The demand for psychotherapy in China is booming among its nearly 1.4 billion citizens. But psychologists are largely unable to help meet the demand for a simple reason: In 2013, a new law went into effect that, among other provisions, restricts the ability of psychologists in mainland China to offer psychotherapy. Unless they are working in hospitals with clients who have already been diagnosed by psychiatrists, psychologists must call themselves counselors and limit themselves to offering counseling and psychosocial support.
“Psychotherapy can’t be … practiced in settings other than hospitals,” says Buxin Han, PhD, president-elect of the Chinese Psychological Society (CPS).
The country’s Mental Health Law—available in an annotated English translation (Chen, Shanghai Archives of Psychiatry, Vol. 24, No. 6, 2012)—doesn’t define what services are considered psychotherapy or what training one needs to provide it. But the law does spell out penalties for situations in which “psychological counselors,” also undefined, provide psychotherapy or diagnose or treat individuals with mental disorders.
Maybe this is america specific but my therapist actually helps me with coping with shitty situations. I cant actually do anything against the fucked up things if i let them paralyze me. Your feelings are valid, its about how you adress them.
Mental healthcare under communism is when you get sent to the gulag for wrongthink
Under Stalinist soviet communism, which was dictatorship with extra steps?
How about under Zapatista communism (which is still going on)? Or Black Panther communism, at least until the FBI (under J. Edgar Hoover, so acting as the capitalist state’s secret police) massacred the BP administrative leaders?
Tell us more about the joys of capitalist healthcare. At least for the common American, we get bare minimum socialized healthcare, and even it is on the chopping block. The rest is an insurance sector that willfully (and oddly, legally) dodges its only job, and a medical system so hyperinflated it puts people into lifelong debt.
So STFU with jingoistic platitudes and virtue-signaling to your fellow MAGAs, and put up a real argument.
Or not.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7310752/
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and can be diagnosed and treated in primary care clinics. No studies to date have demonstrated the prevalence of depression in rural, primary care settings in Mexico. The objective of this study is to describe the prevalence of visits for depression in primary care settings in one group of rural communities within Chiapas, Mexico. We performed a cross-sectional, retrospective study of depression prevalence in primary care clinics in the Sierra region of Chiapas, Mexico during the calendar year of 2014. We determined the average depression prevalence is 7.9% (6 community clinics, n = 4555). The prevalence of depression in rural Chiapas, Mexico is much higher than the Mexican national average of 4.0–4.5% found in a home-based survey. Further efforts to understand the causes, develop improved mental health services in primary care, and reduce the higher burden of depression in rural communities in Mexico are urgently needed.
Keywords: Chiapas, depression, Mexico, prevalence, rural
But did you know that women who own horses are likely to live on average 15 years longer than women who do not own horses? Why wouldn’t people get a majestic car-sized animal to improve their well-being, are they stupid?
If they cannot afford a horse, would a pony work? Asking for a friend…
Go into a local field and tame a wild horse??? Probably healthier that way anyways (all-natural, soul-bond)
Just tame a horse bro
I can say from experience that ponies make life more tolerable ❤️ I may be somewhat biased, however…
I want to say that there are many anti-oppressive therapists who make it a point to validate that the current political system creates mental health problems. More of us than you’d think.
You can find us mostly at https://www.inclusivetherapists.com/
Recently I was told I probably need medication for that fact I’m worried about ten million different things happening right now, but like, surely my fears are entirely rational and justified???
They are, but your therapist might have a contract obliging them to recommend it for the purpose of obtaining large amounts of money. Being a therapist only pays well if your patients are rich fucks with daddy issues.
Also, there’s a small chance that even though your fears are on point, your therapist might consider it better for you mentally to keep calm and get bent than to maintain a constant state of fear and anxiety. I hear the latter is bad for the heart.
Turns out a sedated and anaesthetized and gaslit population is less likely to meaningfully revolt against the structure that oppresses it, who would have guessed!
Even better, the sedatives and anaesthetics cause dependency, so they’ll keep paying for more, and they often cause numerous other deletorious health conditions, which they’ll need to pay even more to deal with those side effects!
And they’ll now also be too physically unhealthy, as well as physically and mentally dependent, and too mentally precarious to do anything other than shrivel up, whimper and die, or maybe go berserk, when industrial civilization collapses and no one can get their meds any more!
The truth is researchers and doctors don’t actually know how effective antidepressants are or why certain types work only for certain people. But recent advances in genomics and personalized medicine are bringing us closer to a better understanding.
We don’t even know how these things work!
Or why they seem to for some but not others!
