As I sit freezing in my 3rd floor, (blowing outside air through to push out a neighbor’s cigarette poison), I’m reminded of the “I hope you can finally get the help you need” meme people throw at hopeless people as they’re dragged off to a psych ward.
“…the help you need…”
Repeated word-for-word by countless people, without considering what it really means. What you think of as “help” might be torture for the person upon which you’re inflicting it. I suggest that “the help you need” is a thoughtless comment; that it is presumptuous, patronizing, condescending, and utterly dismissive of the actual issues causing a person’s misery.
Where was help when it was asked for earlier? Because it was asked for. You might not have understood it, and the request might have seemed unreasonable or trite to you at the time, but it was there. Even with people who are not skilled communicators, even if you are not a skilled listener: Complaint is the most basic form of discomfort-reporting.
The sound of complaint is pretty recognizable across many land-dwelling mammals (though humans convince themselves otherwise, just to dehumanize other animals and each other). But, a powerful tool humans use to silence requests for help is the social taboo against complaint, and all the justifications of suffering that go with it.
“Be happy; you could be like them!”
[points at someone else, who has probably had the same treatment]
(There’s always someone worse off to use as an object of justification for not making improvements)
People don’t jump straight to suicide as a solution to suffering. If you’ve never been there, you have no idea what such people have struggled to tolerate, nor for how long. The personal character involved is the polar opposite of laziness & selfishness. It is usually a great effort to conform to what culture tells them is “just part of life”, “perfectly normal”, and “not a big deal, really; get over it”. Suppression of complaint teaches that there’s nothing people can do about what’s hurting them, and that our society will hurt them more for wanting things any differently.
There’s only so much coping in a person, and everyone has a different-sized coping tank. Impotence to end suffering is what leads to defeat and the desire to stop existing. Our society is a well-oiled machine for producing more and more of such misery every year. By pathologizing those who break first, no one has to change anything to which they’ve grown accustomed… it’s also profitable.
Throwing that lame “the help you need” meme at an already-broken person is like telling a person in a body-cast that you’re glad they’re so broken as to be trapped in hospital, because it’s easier than having prevented them from being mangled in the first place. Except, a body-cast addresses something visibly broken. Emotional harm is invisible (a likely cause for some people to actually commit physical self-harm, to externalize and visibly manifest that which is invisible and easily dismissed). Typical psych “intervention”, is an inflicted action usually not requested by the person that’s suffering (until they’re driven to desperate means to fall in line with what a fundamentally sick society says is normal human tolerance).
This inflicted help does not address causation. Antidepressants have not been proven to be a treatment for any measurable disease process or injury. They can be temporarily helpful in the suppression of symptoms of trauma (which you biologically need to experience, or you cannot process the experiences). At best, they allow a potentially useful modified perception of experiences (something that leads to character assassination when people pursue this on their own terms via the many psychotropics which can produce altered states). At worst, these substances do even greater harm in the long term compared to whatever they were prescribed to “treat” (adverse effects can ruin lives, and physiological addiction keeps people trapped on the drugs).
If lucky, the person may get counseling to try to convince them to stop responding to trauma the way their bodies are biologically built to respond. More likely, they wont be able to afford such a luxury. Getting the drugs, however, will see much more systemic support.
“But I don’t know what help they need. That’s why we say the phrase!” you may say. I disagree that this is the implied meaning. However well-meaning, the meme is practically code for “go get drugged; you’re defective”. It also includes an implied “the problem is yours; not mine.” After all, it isn’t “the help we all need with a toxic culture”. No, it is saying “the help you need, because you’re broken and I’m fine” (though there is a pretty common behavior among people to presume that whatever they believe “fixed it for them” is also the solution to everyone else’s problems, resulting in armchair prescription of psych drugs and even threats to “get the help you need or I’ll have them take you away”). Most people think they are “above these types of things”, unless and until it happens to them, so, no, it’s likely not merely some innocent deference to some other authority.
