Would somebody mind telling me how to re-post the text here? I am certainly not interested in retyping all that.

I see on the r-psychiatry sub people who work in the field complain or vent from time to time. Upset at disrespectful or non-compliant patients, sad over the suicide of a patient, angry over treatment and funding. Yet psychiatry enjoys well paying status, staff far less so, as well as good quality of life in work and life.

Are these complaints valid? I think they are not. As far as I'm concerned, anyone licensed to work in psychiatry knew what they were signing up for and have invalid feelings. Maybe a suicidal patient was starting to get better finally and they take their life. Sad, but I don't believe psychiatrists are entitled to those feelings. They know their aptitude for treating patients affects whether they life or die. You know you are dealing with mental illness and you're going to complain? Of its that bad, then quit and go work in a different specialty. Or be a consultant if you lack the spine to be on the ground.

I had an experience the other day when scobot5 made a reply to my comment. I disagreed with him, but for the first time I thought to myself "this isn't important enough to argue about."

I've never experienced this when I've talked about psychiatry. When I was a kid, everything and pretty much everyone was completely disconnected from reality. I had to immediately counter any nonsense to have any hope of staying alive.

As an adult I carried this with me in a weird way. Even though the circumstances changed and I was no longer in imminent danger, I still responded like it was a reflex. I know it doesn't make sense, but to me in the moment it was life and death.

For the first time I didn't experience that. For the first time I felt that things would be OK if I let something go. I know it's difficult to understand where I'm coming from, but holy crap the peace is amazing.

“Treatment for Bipolar Disorder in Adults: A Systematic Review” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK532183/

”Conclusions:

We found no high- or moderate-strength evidence for any intervention to effectively treat any phase of any type of BD versus placebo or an active comparator. All antipsychotics approved by the Food and Drug Administration, except aripiprazole, had low-strength evidence for benefit for acute mania in adults with BD-I. Lithium improved short-term for acute mania and resulted in longer time to relapse in the long term versus placebo in adults with BD-I. Aside from low-strength evidence showing CBT and systematic/collaborative care having no benefit for a few outcomes, evidence was insufficient for nondrug interventions. Information on harms was limited across all studies. Future research examining BD treatments will require innovative ways to increase study completion rates.”

This is interesting as it seems that the narrative is often how medications are necessary for the treatment of bipolar disorder, both in the short and long term. Is there a better way to approach treatment?

I am talking about the same sort of downsizing the happened in the 1970s as insane asylum dissipated.

The idea is to implement public health measure that reduce disease burden with I utilize psychiatry, reducing demand for psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses and thus shrinking their job market. I also believe the law should be changed so that physicians can only practice in fields they did a residency in.

I want to know a graduating psychiatrist whose dream is to help others as she has been helped is devastated to find no jobs to fulfill that. My dream is fewer jobs for these people and reforms to their practice, such as making it illegal to use or consider the Hippocratic Oath (in which doctors make pledges to fake dieties) as a defene. So if I sue a psychiatrist they should get no presumption of good faith and cannot say it was "for the good of the patient" (ignoring how arrogant such a claim is

So just IMO it's real fucked up if mods are gonna private a thread where I'm still getting replies and notifications 😒

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Background
In early 2020, I fell into depression after a life-changing event. I delayed psychiatric treatment for two years, saw a few therapists, but nothing improved. My depression led to severe anger issues and self-harm (non-suicidal). I tried to deal with it, but things got worse after a major breakup in 2022. This pushed me to finally start meds.

2022-2024: On Meds
I’ve been on a mix of antipsychotics, antidepressants, and sleeping pills for 2 years. While they stopped self-harm and reduced anger, the side effects have been unbearable. My GPA has dropped, and I’m failing courses for the first time in my life. The doctor changes meds often, but each comes with new side effects:

Side Effects:

• Nausea, tremors, frequent urination
• Nightmares and almost screaming while waking up
• Sensitivity to noise
• Severe itching, which no allergy meds helped

It’s been exhausting. I even tried meditation and exercise, but the meds made me too tired. Recently, I stopped meds for 3 weeks and while I feel less numb, the anger is back. My doc didn’t diagnose anything major, just anxiety and chemical imbalances. His visits are exhausting (5-hour wait) and no other psychiatrist has my medical records.

Now
I’m tired of meds but don’t want to live in anger and irritability either. What should I do? Therapy hasn’t helped, and switching meds has only caused more side effects. I really need advice on how to move forward.

