The sorry state of mental health services.

[Spiritualchaos]

You have touched on a topic I know far too much about, as I spent nearly two decades being dragged all over the health care system, for mental health more in my younger years, and physical health in my 20s and early 30s, and usually had no luck whatsoever. I live in Canada, so it does not seem to even matter our health care is basically free, there is still a huge backlog of people looking for support who wait years to see someone, and when they finally get an opportunity to talk to someone, they find a person who doesn't look them in the eye while prescribing them a bunch of drugs that just mask their symptoms rather than actually getting to the root cause of what they are experiencing. I saw this happen to my ex husband and I was in complete disbelief. 

My mental health issues started at a very young age by the alienation I felt and the overly sensitive nature I possessed that seemed obscure in a logical and masculine driven world. I was overwhelmed by the societal pressures put on me to be normal and that caused me to be shoved into the system at a very young age. I didn't fit in, so I was very depressed, and my empathic gifts manifested as severe anxiety, so I struggled deeply in my younger years. 

I've been on so many prescription medications for depression in my 20s and early 30s... Paxil, Effexor, Seroquel... they are all awful in my opinion. All they did was mask my symptoms and make me feel like I was in a fog, that I could not connect to anyone, or experience life the way I was meant to experience it. They have intense side effects, like becoming more suicidal while on them. How does that make sense, even in a logical way, to give medications to a suicidal person, and those meds can make them more suicidal? Also, if you give someone SSRIs that is bipolar for example, they have side effects that are more severe, as this happened to my ex husband and he started to hallucinate while on them. 

I always thought the mind-set of most health care professionals was, for lack of a more sophisticated term; completely wack. 

I think there is a huge problem with how mental health care professionals are trained to diagnose people. They are only using outdated methods that are not helping a population in the middle of awakening. The lengths these professionals go in order to link everything to something of the mind, something logical, is ludicrous. Most of them are not mentally healthy themselves, as I had a psychiatric nurse once literally scream at me for getting emotional during a therapy session, but not before she lectured me for 15 minutes of the appointment on the difference between a therapist and a counsellor. I was appalled, so I left and she cancelled my appointment with the psychiatrist without my permission. I had another counsellor who wanted to film me for study, then proceeded to stare at me blankly, as they had nothing to offer in response to the life I was living and what I was feeling, as they could not even relate to the depth of the emotions I was experiencing.  The worst experience I had was when I woke up in the U of A Hospital in Edmonton after overdosing, first having a therapist come see me before I could be discharged. I started to explain what was going on in my life that led me to that point, and I got "I don't need to hear your life story" as a response. I was like... wow, this system is extremely broken. I left without any follow-up support and felt like they just saw me as a burden on the health care system, like my annoying "emotional problems" were getting in the way of them doing "real healing." That city needs a lot of healing and people are struggling, and their experience is to just close off their hearts and feed them to the wolves of society, who want them medicated so they can feel more comfortable in their little bubbles of illusion. 

After years of being pharmaceutically mediated, and feeling no better from those prescriptions, I did psilocybin once, and that was enough to break through this pattern of depression I had got stuck in for over 2 decades. I watched an amazing documentary recently released on Netflix, I would highly recommend it. It's called How to Change Your Mind and it's about using plant medicine to help heal mental disorders, like OCD, PTSD, Anxiety, Depression, etc. 

It makes me happy to see them incorporating these spiritual techniques in the healing process, because I know how effective these methods are over conventional methods. They are organic, the experiences they produce are raw and powerful, but they will heal you at the deepest level, instead of just masking your symptoms and trying to intellectually understand something that is not something that can be conceptualized with the mind.