Why is it that the people who need the most help get the screw? If you’re ill and go to see your doctor, although they may take a while to figure out what you’ve got, there’s a set of straightforward things they’ll do to figure it out, and if you have a good one, they won’t stop until they figure it out. And if you’re not happy, you can get a second opinion. There are things you can do.
But as soon as the help you need is psychiatric, well then forget simplicity. You have to crawl through mount red tape to get help. First you have to tell your family doctor so that you can even see a psychiatrist. The doctor gets skiddish and half the time doesn’t even want to deal with it. They’d rather deal with wounds they can see. If you manage to convince them that you do have a problem and should see a psychiatrist, sometimes they won’t even refer you for months, and when you try and see some psychiatrists, you need a god damn referral from somewhere else besides the doctor! Hellooo! Psychiatrists aren’t a dime a dozen!
Then when you finally do get to a psychiatrist and tell them everything, they try to shove you out the door, hand you pills and say “Have a nice day.” If you have concerns, good luck getting an ear, even though they’re kind of the only person who can talk to you about them. When you ask about counseling, they say it’s not their department. Not their department? Then who in the blue bloody hell’s department is it, and send me there right now! I know a psychiatrist’s primary role is to prescribe drugs, but they should at the very least be able to refer you! For the love of God these people don’t just have a cough and need a pill. They need help! And it’s complicated! To rush someone out the door as if their stuff doesn’t matter, well, what do you think that does, Sparticus? I just can’t believe when a psychiatrist’s profession is to deal with the mind, that they’d be that cold and uncaring. But apparently they are.
And on top of that, it seems like to get anywhere, you have to know some kind of code. I know that’s the way it is with medicine too, but it seems almost worse that people who are having problems that can be pretty scary that no one else can physically see have to learn some kind of doctorese to get what they need. If you’ve got a tumour, sure it’s scary, but the doctor isn’t going to try and tell you it doesn’t exist.
And this is why nobody, or not nearly enough people, can get the help they need. We’ve got people running around with depression, bipolar, and who knows what else, suffering in secret and in silence, because that’s easier than dealing with the system. If that’s the kind of system we have, isn’t it time for an overhall?