Posted by
KsReaganite on Friday, October 16, 2009 12:11:43 AM
The fact that mental health has not been an issue in the otherwise volatile national healthcare debate is to be commended: mental health coverage is included in all the bills and proposals by default. We have come a long way from a mere generation ago when it was almost a taboo topic.
But I fear, we are fast trivializing the health of the mind by making it a fad and pop culture item. Every personal difficulty, communication problem, marital discord, or even mere sadness elicits the same hackneyed response of ‘have you considered counseling’. In the America of today, uniquely amongst industrial nations, the concept of ‘counseling’ is taken to be the psychological equivalent of the wonder drug aspirin. As for counselors, a cursory glance at the myriad of post-nominal letter combinations will tell you that anyone can call herself/himself a counselor.
Therapy Nation, the title of a book from the 1990s, rightly foreshadowed where we were headed with this fad of ‘talking it out and taking Prozac’ spreading from the elites to the masses.
At the risk of sounding nonchalantly unimpressed by fancy titles, let me suggest that being sad at the loss of a pet dog does not require seeking therapy. Nor does it require counseling, whatever that means in today’s water cooler side conversation, when a normal person is having a sad day or two because of an argument or the weather or stress. Newsflash to pop-psychologists: happiness and sadness are regular elements in the regular life of regular folks.
Mental health is a serious matter that manifests itself in manic depression, obsessive compulsiveness, schizophrenia, and several other substantive maladies. We do no service to those suffering from such ailments by falsely elevating a sad day or a foul mood to the level of ‘mental illness’ needing therapeutic counseling. Please let us have our sad days and let qualified psychiatrists and certified psychologists handle the care of people with real mental health problems. Ignoring mental health problems in the past did us no good; trivializing them today does us no favors either.