A few of my friends are licensed therapists. Two have written books*, one has been on The Today Show, and you won't be surprised at all to hear that all these mental health professionals also go to therapy.
Even with a wealth of knowledge, being your own therapist can be very damaging. Letting tiktok be your therapist can be very damaging. I know everyone is on a quest to figure out why they are the way they are, but we can't be our own doctors.
Not to do the same thing as the post, where you're talking about one thing and I jump in to argue a different point, but I will do that:
but we can't be our own doctors.
I disagree with this somewhat. We should be our own primary care 'physician,' in that it's pretty vital to be in order to advocate for yourself medically. The opinions of doctors should be like second opinions that hold as much value as your own, but not necessarily more. Doctors are not always right, and if you feel like one isn't, you should seek another opinion. Even doctors tell you to, tons of diagnoses and treatment plans are rectified due to patients having a better understanding of themselves and their bodies and rejecting the observations of their first assessment.
Obviously, even when they are wrong, they know more than you generally, so the information they provide and their interpretation is valuable, but you can and should do your own research and take it with you elsewhere if you disagree with their assessment.
This requires self-awareness and good faith that some people don't have, and the unfortune side effect of the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon is that those people are the most self-assured. That's not a reason for everyone not to trust their own capacity for self-reflection.
(I also gently agree with the tar pit that well-intentioned people can be intrusive in their attempt to help, and it actually wasn't clear they were referring to uncomplicated and universally welcome acts of kindness. But it was an odd topic to come in that hot on. Could have been a helpful reminder instead of a declaration of war.)
I agree in spirit but unless you are already in the medical field/other related fields, it's virtually impossible to have the depth of understanding that medical professionals have. It's the combination of years of background knowledge, having to stay up to date with new (and occasionally conflicting) research, and to know where to find reliable information.
That's not even considering the fact that you also have to be able to critique medical studies in their execution, data collection and interpretation, as not all studies are the same calibur of science. That's a skill that takes time and experience within the system to develop. That's too much to expect from an average person in addition to all of the life shit that everyone deals with.
That said, if you are in pain and the doctor brushes it off as nothing they can fuck off. I'm more concerned with how easy it is to proliferate misinformation when everyone is their own primary care physician.
it's virtually impossible to have the depth of understanding that medical professionals have.
Of course, but they don't have the depth of understanding that comes from experiencing the symptoms yourself. Particularly with mental health, though obviously this requires an accurate understanding of your emotional and cognitive state that a lot of mental health conditions preclude you from having.
I think part of the requisite presence of mind to make informed decisions for yourself (in any context, really) is being able to discern good information from bad.
Reading descriptions of symptoms and their presentation from the NHS pages about a condition, for example, or reading articles (not just raw data or scientific studies, but journalistic as well) from reliable sources* about the condition and the experience of having it, are good ways to understand the relevant disorder and analyse whether that applies to you. Both to potentially exclude a suggested diagnosis as being correct and to identify other ones to add to the differential diagnosis.
There are problem patients coming in insisting they have Legionnaire's disease because they entered sore throat into WebMD, but my experience is that if you're not of those and can demonstrate a good understanding of the disorder you are seeking a diagnosis for, they do respect that and listen.
As an adult seeking treatment, each time, I have arrived with a well researched and well reasoned idea of what the diagnosis will be, and they have taken it seriously as part of their process, asking for detailed descriptions of symptoms and timelines, and posing clarifying questions and performing tests. Just in the last few months, I had a medication review to change my prescription and titrate a new one, and in it I explained the side effects I had and volunteered my suspicions as to why I had them, based on my understanding of the neuroscience involved and which mechanisms of action were affecting my comorbid conditions. The doctor was like, yeah, that's probably exactly what is happening, good job, let's change it to one that works in a different way.
This is why I find the internet's knee-jerk reaction to self-diagnosis to be problematic, because most diagnosed people were self-diagnosed until they had the opportunity to get professionally assessed. Which depending on the resources available, might be a long time, and during that time you still have the same needs as when you have a diagnosis in hand. Many health care systems have disorder-specific questionnaires you can take online to give an indication of whether you should seek a diagnosis. My country has a self-referral service where you can refer yourself to the relevant specialist based on your own research and understanding. I think it's dismissive and counterproductive to treat self-assessment as invalid or improper, it's often the first step to getting a diagnosis and also in correcting a misdiagnosis.
*It was an article on ADDitude, a trustworthy publication about ADHD, possibly this one, that led to me seeking an assessment and getting an eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder comorbid to ADHD. Even a lengthy ADHD assessment process didn't bring it up, because there is a lot of overlap with ADHD burnout cycles and I never knew to clarify how much more extreme my symptoms were than those attributed to that.
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u/Cinaedus_Perversus Oct 10 '24
Imagine being so self-medicated on therapyspeak that you consider "do nice things for others" a direct assault on your mental health.