The problem is that attitudes like GP’s are why mental health is so disregarded. It’s tempting to believe that people should just man up and deal with it, and presto: you have both toxic masculinity and also a reason not to bother taking mental health seriously. After all, if 51% of the population can handle it, is it really a societal problem worth bothering with? (They can’t, and it is.)
The idea that it’s healthier to internalize trauma is wrong in well over 90% of cases. Most people have lots of problems as adults due to trauma they got when they were kids, usually by emulating a dysfunctional parenting model, and they don’t even realize it. I lost my best friend when my issues flared up, and I was blind that I even had a problem at all. My actions felt healthy, and they were anything but.
Please don’t minimize mental health. If not for yourself, then for your future children.
> After all, if 51% of the population can handle it, is it really a societal problem worth bothering with? (They can’t, and it is.)
But you are making assumptions just like that: what makes you say 51% of the population can't handle particular types of trauma better than others?
Lots of things we are talking about are really "learned" and have no basis in biology, for instance: society itself is a human construct, and relationship to people around us are clearly built in that context. That does not mean they are not real, just that they can be learned even in a different way, and they surely are.
The reason we should take individual approach is because we can't know in advance who can "handle" a particular stressor in their current situation and who can't (and this is never black or white, all experiences — good and bad — shape us into persons we are). The onus is on those providing the help to provide just enough so we can deal with the situation in a reasonable manner.
Most people's actions are influenced both by stressful, but also by positive events in our lives: that's what makes us, really, "us". And really, everyone experiences what one would call trauma (trauma can be temporary as well).
When an event, positive or negative, influences us in a way where we can't continue to operate according to certain norms, we recognize that as a mental health issue.
So we can either claim that there are no people without mental health issues, which I think is not a very useful "calibration" of the terminology, or we can establish a baseline where we expect people to have some challenges with mental health which we call "normal response to trauma", and focus on those who have exaggerated or diminished responses.
It's clearly a serious problem that GPs ignore things that will surface but it is also a problem that experts surface things that don't need to be surfaced and in the worst cases even did not exist but fit a fad theory.
One should be very careful with measures claiming things like 90% as GPs defer to experts for these measures.
Ah, yes, I took this to be a reference to general doctors don't take psychological issues seriously, which is both true at times and sometimes exaggerated.
The "satanic panic" was certainly an extreme example, but in general the entire industry spent a few decades inducing false memories. Because of the nature of trust in authority few people question when they are pressured to have a trauma and psychological effects from events that never occurred.
On the lesser end, I think many of the consumer oriented psychologists will take you in this direction with events that did occur but are probably typical experiences and only actually effect specific personalities.
Even more so, “satanic panic“ is a term that contains some truth (“tread carefully, conspiracy nuts territory“) but the overgeneralization makes it so actual organized abuse structures and its victims are dismissed too easily. Plenty of hard fact cases of such structures exist. See also for example the recent warning by Europol and the research into structures such as 764. The Bhagwan/Osho cult and many others can serve as prominent examples.
Reality is all shades of grey (or colors), not black and white. I find it important to warn of the dangers of such spiritual abuse communities and its techniques, and to not dismiss it as nonexistent and an invention of some esoteric nutjobs with the wave of a hand, which is what this terminology is doing. This attitude drives more people into such structures.
I don't really get your point. Our skepticism toward reports involving real cults and incompetent insititutions is certainly higher since 12000 patients were hurt by non existing satanic institutions in bad therapy. They are not less hurt by the fact that it could have happened.
Percentages from the lost in a mall experiment don't seem to show anything surprising about how I would expect these traumas to end up integrating with real experience, and the patients that were going to be most susceptible were probably not going to look like a random selection study, see far more in the importance of their relationship with their therapist, etc.
The idea that it’s healthier to internalize trauma is wrong in well over 90% of cases. Most people have lots of problems as adults due to trauma they got when they were kids, usually by emulating a dysfunctional parenting model, and they don’t even realize it. I lost my best friend when my issues flared up, and I was blind that I even had a problem at all. My actions felt healthy, and they were anything but.
Please don’t minimize mental health. If not for yourself, then for your future children.