Note: I believe there are genuine instances where medication helps. Coming from a family with a history of schizophrenia, I understand how hard it can be to survive without access to modern medications.
That said, I also believe that the Therapy Industrial Complex is myopically focused upon the individual, to the point where there’s often not even consideration of societal factors influencing our minds. It is not individual mental health leading to rising suicide rates, increases in mass shootings, and generalized depression. It is our society.
If you genuinely don’t feel regular feelings of climate anxiety that effects your ability to focus on the meaningless trash that is much of modern life, then it is you who need medication, not those who experience the entirely rational anxiety of knowing that life as we know it is very likely to come to a screeching halt, leaving us and our future generations infinitely worse off than the generations before them. It is sick to be healthy in a sick society. Instead of taking drugs to hide your emotions, use them to get angry enough to do something.
As long as people keep taking their soma and going to work, things won’t get better, they just won’t. Period.
While I’m sure that there are some therapists out there who don’t focus on this much, I assure you any modern day therapist worth their salt has had extensive systems training and is VERY aware of the environmental pressures their clients are facing. There are even entire theories that operate from this perspective. Look up the Liberation Health Model.
What might be fair to claim is that the PHARMACOLOGICAL industrial complex is myopically focused on the individual. But given the nature of big pharma, I would express doubt on this as well. They are also very systems savvy as they created the system itself.
They may be aware of it, but they don’t seem to be pushing the appropriate solutions. If someone comes in with severe climate anxiety, the immediate solution may very well be to medicate in order to bring down the anxiety level, but the overall solution should not be to continue therapy and medication, but to embrace that anxiety and utilize it to educate and agitate for change.
In essence, I’m saying that anyone positing to be working on climate related mental health that doesn’t directly advocate for mass movement style populist changes to their charges and the society at large is a charlatan, because nothing they can prescribe will ever make things better in the long run, only make their patient care less.
If your issues are specifically with the way medication is prescribed, then your arguments need to be focused at psychiatrists/ general practitioners. Therapists do not prescribe medication. We do therapy.
I cited a type of therapy in my last post that literally helps empower clients to seek systemic change in their environment. Look it up and read up before you claim that therapists “don’t seem to be pushing the appropriate solutions”.
While it may seem like semantics, the myth that therapists are pill pushers is widely circulated and often cited as a reason for people not getting help sooner. It’s important that people understand that there is meaningful help out there, and statements made in your comment are not helpful to them.
Thank you, I appreciate that distinction, and will be sure to clarify in the future.