The State of Mental Health Care in the World

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According to Mental Health America, more than 16 million adults face depression every year, but only about 1/3 reaches out for professional help.

What is wrong with the general mental health care system that people want to solve their problems by themselves?

In my opinion, there are three reasons:

• Humanity keeps stigmatizing vulnerability amongst men.
• Talking therapies aren’t that effective while costing a fortune.
• Pedagogy, the study of teaching, has not found a solution to prevent or help us better cope with trauma.

The Mental Disease Taboo

When I had depression, which I now recognize as Borderline Personality Disorder, people told me to drink more beer and don’t care about my problems or go traveling.

Excellent advice for a young man who has troubles to open his heart to be vulnerable. In the article, Neglected diseases: Mental health issues in men, dr. Amish Lamischhane writes :

By nature, men do not like to share their feelings and try to seek help, even if it’s needed. This unwillingness to share the problems make a deep impact and the condition worsens.

It would take me two years to acknowledge I even had a problem.

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Only talking about mental diseases and symptoms makes most people feel uneasy unless they have visited a psychologist or psychiatrist before.

Explaining to your boss, colleagues, friends, and family, you haven’t been able to face reality for a while, taking a lot of courage.

When you have opened up the advice is almost always the same. You should visit a shrink and don’t trust your self-diagnosis until your condition is medically verified.

Mental Misdiagnosis and Uneffective Talking

People assume that psychologist now better as average people what they have.

An excerpt of the article The Dangers of Mental Health Misdiagnosis: Why Accuracy Matters:

‘A 2012 study by Bipolar UK, the Royal College of Physicians, and Bipolar Scotland found that “people with bipolar disorder wait for an average of 13.2 years before they are diagnosed, and often spend years receiving treatment for other conditions.” Of 706 people surveyed, only 15% received a prompt diagnosis, while 85% experienced a diagnostic delay. “Most of those were wrongly told they had depression,” writes Denis Campbell for The Guardian. “Among the 85% whose diagnosis was delayed, 71% said that their symptoms had become worse as a result of receiving inappropriate treatment, such as antidepressants or sleeping pills.” As Suzanne Hudson, chief executive of Bipolar UK, says, “A delay of this length has a significant impact for individuals and families, with sometimes devastating consequences, as bipolar has the highest rate of suicide of any psychiatric illness.”

According to Dr. Mark Zimmerman, associate professor at Brown University and director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital: “We believe that clinicians are inclined to diagnose disorders that they feel more comfortable treating,”

But also, patients fail to tell all the symptoms.

In my view, this is still the psychologist problem, who did not ask the right questions.

Because you can’t expect people to do their own research when self-diagnosis is the ultimate taboo.

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So I followed like any docile sheep the masses. Got a letter from the general practitioner which said I had depression and went to a psychologist.

Did not work, so tried psychoanalysis.

Again not useful, so I concluded that talking therapies aren’t that efficient.

Most mental patients are very conscious of their problems. Sadly, talking about it has not helped in behavioral change.

Digging the past for trauma can help explain neuroses but doesn’t have to facilitate behavioral change.

Prevention/ Lack of understanding

Although mental diseases plague the modern world, we still have no comprehensive view of what it is in contemporary life that causes, for example, depression.

Recent research shows a lack of bacteria in the gut biome can cause depression.

For further research read Science’s article Evidence mounts that gut bacteria can influence mood, prevent depression.

Photo by Joiarib Morales Uc on Unsplash

Another interesting correlation is the relationship between breathing and diseases.

According to dr. Arthur Rakimov, in his article, Breathing Slower and Less: The Greatest Health Discovery Ever:

‘Over 90% of modern people suffer from breathing problems. The common problems include chest breathing, mouth breathing, and hyperventilation (increased minute ventilation). All of which reduces oxygen levels in body cells and promote chronic diseases.’

So what works for me?

After losing all faith in the mental health care system in the Netherlands, I have set out to heal myself.

Healing means going beyond the symptoms and treating the cause.

Therefore I am helping the body detoxify with the Wim Hof Method and yoga.

To help the mind calm down, I study eastern philosophy which has been the biggest blessing in the quest to conquering myself.

Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash

Note: I have not studied psychology and have not interviewed mental health care practitioners. This blogpost is about my experience with the Dutch mental health care system, which is flawed, in my opinion. The idea is to use this text to critically reflect on the state of psychological care in the world.

This text is #11 of the 30-days creative writing challenge.