[roma1n]

See friends, exercise, and if the issue is serious enough, do not put off seeing a psychiatrist or another health professional.

Strangely enough you do not see an Ask HN: what are you doing for your T1 diabetes ? -- people will just see their doctor and inject insulin. Yet we do not treat mental health that way.

[mercer]

I think it's a very good thing that we don't treat mental health that way because, generally speaking, we're nowhere near understanding mental health issues the way we understand diabetes (although I wouldn't be surprised if we don't understand that one as well as I'm inclined to think).

A better analogy would be something like 'Ask HN: what are you doing for your front-end javascript needs', which of course is discussed a lot, maybe even too much.

To be clear, I do agree that if you have serious issues it would be good to see a professional. But it's not a panacea and so it's quite possible, likely even, that a lot of people asking questions like OP are asking specifically because a professional has not been able to cleanly solve the problem, if at all. In fact, I've met plenty of people who felt they were worse off after getting help.

Again, I'd still recommend you try if you're struggling, but it's important to not see a mental health professional as 'the' solution, because on top of quite possibly turning out to be a disappointing experience, it might keep you from trying other stuff alongside it.

[mnm1]

Most of the places I've lived, especially in the bay area, psychiatrists were completely incentivized to prescribe as much addictive and known to be ineffective medicine as they could to keep the patient dependent and coming back / paying. There was no incentive for and few of them were interested in actual non-drug therapy. Some were actually hostile to the idea of non-drug therapy or reducing/stopping the medicine I was on at the time. In addition, in the US, there are many reporting requirements that require psychiatrists to report certain things said in meetings with patients to officials. One can end up in a mental hospital with the cops searching their house by simply saying the wrong things or saying the right things in the wrong way. This just begins to scratch the surface of why psychiatrists are not like other doctors. And lets face it, many doctors in general are not that great at their jobs in general--a job where one mistake can mean the difference between life and death. Having anxiety about seeing any health professional, mental or physical, is hardly an unnatural or abnormal reaction. Then you get to costs, health insurance, etc. and it gets even easier to see why people would be deterred from seeing mental health professionals especially psychiatrists.

[skrebbel]

I don't think that's what the OP meant. Type 1 diabetes has no known cause, but I bet many mental health issues are preventable.

You're replying to a "Ask HN: What do you do to fix your mental health problems?", which is not the same thing. This thread is about prevention as much as it is about recovery.

[aceoflolo]

Are you seriously comparing the two? Psychology is nothing more than a pseudoscience where most of the time the solution is to take some pills that will turn you into a zombie, sometimes even permanently.