Currently our laws, thanks to lobbying by psychiatry, incentivize you, if you're suicidal, to 1) Never talk about it and 2) Don't fuck it up if you decide to go through with it.

Because of psychiatry, if you talk about being suicidal you immediately surrender your right to bodily autonomy. You will, at a minimum; be arrested, strip searched, most likely cavity searched, locked in seclusion, and charged tens of thousands of dollars to have your Human Rights violated. Or the cops will simply kill you upon arrival, which we know statistically is extremely common. The most common victim of a police shooting is someone in a mental health crisis. Mentally ill people are 16x more likely to be killed by police than non mentally ill people. And that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you will be restrained, forcibly sedated and electroshocked until you can't even remember who your own mother is anymore.

And this isn't just known and talked about on antipsychiatry forums, this knowledge is widespread. We see memes and posts on pro-psychiatry forums saying things like "Telling my therapist enough to get help, but not enough that they involuntarily hospitalize me." People understand that you can not talk about being suicidal. Doing so can be life-ruining. It is typically life-ruining.

Because of psychiatry people having thoughts of suicide are forced to keep those thoughts to themselves. To never seek help from anyone in any way. They can't talk to friends, family, anyone. And they know they have one shot to get it right. Psychiatry has created within our society the most dangerous situation imaginable. There is a clear solution to stopping the suicide epidemic: abolish psychiatry.

This is an essay I wrote about how I think psychiatry is not legitimate medicine.

Think also of joining my new subreddit r/onlytruemedicine. Thanks. Here goes:

Psychiatry is mostly fake

Exactly as it sounds. It is mostly fake. This is written from a medical doctor’s perspective who has been put through the psychiatric and therapy ringer.

Many people have compared psychiatry to a cult or supernatural religion. It has also been compared to now disgraced social/political movements like nazism - punishing a vulnerable population that it has declared undesirable misfits. Basically psychiatry is at best experimental medicine, on par with witch doctors, healing shamans and primitive ’caveman’ medicine.

Although we have found that some substances do affect behavior, such as alcohol, sugar, caffeine, THC, etc., the application of substances to affect behavior should in no way constitute true medicine.

What is currently called modern psychiatry with its myriad diseases, is nothing more than described sets of grouped behaviors. All behavior can ultimately change by free will and with talk therapy (usually with psychologists and therapists) and ‘will power’ if applied regularly. All medications currently prescribed for “psychiatric mental illnesses” essentially amount to sedatives or other similar substances that problematically affect brain chemistry.

The brain is a biological organ for sure, however, we do not understand how it functions in the least, particularly at the higher levels such as behavior where psychiatric medicine supposedly specializes. We understand the urinary bladder, the lungs, the cardiovascular system, muscles, bones, the hematopoietic system, the digestive system, the peripheral nerves, etc., to a much greater degree.

We do NOT understand the brain, and therefore we should not be mucking with its chemicals, plain and simple.

Psychiatry has never been legitimate. It has always been controversial, thought to be punitive and more prison minded. Psychiatric doctors represent the next generation of formerly punitive faith healers, exorcists, witch trial judges, and any other historically shameful exercise at an early society’s attempt to bring community behavioral cohesion.

Psychiatric controversies, including everything from psychosurgeries such as frontal lobotomy, torture/seizure modalities like ECT (electro-convulsive therapy), etc. have amounted to nothing more than man’s imperfect desire to control behaviors that other people find problematic. Many of the the problematic behaviors of psychiatric patients are rooted in bad childhood experiences such as emotional trauma. It is therefore double punishment to an individual to have suffered in childhood and then to suffer at the hands of supposed doctors wielding poisonous chemicals and demands for punitive compliance in adolescence and adulthood.

It does not matter that psychiatrists have gone to medical schools, even prestigious Ivy League ones, or are licensed by governments to practice medicine. It is NOT true medicine no matter what governing boards they have convinced. They are still considered for the purposes of this essay, and for everyone else, to be mostly illegitimate.

Creating new neural pathways through cognitive exercises is the key to changing behavior. That can only reasonably be done with concerted effort over time at changing bad behaviors. If there is a role for psychiatry at all within this, it may be temporary or mild sedation to quell negative thinking. Long-term use of psychiatric medication is abundantly harmful to most individuals as can be seen throughout the published literature as well as online discussion boards.

