, but the motivations are often wholesome, except for those that are unlucky as to which parents they got.
After twenty years of both multiple therapists and psychiatrists I do not believe in either. Therapists can absolutely do harm (not all) and their harm isn’t just referral to a psychiatrist for drugs. My diagnoses can all be explained better by a lack of a support network, the kind that can be active in my life. A therapist lets be get all my talking out of my system and then shoves me out of the door after 50 minutes, even if the talk has left me rattled, and always without establishing a network of people that can actually do the active things that friends do together. No therapists show up when my car breaks down, at a funeral when a parent died, when I need someone to come over and take me out of the house for lunch so I’m not so isolated. Not only that but no therapist in twenty years ever caught on to the fact that my support network was so non-existant. That after moving so often and being an only child of dead parents I was alone all the time. Instead we worked through my childhood and techniques like DBT teaches. Or did the unscientific silliness that is EMDR. Until I met my husband and made friends of his friends and had his family be my family I had no idea what was wrong. I couldn’t say I was lonely and afraid because I didn’t know it myself. I felt safe to tell my therapist anything, but self reporting can’t work when you don’t know what to report. And even then, therapists are still a pathologizing authority figure that instill a feeling of dependency in too many of us. They still treat us as unwell individuals in a normal world instead of normal individuals in an unwell world. I didn’t need an hour a month of talk, I needed friends. I needed family. I needed financial stability. I needed community. I needed to be a loved person with a normal life. Therapists can’t provide the active loving situation that those other things do. Friends, family, financial stability, community are the loving environment where people actually heal. I could have talked for another twenty years to someone who listens for money and it never would have helped me. My friends are people who I can give back to. That makes me feel good. I can only give a therapist money. It’s a terrible model for a healing relationship.
Regarding the other commenter who wrote about the idea of lithium being added to water: I get that trace amounts of lithium are naturally found in water but there’s lots of things that are naturally present in water supplies. Many of these things we have determined to be bad and so we filter them out. But rather than re-adding an impurity to make it so that unless a person can afford bottled water they get drugged against their will, we still need to go back to the real causes of depression. People don’t have support networks because they can’t afford a stable home and a big group of family and friends. Even the wealthier among us are moving away from home to chase time consuming jobs, leaving them littletime for a family, and no extended family nearby to help raise children. Modern capitalist society is sick and some of us suffer more than others. I don’t want drugged water or drugs of any sort, I want a stable home and family. At my increasing age I think the best I might get is a few years with my husband before he’s worked to death, and if I’m lucky the other people in the senior home with me for poor people will be nice.
Very little about any “help” I have encountered with the medical model has focused on a good external support network. There have been times in my life where the only time I had anyone to talk to was a paid therapist, and even those therapists focused on the things that haven’t been shown to improve well being. It was about making sure I kept my job and health insurance so I could keep being treated. It wasn’t about finding community and meaningful work. Everyone was dispensing things at me, meds or a timed fifty minute block of assistance, but I was still alone almost all the time. My last therapist was the most depressing of all of them, she was on eight different medications before “they worked” for her. She was clearly gaining weight and then stopped working suddenly. I needed a better world to live in. I’ve got a better network now, but I’ve gotten used to be isolated and it’s hard to interact with it.
This is terribly ignorant of the role that suffering takes up in religion, including Christianity. The idea that suffering can be learned from and can be used to provide spiritual development is well documented in many religions, including Christianity. That we can learn from an experience doesn’t mean that having to go through that experience was ideal or was God’s choice. I cannot imagine Jesus wanting us to not learn from things, even diseases.