For the record, I’m 100% in support of seeking help via mental health professionals. My wife had an extremely traumatizing childhood and she’s able to function as a happy, normal adult thanks to years of continued support through professional advice and care.

But for me personally… I’ve only had negative experiences with my few attempts to seek help, so I’m more interested in dealing with it on my own.

I signed up for the US military literally a month before 9/11 happened and my 20-yr career has been filled with war and conflict.

Early in my career, we were told that seeking help through the Mental Health office at our base’s clinic would automatically get us kicked out of the military. The mindset was that mental health issues meant you were unstable and a liability to the effectiveness of the mission, so your commander would recommend you be separated from the service. And commanders were automatically notified when their members sought mental health assistance. So a lot of military members just never sought help, and we had a lot of people who suffered alone, myself included.

Then around 2006 or so, after a military guy on our base had a mental break, shot his wife, and took his child hostage in our base housing, we were told that going to mental health would no longer be a career-ender. They realized that we needed to seek help before it got out of hand, so they told commanders to stop automatically recommending separation every time someone made an appointment with Mental Health.

Of course, the mindset was still deeply embedded in commanders, so despite being told it was safe to make appointments, commanders continued to separate military members for a while afterwards. A ton of people got kicked out suddenly around that time, and people stopped going to Mental Health again.

About a decade later, and after many promises that Mental Health was reforming, my wife decided she needed to see Mental Health. I warned her that it might affect her military career, but she went anyway. To my surprise, it had no effect on her career! She kept her security clearance and she wasn’t reassigned or kicked out. Because she sought help for herself and proved she wasn’t a danger to herself or others, they let her go back to work with no consequences. Her commander wasn’t even notified; they kept no records of the details of her appointments, except that she attended an appointment.

A few years later, I was about to retire, so I figured maybe I should go talk to someone too. At worst, it would be on my record that I sought out Mental Health, which would only help my VA medical claims after I retired.

But it was shortly after the pandemic and they weren’t letting just anyone go to Mental Health due to social distancing and manning issues. I had to make an appointment with Behavioral Health first. They assessed my daily habits (sleep, diet, exercise, etc.) and recommended I make healthy changes. They claimed that just fixing my daily habits could resolve most mental health issues and prevent Mental Health from needing to be involved, so they could focus on more urgent cases. They made me log my daily habits for a month, so they could determine trends in my behavior.

The problem was, I was already doing everything right. I ate healthy, I had a normal sleep schedule (minus insomnia brought on by PTSD, which was why I wanted to see Mental Health in the first place), and obviously, my exercise routine was excellent. I couldn’t continue to serve if my fitness level dropped.

They didn’t believe that I was doing everything right. They accused me of lying on my daily log, and I spent a few more months logging my daily habits to prove there’s no suspicious activity in my logs. In the end, I retired before I got them to recommend me to Mental Health.

When I went to the VA after retiring, they collected all the medical records that the military had on me, but insisted on doing their own testing, because they’re technically a civilian organization separate from the military. So I had to go through Behavioral Health all over again.

They wouldn’t recommend me to Mental Health either, claiming that I’m already doing everything right in my daily schedule. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to speak with Mental Health when my daily routine was healthy and normal. After half a year of fighting that, I finally gave up. I cancelled a follow-up appointment and never went back.

Now I just deal with my own issues by myself. I have a good support network and I’m able to function just fine. It’s easier now, considering I’m completely retired. I don’t have to adhere to a schedule or report to a job every day. I can plan my days as they come and I don’t need to commit to anything. If I have a bad day, I can just stay in bed all day and try again the next day.

Honestly, venting on threads like this on Lemmy (and formerly, Reddit) is probably the best “therapy” I’ve had over the years. Sometimes, just writing down my struggles helps me to deal with them.

Of course, this is my public account that all my friends/family know about, and I don’t have a private one. So I can’t be too specific on some details of my struggles. But it’s still therapeutic being able to share that I’m struggling in an open forum.

Ironically, I don’t like mental health professionals because it’s so impersonal; they’re strangers with no emotional investment in me, so why would I open up with my deepest and most painful secrets to them? But when everyone is anonymous here on Lemmy, I feel comfortable venting about things. I dunno why this feels different, but I prefer it. /Shrugs

I grew up in the 90s. My parents got me into a really rigorous k-12 program where we were easily the poorest family. My parents were dealing with work and chronic illness and I was floundering academically. The school social worker nice enough but this was the era where they put boys who were bored in class on ritalin. My parents found a letter I was about to send a friend with some (admittedly overwrought) prose about how much I hated it and got alarmed. They sent me to therapy to get a second opinion. That happened over two years, and once I left that school, I was okay. That worker was really good, but I was a kid and I was just dealing with an external stressor.

