The System Doesn't Offer Real Help or Advice - That Needs To Change!

I recently watched a video where a therapist clarifies that: “A ‘first day of therapist school thing’ we learn is that we’re not supposed to give our patients advice... we’re not your friend.” It is staggering how many people still don’t know that therapists work under this rule - which also forbids them from providing any actual help with their patients’ problems.

I spent 8 useless years in therapy without having this ever clarified to me, at a cost of thousands of dollars down the drain. My life is still a mess, and I still need help!

We need to acknowledge that this rule creates a massive shortfall between the help that suffering Australians need, and the service that the mental health system is willing to offer. Then we need to correct it. So that means that either Australian therapists will need to formally renounce their allegiance to this rule, or we need to create a new type of therapy profession where the therapists WILL give their patients the essential advice and/or assistance they need to solve their problems.

We need the general public and media to be keenly aware of this shortfall between the help that patients need, and the service that therapists are willing to offer; and we need our politicians to commit to bridging this shortfall as a #1 priority of their mental health policy.

We also need the language around mental healthcare to be mandatorily changed to layman’s terms, so that everyone can know precisely what each and every type of therapist and clinic does (and what they don’t do); and precisely where to go for the help they need. Terms like “Primary Health Network”, “Psychosocial”, “Missing Middle”, “Occupational Therapy”, “Community Care”, ect., ect. (just to name a few!) need to be quickly abolished and replaced with ordinary layman’s terms that tell you exactly what these people do, so you know where you need to go! I’ve been reading these terms for years, and I still have no idea what they really mean.

Making the language straightforward will also make it easier for everybody to spot where there are gaps in the system - the sorts of problems that have no designated profession in the system to handle them.

“How do we tackle the root causes of mental ill-health, and take a proactive approach to mental wellbeing?”

1. We need a system to remedy loneliness - a system that sets lonely people up with compatable, thoughtfully-matched companions and coworkers - including, but not limited to, romantic partners/spouses.
2. We need the government to create more jobs for the long-term unemployed, impoverished, and homeless. I repeat: for the long-term unemployed, impoverished, and homeless! Not for imported foreign workers! We need the government to create well-paying jobs, and to pledge that these jobs will be assigned to the Australians who have been waiting for work the longest.

At the same time, these jobs must not be assigned willy-nilly, but with due regard for the recipient’s mental wellbeing and personal aspirations.
3. We need to really tone-down the ruling class’s obsession with education, and make it much easier for people to get great employment with minimal education, and to access servicepeople who don’t belong to the college-graduate set.

We are so proud of ourselves for largely overcoming our primative racisms and gender biases, but at the same time, we’ve created a country where uneducated people are mostly treated like 2nd-class citizens: significantly forbidden from achieving our dreams, from being contributing members of society, from shaping our society, and even from consentually assisting one another in any manner that has been deemed the sole privelage of educated people.

How can anyone be mentally well in a country where they, and their kind, are regarded and treated as “lesser” people?
4. The issue of homelessness is receiving a lot of due attention right now. But there is still woeful disregard for the fact that while a house may be composed of bricks and morter, a home is made out of people and love.

So many of us aren’t hoping for a cold, steel roof over our head, we are hoping for a family.

I grew up in the age of “Friends” (i.e. Ross, Rachel, Joey, et al.) I grew up presuming that, when I reached my 20s, I would undoubtedly get invited to move in to a house/apartment with a group of wacky characters who would become the brothers and sisters I never had. And then, I reached my 20s... and it didn’t happen. I ended up sad, alone, suicidal, but with that oh-so-important roof over my head.

The government is doing its darndest to build plenty of new boxes to deliver it’s boxless citizens into. But for people like me, that isn’t enough. I don’t need a big empty box, I need a home! I need a family! I need the government to send me off to live in a new box that comes with a family to share my life with!

We need to weave this need into our strategy for homelessness. We need to be setting well-matched, compatable strangers up to live together in the same houses/apartments. Not only will this help the housing shortage - by storing multiple citizens comfortably in the same box, but much more importantly, it will remedy the loneliness of those of us who need a family far more then we’ll ever need shelter.