Being a graduate from 3 years of studying psych and with an active experience of mental illness, I can say that no amount of studying theory and doing therapy+ taking meds for years helped me realize the root of my problems and my worth as a human. more than Marxist analysis. I live to be a part of the revolution, and as long as psychotherapy reinforces the client to believe in themselves and to accept the realities of it is what it is, it will never achieve its job of liberating the person. There is a need for psychology to gain a Marxist perspective, more so from modern day leftists in the mental health field.
They’ll also happily call one time use, or repeated occasional use of “more innocent” drugs like cannabis, “X use disorder”. You can be fully functioning, an occasional cannabis smoker, whose symptoms are both unrelated to cannabis use in theory and are confirmed unrelated by stopping usage and not getting symptom relief and yet they’ll call your occasional use “cannabis use disorder”. And there’s no recourse; you can’t have a diagnosis taken off your record. And of course in a situation where it’s your word against theirs, yours won’t be taken seriously, especially if you have a “drug use disorder”! Just like with non-mental health care, the patient being incentivized to lie to their healthcare provider is a horrible situation to be in, and leads to worse outcomes in general. It’s also infuriating that being honest about occasional responsible cannabis use means you automatically can not get prescribed several classes of drugs (some of which I have issues with on principle but that’s not the point): you can’t be prescribed stimulants, you can’t be prescribed benzodiazepines, you can’t be prescribed narcotic painkillers[1].
This isn’t law, it’s just operating standards at most places. Especially if you’re poor and are recieving government-provided mental health treatment where they have very strict, uniform standards for acceptable treatment by their providers. ↩︎
Where I live there’s a place that we called The Little House (La casita) which is like an evangelical rehabilitation clinic, a lot of kids get sent there, I have quite a couple of friends who were sent there, for smoking weed, and they give you shit like clonazepam, alplax, ketiapine and shit to “quit weed” and they get out of there literally fucked up in the brain because of how much pills they give them, so any parent can send their kids there.
Sounds like the old sounds asylums. Jfc.
Do they then also force those people to go advertise for it and collect donations to keep that shit going? We have something similar here and they do that a lot. Basically a religious legal drug gang.
I wonder how much of it is determined by the cost of some treatments. They’ll need a legitimate reason to deny it and this is ‘reasonable’ on the surface.