When my mom died, I started losing track of days, and taking very risky behaviors. Mostly I would meet strangers for anonymous, sometimes unprotected sex. My family and friends noticed I was spiraling and after a few months, my dad insisted to start therapy. We could only afford to go to a local religious org. I didn’t have much say in who I could see, it was all students working on racking up clinical hours, there was constant turnover so the rapport i would build with one was vaporized after maybe 3 or 4 months. Looking back, I realize at this point in my life I really needed a male therapist, because I was making it weird with the female ones, especially since they were, as mentioned, students, and about my age. In the end, I got annoyed with the turnover, especially after my favorite one left.

But my self destructive behaviors got worse, and I didn’t resolve any of my grief. I got bored with school and started working in EMS. Everything was a pressure cooker. I was working nights, so I didn’t see my friends or family. Management was hostile and full of middle aged white dudes (in 2015!). My coworkers were a bunch of catty assholes. The work was fast paced and brutal and precise and I watched a lot of people, including kids, die. I didn’t have time to indulge myself. I barely had time to eat. I made it a year, but I should have left before. I considered hiring a prostitute. I considered suicide. I didn’t want to my coworkers know (they were gossipy, and our turf covered the counties mental health crisis center, so they would have seen me eventually).

When I left, I went back to school and I was surrounded by slightly younger college girls, so I started getting a little crazy. I considered killing myself. I didn’t want anyone to know, so I looked into suicide kits, and actually got a VPN with the intention to order one and just have it hang around until I was ready. This first concrete step kind of horrified me. I had health insurance at this point, from Obamacare, so I found a real therapist. I saw this guy for five years. It was really great. I worked through all the trauma and grief in a way that felt safe and healthy. He eventually “graduated” me. I felt really proud. I still do.

I know finding the right therapist sucks, and would suck even if we didnt live the hellscape of late capitalism. but I do think that if you find someone you vibe with, it can get better.

Overall, great. I have needed a lot of help, and got it. Almost always with compassion, empathy, and amazing skill. Even when one or more of those wasn’t in place, the others were, and I still received appropriate care.

That being said, you gotta be careful sometimes. You start talking about philosophy surrounding death, particularly your own, and they get all het up. Outright stating that you reserve the right to choose your time and manner of death is not always received with the kind of open mined listening that should be the default and standard for such subjects.

There’s some that will outright argue with you if that’s your relationship with death. Which has always eventually been resolved, but it’s a pain in the ass.

But that’s why I stopped eventually. If I can’t rely on a professional to tell the difference between suicidal ideation and a frank exploration of death as an aspect of life, then every time it’s necessary to see a different provider, it’s more added stress to deal with than is worth it to me.

At this point in my life, the amount of physical pain caused by going somewhere, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, and then trying to ignore that pain to deal with internal mental processes is so high that nothing I could gain would be worth starting back. I already have to deal with that bullshit at regular doctors, I’m not layering more of it on.

But! That work I did was important. I wouldn’t be here without it, and If I had managed to make it through, I doubt I would be as functional. Shit got bad for a while there.

Parents forced me to do therapy as a child as punishment for acting out.

As an adult i try to start sometimes, and basically ask them if there was something not illegal i could say that would make them imprison me against my will.

The answer is always yes

So I don’t do therapy

If I ever confided in a person I trust and their reaction was to call the cops to hold me in an asylum against my will I would fucking lose it and that would be the end of my life.

Personally I’ve only been to a therapist once - got access to an online cbt program that ended up being of more help than she was (which wasn’t a whole lot).

Mostly just me talking, highlighting this and that. Her advice basically boiled down to needing to learn to be happy with where I am in life, setting lower ambitions and talking more to people around me.

Kinda rubbed me the wrong way because I specifically mentioned cause and effect with procrastinating on certain things and ended up being increasingly unhappy/distressed because of that - noting that I’d like advice on how to better align my actions with my goals (not vice versa).

I’m still a young guy and yeah there’s things I’d like to achieve in life. Not exactly revolutionary stuff, just basic human life goal shit: finishing my education, getting a job, owning a home, finding love y’know.