Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study

(I don't entirely agree with them, but that's my best summary of their argument).

The problem is often on the line of you get depression & anxiety as a symtom of some other problems if you fix the problems fine. If you don't it can get out control and then you can become conditioned to do "bad" responses to all kind of things making the symptom a illness itself. And making it really hard to get out of it.

Or at least this is how it often did look like to me when I looked at people with depression & anxiety.

Just to be clear with "bad" responses I mainly mean thinks like avoiding problems instead of fixing (or sidestepping) them making it with every time you do so harder to "fix" that underlying problem in the future.

So your assumption that you would have been given surgery seems extremely unlikely, while the assumption that a person with depressive symptoms would be prescribed psychiatric treatment rather than being recommended to leave their job seems possible.

For your anecdote, I would expect that you would be given a physical exam and then some kind of imaging investigation before proceeding to surgery. Even if the doctor you went to was incompetent during the physical scan, the imaging would very quickly show whether there is a need for some kind of surgery. Unfortunately, we don't have any equivalent tests for psychiatric problems. If your psychiatrist is incompetent, you may well be prescribed medication that other psychiatrists may have found unnecessary, and your only recourse is to trust your own judgement above theirs (which has its own problems, if you already suspect you have a mental disorder).

Of course, per their story, leto_ii didn't seek professional help, so we can't know what the professional conclusion would have been. Have you ever heard though of psychiatrists recommending job changes to their patients? More so, recommending they leave their job on the spot, without securing another job before hand?

I’d recommend people read “The Deepest Well” - a great book on this topic.

So what is a major focus of research? Finding ways to isolate/synthesize specific compounds to make a patentable drug that can be given in lieu of patients making lifestyle changes, because a) you can't patent a lifestyle change and put it in a pill and make billions of dollars off it and b) because patients are generally assumed to be unwilling/unable to make the lifestyle changes.

So, "how would this help a doctor treat a mental health patient?" is perhaps the wrong question, because it won't because the doctor isn't interested or trained nor has the time to guide a person through a lifestyle change. It nonetheless may be very relevant to you in deciding whether you'd rather be on insulin for the rest of your life vs. finding a way to lose weight. Just as it may be helpful for you to consider whether makes changes to lower/resolve sources of stress and anxiety in your life is a better option for managing mental distress than being on an SSRI/benzo indefinitely.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the AstraZeneca "how to be happy without psychopharmaceuticals" guide to living.