I’m really frustrated by recent experiences interfacing with the mental health system for myself and for my teenager. For them, it’s really atrocious. There may be effective options for the upper classes, but they aren’t accessible to me.

This is inspired by @X08’s recent [post] (https://tildes.net/~health.mental/1iia/unable_to_feel_progress_lack_of_happiness_and_not_finding_motivation_to_keep_investing) . Obviously I don’t know about their particulars, but I’ve certainly had the experience of being a part of a group where it appears others are progressing while I am not. Partly this is a problem of how we perceive, measure, and judge “success.” “Don’t compare my insides to others’ outsides,” as the saying goes. But it is possible to a more faithful and reflective comparison, and it does happen that others similar to me* make progress where I don’t, and it’s really frustrating. I’m often wondering, what’s wrong with me that I can’t change and grow?

I don’t have a great answer, although my exceptionally shitty childhood certainly plays a great role.

What I really want to comment on, though, is how insensitive our current mental health system is to the impact disparate causes have on creating similar symptoms, and how that should inform treatment approaches. A gifted psychiatrist (of which there are shockingly few) once put it like this (paraphrasing): Before we look at treatment for depression, we have to make sure the patient isn’t just surrounded by assholes.

But it’s a real problem. CBT is touted by a lot of “weighty” authorities as a valid gold standard treatment for a wide range of MH symptoms, and is claimed to be effective regardless of causes. And it’s my opinion that there is a lot of reasonably scientifically rigorous research backing that claim up. But, it’s not all rainbows, and it’s not working for lots of people. For one, a lot of folks claiming to do CBT are really not. Actual CBT involves a lot of homework, and a lot of recipients don’t have home support and don’t do the homework. This is extra true for children and adolescents living in dysfunctional homes. But more than just patient effort, the research marking CBT as so favorable is mostly based on subjects who are only mild to moderately distressed.* The end result is everyone involved in the “evidence based” healthcare chain is signing sufferers up for CBT when that might not be the best approach. There are lots of other criticisms too. If a practitioner is not well-trained and dedicated, the practice can be very invalidating. It seeks to make the sufferer’s more cognitive process more ‘rational,’ but when that person’s experiences are really, objectively bad, it’s very rational to conclude the world is hostile and unsafe. The tool itself is prepared for this, but it takes a really effective therapist to pull off. Also, it’s not enough by itself, grieving and other healing is also required for success.

The same thing happens in 12 step groups. AA/NA is resoundingly helpful-for a certain set of alcoholics/addicts. Those who don’t make it are often exhorted to become more honest, more open-minded, or more willing.*** My observation, though, is that most of the ones that make it come from intact families with resources. This is not universally true, it’s important for me to point out that there are enough examples of success among folks with no such background to say that there is something valuable in that approach that transcends socio-economics. There are also plenty from well-resourced families who don’t make it, but many of those families are highly dysfunctional. Of this last group, folks from dysfunctional families, some of us find success in other groups. This is because AA/NA are designed for sociopaths, ACA**** is designed for the product of sociopathic parents (who are filled with shame).

I don’t know what the solution is. A lot of malaise, addiction, “maladaptive” behaviors are, I think, born in a dysfunctional society, and so long as that society remains dysfunctional, no individual focused therapy solution will create a permanent fix. I think right here and now, too, we are at one of humanity’s “high tides” of self-destruction, a result primarily of runaway capitalism (is there any other kind?). We also just came through a really nasty global trauma, everyone is feeling it some kinda way.

Thanks for attending my TEDz talk.

*Of course, when talking about something as complex as a human life, there may no way to determine how similar is enough to make valid comparisons

**Also, let’s not talk about the various biases and implementation problems with what those studies refer to as ‘validated’ assessments used for measuring level of distress

***I am, technically, an NA success story

****Adult Children Anonymous, aka Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families, more info at adultchildren.org.

At 22 years old, after months long assessments, I have been diagnosed with severe ADHD, depression and moderate anxiety. Here is a quick timeline of my experience:

• May - August :
  • I started CBT therapy and Sertraline 50mg
  • Gradually I was upped to the a dose of 75mg.
  • In this whole period I did not experience any improvements or side effects, except a loss of appetite in the first few days.
• September:
  • I started taking Methylphenidate 18mg and went back to just 50mg of Sertraline.
  • From the first day I had felt a sentiment of calmness and control. But it slowly faded away and I still felt I could not concentrate on things or act productive.
  • I also stopped going to therapy as I saw that CBT was not effective for me.
• October - November:
  • This was a completely different month. I wasn't fully in control of my attention span but it was much better than I've ever been. What was more shocking was how internally I felt at peace and something that I'd describe now as euphoric (as I assume this was just a side effect of the medication). U
  • Until mid november I was actually going around telling people I think I might not be depressed anymore, as I had felt for the first time in a way that I haven't felt since early childhood. I was able to accomplish incredible feats related to discipline and I saw my academic results improving greatly. Unfortunately this sentiment slowly faded away and I was back to my old self by the end of November.
• December - Now I was upped to 36mg of Methylphenidate and I noticed a much better control of my attention but unfortunately I have not felt that feeling of relief again. And as it seems the effectiveness of the dose diminished from the first few days to now.
  Since December I've had numerous breakdowns, feeling completely exhausted and burnt out. I suffered from classic problems of procrastination starting to work on difficult projects only a couple of days before the deadline and it was all crashing down. I submitted multiple disgustingly low quality pieces of work because I just did not work in time enough but the few days I did work I did incredible amounts of effort and I do feel like the pills helped me stay focused. After this deadline period though I was just met with my normal depression symptoms where I had a long streak of days that I could not even get out of bed or brush my teeth.