Coercion and placebo effect are the main tools employed by modern psychiatrists along with endless experimentation of all the chemicals in their toolbox. These are all ultimately harmful and should not be taken seriously as legitimate medicine.

Because brain function, particularly the cerebrum (and within that the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes, are currently mostly a mystery to science, it goes without saying that tampering with this chemistry is experimental at best, extremely harmful at worst.

Where is the proof for psychiatry? THERE IS NONE! No imaging, no pathologic tissue to sample, no blood tests - nothing but the opinion of a flawed supposedly educated human being is used for diagnosing mental illness. The attempted standardization (must meet for example 3 of 5 criteria in the DSM - diagnostic & statistical manual to be eligible for diagnosis) is still an imperfect system where ‘square pegs’ can be hammered into round holes without too much effort.

If science is ever able to coherently explain how these areas of the brain work, as far as forming thoughts, memories, logic, etc., from a true biological perspective, at that point psychiatry, with treatments reflecting that knowledge, can be given more legitimacy.

What about the idea that there are so many psychiatrists and so many mental health professionals who espouse or agree that medication works? What about that? The entire course of human history is filled with terrible ideas that many many people believed in it one point or another. We should throw modern psychiatry onto that pile. Group hysteria is always just that, a large amount of people believing some thing that has no legitimacy.

Are there any other medical specialties that have such a strong “anti” movement, including Scientologists, critical psychiatry advocates, and the like? Is there an anti-urology movement? Anti-pulmonology movement? No there is not. There is only an anti psychiatry movement. And there is a very good reason for that - no proof. See discussion below.

Who are psychiatrists? They are medical doctors with degrees like MD or DO after their names. Their main job is to write prescriptions for medications.

They are to be distinguished from the REAL or most legitimate mental health practitioners currently out there: therapists and psychologists, with degrees like PhD and LMFT and the like. These are the people that work on behavior from a talk standpoint, where it should remain for now.

Basically: psychology (and other talk therapy) good, psychiatry bad.

Who becomes a psychiatrist anyway? The most emotionally insecure members of the medical school class, that’s who. They are the ones who had emotionally difficult childhoods and likely had a mental health history forced upon them by a psychologically ill parent. So the trans-generational cycle continues in perpetuity and gets amplified onto other unsuspecting poor souls.

The majority of medical students avoid psychiatry like the plague because enduring psychiatry lectures and sitting through their tedious clerkships, where it feels like the whole thing is nothing other than a contorted group of weirdos donned in white coats, endlessly bantering about unprovable conditions and employing specious logic in justifying the coercive application of mind numbing chemicals to troubled gullible individuals.

But haven’t I ever seen someone with mental illness? Someone with schizophrenia or true bipolar (this is distinguished from false bipolar which is a newer diagnosis advocated by pharmaceutical companies to sell medication) who is hearing voices and is out of touch with reality, and is truly dangerous? Yes I have.

Do they have an illness in their brain? Not likely.

They are severely emotionally troubled for sure. No one watched every second of their upbringing and witnessed the kind of emotional trauma they likely endured. They are the way they are due to overwhelming trauma during their formative years most likely.

While it can be posited that there are biological brain differences among us, there is nothing to indicate that a child raised in a safe and secure environment free from emotional trauma would develop mental illness. This is a fallacy that psychiatrists would like you to believe is a biological inevitability, however, like everything else in psychiatry, it is only a guess at best.

Is something biologically different in the brains of schizophrenics and true bipolars? Not anything currently detectable by modern science. So the application of anti-psychotic chemicals upon them is both foolish and dangerous, and tantamount to chemical torture.

Talk therapy with these individuals is time consuming and therefore inefficient. They are capable of logic, free will, and changing their mind to make different decisions, just like the rest of us.

It is however much quicker (and therefore less costly) to hit their brains with toxic substances, but ultimately much worse for them and society at large.

And yes, it buys boats for pharmaceutical executives in the process. Don’t underestimate the profit factor in so-called mental health medications.

But what about people who are convinced psychiatric medicine helped them? My response: Do we truly know it helped them? How do we know they didn’t convince themselves it helped them to avoid the cognitive dissonance of taking poisonous chemicals and spending money and time all for nought? Are there other life circumstances that changed? Relationship or career or other?

