Like, I’ve had several therapists/psychologists/psychiatrists/counselors throughout my life who either seemed disinterested or flat out unfit to deal with people like me, and I don’t even think I’m the worst case scenario (who knows, maybe I am?).
What’s their main demographic, who do they even help? Yuppies, professionals, people in manager positions who already have had successful professional, social, and dating lives?
They’re already too expensive for most of the population, they seem to be absolutely oblivious to the problems of most men of color or trans folks or most gay folks, they can’t help early career young people, definitely not working class people, like what the fuck are they good for? And can people just shut the fuck about ‘just go to therapy, honey’, ‘men will do anything but go to therapy’ like fuck off. I went to therapy, and holy shit yeap, the world still sucks and society is still extremely hostile to me.
Oh I can change my reaction to things? to live in delusion is almost what they seem to be prescribing and nah, I’d rather just save the 100 dollars per session and spend it on 2 months supply of fucking OxyContin.
And motherfucker, if you’re a psychiatrist, and I’m here for adderall or anxiolitics or fucking laxatives, you had better fucking give it to me. I didn’t fucking pay 150 to prescribe me children’s medication or to be lectured about the importance of therapy.
This doesn’t disprove the existence of psychiatric disorders? Just the idea that they fit a specific vague label of “MDD” or “GAD” which seems relatively reasonable to me. Acute and intense anxiety, low mood, ahedonia, etc are all things people still experience but they don’t seem to fall across diagnosis lines (notably also don’t seem to fall along alternative diagnosis lines, like for instance the (kinda victim-blamey) theory of “TLP narcissism” I just read about yesterday)
Overall it seems to imply that statistically strange disordered moods and neural differences exist, they just don’t conform to our arbitrary groupings. This is rather obvious when you see how spectrum-based most disorders have to be to accommodate for the wide variety of issues people have.
The DSM is generally just stuff that pathologizes normal behavior under capitalism or pathologizes forms of neurodivergency so altogether it’s unsurprising that depression doesn’t exist as a coherent individual disorder