I’ve been waiting since I was 14 for a therapist. I’m nearly 20.
Too many people are interested in speaking for me to be able to help. At no point in my life have I been considered an autonomous being by anyone that was supposed to care for me. Everyone talks to me like I’m stupid and they know better, and the reason I have all of these problems is because I made bad decisions. That especially goes for the people who are supposed to be helping me.
For years the cycle has gone: ask for help, get referred to some specialist who gives me a singular low-effort meeting to tell me they don’t see what the problem is, then get discharged from any relevant services while said therapists/psychiatrists are kicking it in the Maldives. Bullshit. (and literally every time I’ve had that course of events unfold, the bastards DID go to some tropical beach resort holiday location).
These people want to give you generic adages like “Just get out there” or “Things will get better” but their shitty advice doesn’t work and things don’t get better. I try their drugs to no avail. I literally tell them the kind of help and treatment I want and they say no.
Then, on top of all of that, there comes a point you lose ability to maintain relationships with people. They see all of this stuff happening to you all the time and they blame you. They can’t imagine something bad happening in their lives without it being their fault. They don’t really want to spend time with you anymore, but when they decide to they actually have the gall to wonder why you seem reserved and awkward. You spend years wondering if they were even your friends in the first place.
Great, you have no friends. What now? How do you make friends in 2020? I don’t know anybody that didn’t make their friends through school/uni, or the social groups that began in those places. There comes a point when you’re too old to make friends like that, surely?
I was particularly unlucky because I “left school” (was kicked out) when I was 15 over my mental health problems. I didn’t get to finish my GCSEs at school. I’m not even employable. My life sucks so much when I wake up in the morning, I’m angry my dreams are over.
I’m so fucking sick of everyone acting like our current mental health system is even anywhere near acceptable. Great, there’s the odd couple of people who literally need a pill or two to correct some neurochemical imbalance, or to cope with some ongoing condition, and it works for them. Great. The problem is that there are millions of people in my shoes in the UK alone that are being told to just try harder, and that they haven’t found the right therapist, and that one day everything is going to change. Spoiler: it’s not. The people who keep telling you it’s going to change aren’t ever the ones changing anything for you.
If you ask me, people who are socially isolated (like incels, or me) had shitty parents and shitty teachers that spent years crushing their self esteem in order to enact control, leaving a completely dysfunctional person to live their adult life. At least that is overwhelmingly my experience. I don’t blame my ex-friends, or women. I blame my parents, and I blame the government. You want to help? Stop letting shitty people have babies.