Don’t underestimate our desire to legitimize superstition. It feels cognitively better to convince ourselves that a treatment like psychiatric medicine is working for us, rather than face the reality that we made ourselves feel better. And also that the nice “doctor” on the chair or behind the desk holding the prescription pad might actually be a manipulative liar whose main prerogative is his/her own personal profit. You might be to them just the next sucker walking in and out of their door.

To the extent that the psychiatrist might have clinical narcissism themselves, they truly don’t care much about you and only care about themselves and their bottom line. Keeping you a perpetual patient is the most important thing to them.

Psychiatry in the modern era, dealt mainly with the extremely emotionally troubled, the kind that were regularly institutionalized up until around the 1980s when suddenly the emergence of SSRI’s like Prozac hit the market.

Suddenly psychiatry for the masses on demand became the norm. This was an unfortunate error for society. These medications work very poorly and have been mired in controversy, producing weight gain and sexual dysfunction side effects that have been well described in the scientific literature and popular press.

The unfortunate legacy is that psychiatry suddenly became more mainstream (“Prozac Nation” was a bestselling book that generated endless media discussion at the time) for what would be considered the majority of “anxious preoccupied” people out there using the language of attachment theory, those formerly thought to be dealing with the “problems of daily living”.

Psychiatry ultimately should retract back to what it used to be before Prozac. These so-called medications do not work well and mainly only provide false hope for people who should be investing more time and effort in therapy, self exploration and actively changing behaviors.

At this time, modern psychiatry is nothing more than a harmful pseudoscience and should be preferentially avoided at all costs by the outpatient population. Their ‘medications’ are no more effective at curbing or helping undesirable behavior than a tarot card or crystal ball reading psychic is capable of reliably predicting the future. At least in those latter examples no physical or mental coercive practices, or toxic substances are being administered.

Psychiatry is not legitimately a true branch of medicine but rather an extension of law enforcement, with its only utility being its license to sedate dangerous individuals. As psychiatrists, like most humans, are trusting souls not trained to be skeptical of dangerous manipulators, they are delicious targets to be worked on by cunning individuals of the extreme narcissist persuasion (malignant narcissists, psychopaths & sociopaths). An enlightened society should therefore have enhanced or extra rules in place for accessing psychiatry, knowing the inappropriate power they yield relative to the limited ability of its practitioners to detect such dangerous individuals.

Psychiatry should ideally therefore not be legitimate ethical treatment for most people, save only for the most dangerous (ideally already incarcerated) among us. When it is available to the non-prison population, it should not be accessible by the general public, but only on a referral basis.

Any family or individual seeking psychiatric services should have had to go through at least 1 year minimum of talk therapy before being allowed access to a psychiatrist. In the setting of child or disabled adult patients, every major caregiver for the intended psychiatric patient should be required to undergo a rigorous psychological evaluation (MMPI personality testing and interview with knowledgeable skeptical psychologist or equivalent professional) clearing them of dangerous behavior before a single prescription is written.

Does that seem costly and time consuming? It is, but such a process would ultimately do a better job weeding out the manipulative psychologically ill liars with nefarious control intentions (of which unfortunately there are many in the caregiver population) from those true innocent and benevolent individuals who altruistically are trying to help troubled dependents in their care.

It is further thought that with advances in AI or artificial intelligence technology, around the clock talk therapy for emotionally troubled, or even all, people maybe on the short horizon. This may be able to keep people emotionally stable and secure at all times, thereby ultimately replacing the need for harmful controversial psychiatric medicines entirely.

Employing positive thinking, actively instituting a positive mindset, and limiting contact with troublesome individuals works well when applied consistently over time, and may ultimately be the solution for all behavioral, emotional and so-called “psychiatric“ problems.

One can hope and dream.

The too long; didn’t read assessment: psychiatrists currently should not be considered real doctors and they should not be considered to be practicing real medicine. Call it experimental at best. They should be avoided at all costs in favor of talk based therapies, save only for the most dangerous among us.

If we do attempt to legitimize their sedative type chemicals, it should be in a setting of MUCH ENHANCED safeguards for the public than what currently exist today. A much more thorough informed consent process at the outset of psychiatric therapy should be employed right away.

Wake up world!

I find this need for psychiatry to be “fake” or not real medicine is generally an emotional argument.

