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No offence intended, doctor, but I would like to see citations for a couple of your statements, specifically "by breathing calmly you will cure yourself from panic attacks..forever," and "psychologists know how to cure insomnia in a single session." These certainly aren't common knowledge, and they sound a bit overstated, while your broken foot analogy would not survive any degree of detailed examination -- as I am sure you know -- so I'm a but unsatisfied with your comment. I'd like to suggest that your patients' beliefs might originate with a valid, correct observation from their lives; their experience is that they do function in a way that is different from others in their lives, and they have generally, in their lives, seen that those who have insisted that they do not function any differently, do not, in truth, actually understand their experience at all. I would suggest that you cut them some slack. It's generally true, to my understanding, that one "always [has] the power to change [one's] mood for the better;" but its also true that human volition isn't very well understood, that self-control is understood to be a limited (albiet apparently trainable) resource that correlates strongly to blood glucose, that some people seem to have innately poorer impulse control than others, and that everyone experiences absolute freedom of choice at all times only in a crass and unsatisfactory Sartrean sense. This leaves me wishing to suggest to you that you might want to avoid relative comparisons of mental health that admit a "strength of will" argument as to why one person might succeed in overcoming depression where another might fail. I am sure that you do have excellent coping mechanisms, and I am sure that you are happier for it; I am sure that, by definition, most anyone would be happier if they improved their ability to cope with events in their lives; I am sure that every single individual can make a conscious effort to focus on improving their mental health. However, some will fail; others will fail to try. I am sure that you understand that it is nothing other than good luck that you were able to develop excellent coping mechanisms, even if it is a good luck that most people, perhaps even most people with mental health problems, might share. But your remarks make some strong generalizations and propose a virtuous course towards self-empowered mental health without being duly respectful of the actuality. |