New research, reviewing huge bodies of scientific evidence, found no direct link between serotonin and depression.
The authors find “no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression or that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.”
Fuckin’ whoops, turns out SSRIs don’t actually treat depression at all, meaning we’ve been giving tens, hundreds? of millions of people uneccessary medical complications in the form of side effects, and any reported mental health improvements were actually from the placebo effect!
In fact, we’re still somehow legally allowed to say:
Antidepressants, including SSRIs, remain an effective treatment. We just need to better understand why and how they work.
Even tbough the fundamental ‘chemical imbalance’ hypothesis that SSRIs are built on has been shown to be bunk!
But its ok, see, here’s our ‘current best evidence’, that SSRIs are indeed an effective treatment, from our article written in 2022.
Yep, that’s right, its a study from 2009!
Which outright statea in the abstract:
Most of the studies were supported by funds from pharmaceutical companies and were of short duration.
See! All fine.
Keep taking your pills.
Withdrawal can be very dangerous.
What, healthcare in this country being useless and they still charge a shitton for it and push for the treatments even tho it may not be necessary or even beneficial in any way!? No way!!!
As someone untreated (and shut-in), the grass isn’t green here either. I don’t know what the here-and-now alternative is, especially as a well-understood and very-effective med that can be taken irregularly is probably an exception rather than the norm (esp. for something serious/underlying).
If somebody finds a combo of meds that makes them more-than-somewhat functional I think that’s great, I don’t care how you try to frame it. I’m probably not surviving any sort of collapse either, not that I’d even want to. (someone on meds might do better if they can taper off)
I take more issue with the cost and hoops of the US health-insurance system (+other stuff like transportation). It’s a failure even by “pick two” standards… if it’s “you try this first” or 4 appointments for testing/specialists before one step is made it would be much better if bureaucracy weren’t also an issue.
Specifically with the gov’t imploding now (and the impending rug pull) I’m not sure what I could ever do unless there was a real chance someone will let me be a test subject for physical brain preservation (and they’d move my brain some other not-imploding country).
SSRIs seem to work better than placebo on average
Unironically, I’d love to see a sourced meta study from ideally the last 3 years that concludes that, which is based on long-term studies, which were properly peer reviewed, and not funded by the drug manufacturers themselves.
Sure, this one probably comes closest to what you’re looking for. Looks like modest benefit. Nothing super effective but enough to make a positive difference generally. I definitely recognize that they can have side effects, so decisions should be personalized.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acps.13541
There are some other older ones done before 2022 as well like this one.
For this one:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acps.13541
We selected 46 RCTs out of 1807 titles and abstracts screened…
There was no indication of subtstantial small study effects, but 36 RCTs had a high or uncertain risk of bias, particularly maintenance trials.
Going into the actual paper…
10 low bias studies, 2935 subjects.
12 high bias studies, 3547 subjects.
24 unclear bias studies, 9689 subjects.
Cool, so the vast majority of analyzed subjects were not from studies that could be established as having a low bias.
Oh hey, remember when I asked for a meta study that didn’t include studies done by or funded by drug manufacturers?
All but four studies were funded, partly or wholly, by drug manufacturers.
Ok, so you obviously either did not read what I asked for, or you didn’t read the paper.
Further, I said long-term, only 7 of the 42 studies are about maintenence stage, you know, long term.
And…
We did not carry out a RoB analysis in maintenance RCTs because all carried a high risk of bias.
Wow! Amazing!
This study does not even kind of come close to the conditions I specifically laid out.
… Onto study number 2.
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.focus.16407
46 (9%) of 522 trials were rated as high risk of bias, 380 (73%) trials as moderate, and 96 (18%) as low;
Cool, 18% of the studied trials were low bias this time, roughly in line with the other meta study.
409 (78%) of 522 studies were funded by pharmaceutical companies.
Awesome.
At least in the first study, they did an analysis of the non-pharm funded studies and saw some good results. Unfortunately that’s pretty much the best we can go off of.
Which is itself, of course, monetized.
You guys are obsessed with capitalism. It’s a psychological defense mechanism that protects you from encountering the actual complexity of existence.
Your existence is made infinitely more complex by capitalism. We could just as easily be like our ancestors living off the land and enjoying a slow and quiet life but instead we are forced to do menial labor for menial wages to live mediocre lives ruled by technology and plastic junk that is poisoning our planet. We live on a dying ship that is being dismantled by the people at the head of our society, who also happen to be the richest. Hmm wonder if capitalism has anything to do with that??
Well yeah, capitalism is shit for everyone but a minority of people.