A lot of what people around here believe is perfectly consistent with a field of medicine in which many providers are poorly trained or malfeasant, where the medical science is in its infancy, and where diagnosis is syndromal and treatment based on trial and error. Other conditions or forms of treatment scattered throughout the rest of medicine will generally have all the same shortcomings. Psychiatry is not fundamentally different, it’s just that it’s on the far end of some of these spectrums.

The most telling thing is that almost all physicians and all medical schools, professional societies and accrediting bodies consider psychiatry a “real” medical field, even if they agree with a lot of the shortcomings mentioned. No one seems to ask themselves why there are zero hospitals, medical schools or licensing bodies who have decided to simply remove psychiatry from their purview. Psychiatry has become an increasingly popular and competitive specialty amongst medical students, not the other way around. But whether medical students want to do it or not is irrelevant to the question at hand.

It will sometimes be claimed that other physicians do not consider psychiatrists real doctors, but this is mostly untrue or at best a half truth. A surgeon might sarcastically, or as an ego boost, say that a psychiatrist is not a real doctor. But only in the same way that they don’t consider dermatologists or radiologists real doctors either. And the moment their patient cries or refuses antibiotics they will be calling psychiatry for help.

Most doctors have no issue with psychiatry as medicine because psychiatry is necessary for a functioning medical system and other docs want to be able to call psychiatry when they get out of their depth. Different specialties practice medicine very differently, but they all speak the same language because they all have the same foundational training. You don’t ask a psychiatrist to workup chest pain, but you don’t ask radiologists, dermatologists or pathologists to do that either. Psychiatry is a much more clinical discipline than some of these other ones mentioned, but they are all a part of medicine and the practicioners are all doctors because you have to go to medical school to fill those roles.

Anyway, it’s a dumb argument unless one first states clearly what specific criteria must be met for a field, a diagnosis or a treatment to constitute “real medicine”. That is never where these posts go though, they just declare psychiatry is not legitimate medicine and then follow that with a fairly standard list of complaints. Again, other medical fields are not completely immune from those complaints, even if much of what they do can be excepted So the insistence on making this fake medicine thing the core argument actually only degrades very legitimate antipsychiatry critiques.

I will take issue with one specific comment as well - that is also not novel. People say that there is no other area of medicine with an anti- movement and use this as evidence that psychiatry must be fake. But this is not true. Any time medicine touches a controversial issue there will be resistance that is more or less organized. There is no anti-pulmonology movement because there is nothing controversial about the lungs and pulmonology does not touch on any polarizing societal or psychological issue.

But there are large, well organized anti-vaccine, anti-abortion (or anti-reproductive medicine more generally) and anti-gender affirming care movements. Regardless of what you think about vaccines, the existence of an anti-vaccine movement is hardly proof that vaccines are fake or that immunology or infectious disease is an illegitimate branch of medicine. There are folks in opposition to cosmetic surgery or performance enhancement medicine, who don’t believe this is medicine in the sense of treating human illness.

Anyway, I would argue that one’s efforts are much better spent exposing and confronting some specific issue with psychiatry rather than this.

MbP, or as it’s now known ‘factitious disorder upon another’, is considered a rare form of child abuse, but it may not be as rare as it is thought to be.

Usually when a physician is duped into this by a crafty parent (usually a mother) it is a pediatrician. But have there been any cases where a psychiatrist is the duped doctor?

Psychiatry, as a unique specialty that is more opinion rather than data based seems particularly prone to attack in this regard.

Could it be that a high percentage of child psychiatrists are unknowingly part of an elaborate abuse mechanism by many well meaning families who are ‘just trying to help their out of control child’ when really there is an underlying unhealthy family dynamic that should be changed instead, but society doesn’t really know how to diagnose or treat that? So instead the child suffers?

Your thoughts please.

The schism is premise for this sub. So here, I am looking to get professional perspectives that patients may not see or agree with. It's more of understanding the nuances of the trade so we can refine debate on the matter.

This is less a psychiatry-specific issue and more a medical research issue as a whole. The idea journals get to make these rules and they be voluntary isn't acceptable, and scientists, physicians, nurses, and anyone else who might publish should have to legally disclose any and all funding towards regardless of relevancy. Failure to do so should carry a heavy fine or brief prison time and having your professional licenses and certifications stripped from you.

