Some anti-depressants trigger suicidality in people, it is well known, printed as a warning, but seems to be buried in discussions. Going cold turkey off your meds can also mess you up.
I’m sorry about your friend… you did what you thought was right for him at the time, and who knows what really happened… but I do wish more people knew things can go horribly wrong in therapy. People treat it like it cannot cause harm (“can’t hurt, right?”) but it absolute can and does.
This is completely horrible, and I am so sorry for the friend as well. But both of you seem to be conflating therapy and psychiatry.
Psychiatry is the practice of prescribing pharmacological agents to affect brain chemistry for whatever desired outcome.
Therapy is talking about and getting down to the reasons you feel the way you feel and does not involve medication. It is almost universally helpful, and likely would have helped the friend a great deal.
A common route to psychiatry is through therapy; you see a therapist and they refer you to see a psychiatrist as well.
Therapy can be helpful. Therapy can be harmful. Therapy can be a waste of time and money. It all really just depends on a lot of factors that most people are unable to judge, and certainly the profession itself is incapable of doing so.
I’ve never had a therapist recommend meds or getting meds, but maybe I’ve just been lucky.
I do think many people are able to judge if the effects of therapy are good or bad, but often they depend on the relationship between the therapist and the patient itself. I’ve had bad therapy that was only bad because they were not a good fit for me.
Some anti-depressants trigger suicidality in people, it is well known, printed as a warning, but seems to be buried in discussions. Going cold turkey off your meds can also mess you up.
I’m sorry about your friend… you did what you thought was right for him at the time, and who knows what really happened… but I do wish more people knew things can go horribly wrong in therapy. People treat it like it cannot cause harm (“can’t hurt, right?”) but it absolute can and does.
This is completely horrible, and I am so sorry for the friend as well. But both of you seem to be conflating therapy and psychiatry.
Psychiatry is the practice of prescribing pharmacological agents to affect brain chemistry for whatever desired outcome.
Therapy is talking about and getting down to the reasons you feel the way you feel and does not involve medication. It is almost universally helpful, and likely would have helped the friend a great deal.
A common route to psychiatry is through therapy; you see a therapist and they refer you to see a psychiatrist as well.
Therapy can be helpful. Therapy can be harmful. Therapy can be a waste of time and money. It all really just depends on a lot of factors that most people are unable to judge, and certainly the profession itself is incapable of doing so.
I’ve never had a therapist recommend meds or getting meds, but maybe I’ve just been lucky.
I do think many people are able to judge if the effects of therapy are good or bad, but often they depend on the relationship between the therapist and the patient itself. I’ve had bad therapy that was only bad because they were not a good fit for me.
Yes, the research absolutely does point to the relationship between the client and the therapist as being the most important thing.
Of course, the implications of that seem to completely escape people. If that’s true, then therapy is not a science, it is something else.
I believe it is colloquially referred to as a soft science because of exactly that.