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Exadus posted:A lot of people who get into perpetual self-help probably just need good old fashioned therapy. This, though, is part of why self-help is so popular. There is a massive stigma attached to any form of mental illness. Once you get that diagnosis there are a lot of people who are going to pretend you don't exist and try to shove you out of their lives, even if it isn't anything that makes you dangerous. All told, very few mental illnesses actually make you inherently dangerous to anybody around you but people assume they do. So what you have is people avoiding not only the stigma but also the possibility that they might be ax crazy underneath it all. American society also teaches that you should be totally self-reliant. Getting help in the form of therapy or drugs means you're relying on the skills of others or, worse yet, relying on a chemical to make you feel better. Self-help means you're doing it yourself, you're just learning the skill from somebody else. Which is tragic when you get into people relying on self-help for dealing with things like depression or crippling anxiety. Those are things psychologists, therapists, and councilors know how to fix. I feel like it also plays into how insular and individualistic we've become as a society. We don't really help each other and as we're seeing in some contemporary political movements are encouraged to go it totally alone. Needing help from others is viewed as a sign of weakness so you must do it yourself. Which is actually a very destructive attitude to take simply because we're social creatures. Organization is how we kicked everything else on this rock right in the rear end and became the dominant species. Social isolation also does horrible, terrible things to people. Sometimes the best cure for depression isn't self-help or therapy but rather having some friends you can share dinner and beer with with some sort of regularity.
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Aug 25, 2014 09:03
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 10:01 |
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