Not condoning the violence but I am totally sympathetic to this woman:

https://chroniclet.com/news/402954/woman-denies-mental-illness-will-serve-at-least-14-years-in-attempted-murder-of-parents/

The US has very strong protections for things that fall under freedom of religion. If someone claims that something or not doing something is a legit religious practice, it is often allowed due to these protections for religious freedom. Using this logic, various groups have sought to utilise this to be able to achieve certain goals:

Example 1: The Temple of Satan has utilised religious freedom to give their members better access to abortion in states that restrict abortion.

Example 2: The International Church of Cannabis has utilised religious freedom to give its members better access to marijuana in states that restrict marijuana.

Example 3: Various Native American groups can use hallucinogenic substances under the guise of religious freedom.

Example 4: The Amish are exempt from conscription since they are extreme pacifists.

Example 5: Scientology has had some success in protecting its members from forced psychiatry.

There are many more examples.

Given this, would it be worth creating a Church of Anti-Psychiatry of which would give its members greater protection from forced psychiatry under the guise of religious freedom?

Forgive me, I know this isn't exactly the right sub for this question, but I have no more subs that I'm not banned from.

How do you let the pain out? Every time I start to relax, I'll start to tell people about the way I feel, but this ends up driving them away. For the longest time I couldn't feel it because of all the adrenaline. I was so high that I couldn't feel the pain and stress in my body. I was so lit that I could have had a gunshot wound and not felt it. I looked like starvin' marvin while eating family sized dinners and drinking seven 16 oz beers every night, but at least I had more people around me. Then when I was given the propranolol that blocked the adrenaline, I could suddenly feel all of the emotional and physical pain from decades of living though truly insane bullshit. It was at the worst time possible too being during the virus. I needed someone to hear me but there wasn't hardly anybody. I'm way better now, but I'm still torn between having polite conversations and puking up more of the pain and driving people away. I'm not blaming people for feeling uncomfortable, but I don't know what to do. I can't live with all of this inside of me, but I can't live isolated like letting it out does.

My experience with psychiatry was twenty years ago. The whole experience was burned into my mind. I can remember the sheer insanity and the complete divorce from reality. It's like it just gave everyone a license to believe whatever version of reality they wanted to believe. Anything that ran in opposition was dismissed as some disorder and the person speaking it drugged with haldol so they shut up.

I saw children being drugged because of behavior resulting from blatant abuse. I saw children being electroshocked when the seven different drugs made the kid nuts. Even the schools would threaten parents with CPS and claim child abuse if they didn't put the kid they were annoyed with on adderall.

I'm really wondering if any of this has actually changed. I've heard bits and pieces that make me wonder. The local school mandates the teachers not diagnose or even suggest a disorder. I've seen where actual physical and medical problems are actually being considered. I've even seen where psychs actually acknowledge that there actually might be a problem (like on this sub).

I just want to know if anything has actually changed.

I don't know if I've asked this before, but I'm trying to find information and help for the children of parents on the spectrum. It's becoming more and more clear that this was one of the major reasons for everything being so crazy when I was a kid.

I've looked online and the vast majority of info is for the parents of autistic children, not for the children of autistic parents. The best I've really come across is information for folks who figured out they're autistic in adulthood.

Right now I'm trying to wrap my head around how they process information. For example, I was talking to some other relatives of mine. I would try telling them what happened to me as a kid and they would just keep giving me what I thought was more shit. I got really angry with them until I spoke with their son, who was like "no man, they're autistic. They just don't understand it." I look at my own parents and not only am I starting to see it, but the problems seem to be getting worse. Just recently I discovered that the chimney at my parents house was unstable and could potentially fall into the house. When I brought up the issue with my father, he seriously thought that he could strap it to a tree and leave it at that. I couldn't leave that issue alone and we got it fixed properly, but I'm seeing a slow worsening of things.

I really don't know what to do here. I don't know how to disentangle the way they taught me to see the world vs the way it's normally seen. I don't know how to help them properly deal with emotions. I'll try telling them about a problem and they say they understand but then I'll find out they were just playing along. I just don't know what to do.

Despite a protracted history steeped in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, I find it odd every psychiatrist I have met defaults to medication for everything rather than looking to the cause of why a person is depressed and not just the symptoms in question.

Some things just can't be addressed with pills, and psychotherapy tends to have a lower relapse rate of depressive symptoms compared to medications for a reason. When I look at the psychiatry sub, it's always about the best medication regiment and, rarely, about how to best treat people without medication. I trust psychotherapists more as they have no choice but to talk to you. They can't reach for a prescription pad.

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