Not all mental health care professionals are bad. What I have said about the mental health care system and society's ignorance about psychiatric discrimination is meant to illustrate the importance of good mental health care and public education about mental health, so that those things can be improved.
Particularly when you're young, you are fortunate if the people who are your mental health care providers respect, like and understand you. Most children, teenagers and even people in their twenties don't know how to deal with how sure many mental health care providers are that it's the provider and not the client who's always right about the client's life.
Learning how to know who's going to be able to help you and who's going to make things worse for you and then blame all the subsequent problems on you is a frustrating, terrifying, demoralizing and dangerous process. It shouldn't be that way, and it isn't that way as often in any other type of health care. That's because the mental health care system has always had subjectivity built into it; a sane person can easily be diagnosed with a mental illness by a mental health care provider who just doesn't like the person or who doesn't like to have his or her decisions about the person questioned. That happens all the time.
There are mental health care providers who are not trying to hurt anyone but who do anyway because the system, while it loves to use the incorrect analogy that "mental illness is like diabetes" when it's trying to get people to take medication or otherwise just do what they're told, routinely falls back on the ideas that "nobody knows how mental illness really works" and "mental health care providers are only human" when what it forced someone to do causes a crisis.
It's always a bad idea to yell at a mental health care provider. The more condescending and obtuse the provider, the worse of an idea it is to yell at him or her; the misfortune of that correlation can't be overstated. The safest, if also the most difficult, way to address a situation in which someone is trying to shout you down or manipulate you is to do what you're there to do and try not to let him or her fluster you.
Copyright L. Kochman, January 14, 2016 @ 8:58 a.m.