I don't know what more to do. I always knew I was broken and needed help. And for all my life I thought that seeing a psychiatrist is a last resort in case "I can't fix myself" on my own. Now it's been almost a whole year and I am in a critical time period where I need to excel and put in the work but I find myself succumbing to my symptoms while jumping up and down with the doses of some pills that barely seem to have an effect.

I didn't have many people around me from the start, and many of them would not understand my condition at all (nobody from my family does). But now it seems that even the few that were empathetic I have unfortunately tired out. I've heard my fair share of bad remarks that have gradually demoralised me (ADHD is not real. I'm just lazy. I just like to complain. etc) and due to the fact that I also have codependency problems this has greatly hurt me and made me feel like I am completely alone and nobody cares for my troubles or has my wellbeing in their best interest. Right now I just wish I'd know what to do. I wish there was some clear step by step goal oriented way to "happiness" or at least normality. I don't even know what more to tell my psychiatrist other than how I don't feel well, which is what I've been telling him since the start.

If you've been through a similar journey, I'd love to hear your experience and any advice you wish you had received earlier.

A recent thread had me reflecting on my own mental health journey and what really made a difference for me, I was interested in opening a discussion about what other people found most valuable too. I'll add my own as a comment.

Insight once came to me after I was prepped for a surgical procedure. As my body's weight began to evaporate, a pain I had never recognized, but which must have always been sounding in the background noise of my being, vanished. The superadhesive worry--which sometimes frightened others as much as myself, that in order to socialize, I had learned to sometimes twist into a temporary shape resembling charm--came unstuck and peeled away. Then followed a great thought, a mandate for how I should spend the remainder of my life. Also, I needed to poop. But more than that, I needed to get out of this semi-public hospital bed and to a private space immediately, so I could allow this cosmic insight a moment to fully bloom. Time was against me. Anesthetized, I knew I was slipping toward, maybe even over, the falls past which I would forget everything of this experience until a groggy post-procedure awakening brought dull daylight and its senseless aches back to me. I had to somehow save the thought. I searched, but the bathroom gave up no markers, no specimen cup labels to write on. I wondered about tearing toilet paper into little letters, hiding them above the cabinet. But would I remember to return to read the message? With an increasingly calm desperation, I dug my nails into the flesh of my hand and repeated again and again the life-saving insight delivered during communion with the world that lay beyond pain. Please remember, please remember this thought.

When I regained consciousness, it was waiting for me like a friend who had lost patience, and now seemed much less attractive. What I had somehow stolen from the gods, secreted in my closed palm through a swim across the river Lethe, was this message: “Do Drugs.”

I had realized that analysis, working on the problem of myself both mentally and verbally, had won me no appreciable gains. Insight, I had. But relief, happiness, an improved outlook? Nothing I had done had really helped me feel better. Anesthesia instantly had. These aren’t the words of an addict coming on-line. I was a reluctant user of any substance. However, in the years following I forced myself to again undertake drug trials with my psychiatrists. Methodically, I worked through every class, waltzed backward through the eras of drugs, danced off-label with each oddball wallflower, ingested every twisted molecule to ever win over the FDA with a promise of psychiatric benefit and maybe some that merely had intrigued one of my more historically-curious doctors. When Eddie Haskell, MD wanted to resurrect a drug of the bad old days just to see what it’d do to a person, I was the patient with his hand out.

I overslept and didn’t sleep. I gained and lost a third of my body weight. My head felt like a styrofoam block, then like the slate of a blackboard being scraped with tableware. I was more or less charged, sweaty, sensitive to light, and shaky. Some drugs make you feel like Benjamin Braddock in his birthday diving suit. Others make you feel like an amnesiac idiot in Benjamin Braddock’s birthday diving suit. A common theme emerges. These substances could help me feel slower, distant from the world, claustrophobic, clammy, sensorily distorted. Sometimes, they dulled my anxiety, or dried my hair-trigger tear ducts, but they accomplished this through impairment, and very clumsily. I have never been drunk, but I think it’s like a drunk traffic cop: success in psych meds comes about by the stopping of certain avenues, slowing up of traffic, blocking lawful turns. And it’s sometimes noted in the overall impact that fewer crashes have occurred. To me this is not success. Impairment so far hasn't been healing for me. I want my turn at quoting the line, "I feel like myself again."

And so, my heart sinks at every day's new headline about psychedelics. If you follow health news at all, you know they are a hot topic, showing a ridiculous amount of promise. Despite fitting the diagnostic profile, my former home was far from anywhere with signups for studies. I reached out to several "clinics" offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. They struck me as resembling many legal weed shops--loads of young bros polishing their presentation and sanitizing an extortionate drug deal in hopes of financing a Tesla. With fees starting at 8x the plane ticket to administer and contextualize a drug that costs less than $20 a dose, I wouldn't credit their soft patter as containing much idealism.

And here I am--for other reasons besides. Yes, a part of me thought living here would put legal psychedelics within my reach, but I'm not seeing any opportunities. Now I'm kicking myself for never having tried to cultivate mushroom spores, never having ventured to ask acquaintances for a hand. I'm marooned here and psilocybin is about blow up in the States.