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

> Not everything is painless in life nor should it be.

No, but a lot of things should be. Leaving the house SHOULD be, but for some people it isn't. If it's causing you so much dread you can't bring yourself to do it, that's not just "overcoming adversity" - that's adversity where there shouldn't be any.

One of the least enviable things I've ever witnessed in my life was a pair of co-workers who bonded over their medical problems.

It was a really strange thing to notice, and at first, it just seemed like small talk or polite conversation. But then it kept going, and while there was nothing particularly repugnant about the details, the undertones that developed were unsavory.

It was like they relished being sad about their invalidity, like it was one big sick day that gave them an excuse to stay home from school. As if to say, "thank god my body is failing me again, and everyone is powerless to make demands of me."

They would bond over the similar things their doctors would put them through, about the noises of MRI machines, about side effects and being incapacitated by medicines, about being laid up for extended periods of time. Bad news was greeted with a sort of malign enthusiasm, like getting to take the ride again. "Oh yeah, my doctor just told me my tests are bad again."

You had to wonder if they were harming themselves to get back on the radar. These two individuals weren't stupid, and it seemed within the realm of believability that they'd try to maximize all the physical therapy and weird attention that a medical problem would garner them.

Their problems were distinct and different, but with the way they locked in on each other, sharing tips and tricks as it were, it seemed like maybe without any other reason to talk to one another, the way they enjoyed such discussions bordered on perverse.

The tone of each, finding excitement in the other's words, lent an uncanny color to the details I learned by being a fly on the wall. Like hot pink syringes and neon green day glow catheter crazy straws.

On second thought, maybe the bigger problem was the open office floor plan, and the fact that I was forced to listen to conversations that I just didn't want to hear.

> if they both disappeared at the same time

They didn't disappear at the same time. I was on antidepressants for a year and my time on antidepressants was pretty much independent of the degree to which my sleep problems were fixed. I probably was slightly less anxious while on the antidepressants, but this was far overwhelmed by the fact that I get/got anxious & depressed after the nights my sleep was poor and I don't/didn't whenever I sleep well. I was able to narrow it down to this specific direction of causality (bad sleep -> anxious the next day) through the fact that my sleep was often affected by exogenous physical factors.

I apologize for not going into too much identifying detail on a pseudonymous account, but I solved it by completely ignoring the medical establishment, reading voraciously about the problem, and experimenting on myself until I got myself to an 85% solution that at least allowed me to get back to work. This happened at a far, far slower and more grinding pace than the counterfactual in which I had any competent doctors around me (or rather, if competency wasn't ludicrously uncommon within medicine), since 1) I was sick, 2) I was employed until I quit to focus on the issue, and 3) I don't have an educational background in medicine the way that a doctor (ostensibly) would.

I'm far, far, far more comfortable reading papers in noisy epistemological environments than most people; I can't even imagine how horrible and expensive and drawn-out this process would have been had I not been had the confidence or ability to take this route and had to rely on the medical establishment.

After getting most of the way there myself, I still have issues sleeping once every week or two, and I decided to visit the relevant specialist to use them as a reference to expedite my path to a 100% solution[1]. It's a criminal indictment of our medical system that the only recourse for patients with complex, multi-factor health problems is to themselves navigate both medical knowledge and the medical system until they've narrowed it down to a fairly well-defined, simple solution. To the extent that the system's abdication of responsibility is driven by individuals' decisions, they should be ashamed of themselves (though again, I will reiterate once again that I think that the problem is systemic; I think most people of average intelligence would behave similarly in the situations that doctors find themselves in and I haven't seen any evidence that leads me to believe that most doctors are particularly extra-bright).

[1] At which point regulatory BS popped up again and I was legally required to have a perfunctory appt (at the cost of several hundred dollars, of course) with a doctor to request a referral to this type of specialist

> As I mentioned above, the problem didn't even end up being with anxiety, so going to a therapist would have been worse than useless for me.

I wouldn't go that far. Therapy is a broadly-useful non-medical intervention that can increase across-the-board mental health. It bridges the gap between medical intervention, where specialists act as necessary gatekeepers to otherwise-dangerous courses of action, not that they're always successful at reducing the danger, and self-help, which is thoroughly hit-or-miss.

There is an established body of psychological research that the therapist brings you in contact with that the medical community is only tangentially aware of. Sure, you could read up on this stuff yourself. But it's the talk therapist's job to know about it. And even if you don't find purchase on your stated problem, you might find other problems that you didn't realize you'd had.

If you can afford it or get it covered, I highly recommend regular sessions for a few years.

We need to be reflective enough to know when we have a mental health problem and need to do something about it. But it's also true that one of the most common causes of mental health problems are patterns of thought that can be changed by conscious self-discipline. Indeed, that's the basic premise of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

I also think there's a social point: we often feel bad because we fear that other people will think less of us for various reasons (money, status, lifestyle). A lot of the time, it's important to resist that natural social impulse and to live on your own terms.