Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

Couple of years ago I started to go outside for long periods of time, at the start of the season, all season. Biking and laying about at the waterside with my nose in the grass. First year, first months, I had symptoms. But after like 2 months of exposure I started to become free of symptoms.

Up to my 'real' school we played outside extensively and I never had symptoms.

When I was about 15 years I was prescribed pills and whatnot.

If I go outside 'enough', I consider myself 'cured'.

Not mental, but I felt it was related.

I can somewhat relate from experience: I went to a doctor for terrible trouble sleeping, to the point that it was affecting my physical health, that we assumed was caused by anxiety/depression[1]. I was pretty shocked at the rapidity with which she suggested going on antidepressants, particularly considering the tapering periods and the seriousness of the dependency and side effects that they cause.

I pushed back a little but it turns out that my doctor's cavalier attitude towards antidepressants isn't out of the norm: they're considered a "try it and see what happens" first line of defense, without trying to get a better sense of the patient's specific issues and whether therapy or other interventions, sans medication, would be a better fit (though I should note that the doctor recommended that I go to therapy if possible in conjunction).

Tangentially, this fits with a larger disillusionment I have with the medical system: a combination of screwy incentives, bad lines of communication between generalists and specialists, and a serious institutional/cultural case of a God complex leading to a lack of critical thinking means that I'm at the point where I pretty much keep anything a doctor tells me as just another unreliable information source, weighted more heavily perhaps than my layman's understanding of the research but on categorically the same level.

Ive seen the same disillusionment kick in among my doctor family members: in our conversations over the years, my sister and her husband have gone from a central case of said God complex to as much as telling me not to take doctors' advice without a heavy dose of skepticism.

I should note that I don't actually consider this a criticism of any individual physicians as much as the realities of the system. One of the biggest factors is that the average person showing up at the doctor is simultaneously incredibly dumb and incredibly confident in their understanding of the medical problem. It makes sense for doctors to be a somewhat heavy-handed and reductive, and once you build those habits into your institutions and pedagogy, it's hard to turn it off.

[1] Turns out it was the other way around: consistently not sleeping causes some pretty crappy psychological problems

Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continuously pounds; it stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, "How unlucky that this should happen to me!" Not at all! Say instead, "How lucky I am that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen. The same blow might have struck any one, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation and complaint."

"I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of tress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high".

http://sciencenordic.com/high-levels-vitamin-b12-can-increas...