Do you have some better alternatives for a country where private mental health care costs €150/hr, while the government/insurance paid care have 3-6M+ waiting lists?
Well on the one hand, an obviously terrible solution is not inherently better than doing nothing. ie, LLM mental healthcare could be _worse_ than just letting the current access times climb.
My other stance, which I suspect is probably more controversial, is that I'm not convinced that mental health care is nearly as effective as people think. In general, mental health outcomes for teens are getting markedly worse, and it's not for lack of access. We have more mental health access than we've had previously -- it just doesn't feel like it because the demand has risen even more sharply.
On a personal level, I've been quite depressed lately, and also feeling quite isolated. As part of an attempt to get out of my own shell I mentioned this to a friend. Now, my friend is totally well-intended, and I don't begrudge him whatsoever. But, the first response out of his mouth was whether I'd sought professional mental health care. His response really hurt. I need meaningful social connection. I don't need a licensed professional to charge me money to talk about my childhood. I think a lot of people are lost and lonely, and for many people mental health care is a band-aid over a real crisis of isolation and despair.
I'm not recommending against people seeking mental health care, of course. And, despite my claims there are many people who truly need it, and truly benefit from it. But I don't think it's the unalloyed good that many people seem to believe it to be.
>My other stance, which I suspect is probably more controversial, is that I'm not convinced that mental health care is nearly as effective as people think. In general, mental health outcomes for teens are getting markedly worse, and it's not for lack of access. We have more mental health access than we've had previously -- it just doesn't feel like it because the demand has risen even more sharply.
There's also the elephant in the room that mental healthcare, in particular for teens will probably just be compensating for the disease that is social media addiction. Australia has the right idea, banning social media for all goods.
>I think a lot of people are lost and lonely, and for many people mental health care is a band-aid over a real crisis of isolation and despair.
Professional mental health care cannot scale to the population that needs it. The best option, like you mention, is talking to friends about our feelings and problems. I think there has been an erosion (or it never existed) of these social mental health mechanisms. There is a learned helplessness that has developed that people have lost their capacity to just be with someone that is hurting. There needs to be a framework for providing mental health therapy to loved ones that can exist without licensed professionals, otherwise LLm's are the only scalable option for people to talk about their issues and work on finding solutions.
This might be controversial but mental health care is largely a bandaid when the causes of people's declining mental health is due to factor's far outside the individual's control: loneliness epidemics, declining optimism towards the future, climate change, the rise of global fascism, online dating, addictiveness of social media and the war on our attention, etc.
I was watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" the other day, and Lucy (who has a running gag in Peanuts of being a terrible, or at least questionable, psychologist) tells Charlie Brown to get over his seasonal depression he should get involved in a Christmas project, and suggests he be the director of their play.
Which is to say, your stance might not be as controversial as you think, since it was the adult take in a children's cartoon almost 60 years ago.
Your Peanuts reference made me smile but I don't see why you thought a little girl's comment in a 1960s Christmas special was supposed to represent the "adult take" on mental health in the 1960s.
Lucy isn't actually a psychologist which is part of the reason the "gag" is funny.