This kind of “help” is our society’s punishment for not staying silent and keeping our complaints, and our ultimate defeat, quietly to ourselves. People are discomforted by the notion that someone could be so upset as to literally seek death. It is repugnant to many who have never experienced it. Religions make it a sin, and laws make it akin to a crime. Admitting to this degree of defeat can cause your civil liberties to be suspended, get you locked up, and forcibly drugged (or worse). I promise that such an experience doesn’t make a person feel more in control of their lives; it might even become the very last straw. (I’m not the only one to suggest this)
The only help the “help you need” meme does is to assuage a bit of your own discomfort from witnessing just how upset someone really is. It also may turn a blade in the gut of the person who has to hear it… if they’re aware enough to respect themselves and their struggle.
There is a socially-accepted victim-blaming tool to protect society from accountability: the acculturated willingness to believe that certain persons are simply born with “broken brains” that modern medicine can correct. We’re replacing the stigma of “mental illness” with a more insidious stigma: “It’s okay to take psych drugs because you were born broken” or “born less-than”. This defective-self belief is a requirement of believing in “the chemical imbalance” hypothesis of depression (which has not been scientifically proven to be correct).
It is very powerful social conditioning that you reinforce every time you repeat the “help you need” meme.
It is also legitimate to consider the benefit to pharmaceutical companies when “mental illness” is so normalized, when the definition of pathological behavior is so wide, that increasing numbers of people are convinced to “fix their defect” via a lifetime of psychotropic modification. [That is a very involved digression I don’t have the stomach to dive into. I didn’t even plan to write what I’ve written here.]
Like religion, this belief in being fundamentally broken can make its victims defend the “medical treatment” as if their life actually depends on it. For some, a placebo may be the best handhold they’ve known in a long time, and they’ll eviscerate you for suggesting it is sham (regardless of the lack of compelling scientific evidence to prove otherwise). Withdrawal indeed feels like relapsing, and few doctors will acknowledge physiological addiction to psych drugs even when used as prescribed.
Our current socioeconomic structure refuses, for convenience sake, to protect people from preventable harm, but it will wrap people up in a cloak of remedial “healthcare” to assuage our aversion to someone’s emotional distress once the worst damage is already done. We perpetuate this social construct, choosing non-solutions that make ourselves feel less troubled by our inability (or unwillingness) to actually prevent/cease the damage being done to each other by types of harm we have normalized. We excuse participating in acts of harm against others as “necessary”, or “inconsequential”, and “not my responsibility”. We suppress complaint via shame and mockery. Until this is corrected systemically, we will remain an inhumane and cannibalistic civilization.
Your suffering is real. Your feelings are real. Saying “ow, stop that” to repeat psychological trauma is just as legitimate as saying “knock it off” to someone kicking you in the shins (because, eventually, you will bruise, then bleed, and worse; a response is justified in both cases). Trying to force everyone to measure up to one standard of “how much is too much” is just a tool to protect authorities, a toxic system, or a self-destructive society from being held accountable for what it willingly perpetuates. If it’s not you who’s had too much, it may be the person standing next to you. Deciding that they’re broken because you’re fine is a selfish act, not a kindness.
Find a way to acknowledge that someone is hurting. Ask them what they see as the solutions. Explore what may be done to enact those solutions. Do something functional, rather than throwing an easy and dismissive meme at them as they’re taken out of your sphere of discomfort (or responsibility!). Better yet, take seriously their much earlier requests for relief, before it’s too late and the damage is already done, when you’re standing there asking “but why didn’t they ever look for help??”
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Addendum: Perhaps it might be useful to actually offer an informal definition of what “inflicted help” is. Inflicted help is a term I adopted from an article about Microsoft Office’s “Clippy” character and auto-formatting. It went something like this:
“I typed a dash at the beginning of the line and Word inflicted help on me by creating a bulleted list, which I did not want, and had to spend extra time undoing.”
[paraphrased]
Inflicted help is any action you take toward someone (which you may sincerely believe is an act of offering assistance), but which is something the person has not requested. Your idea of help may result in doing more harm than good. It isn’t just pressuring someone into using psych drugs or having them taken away to a psych ward. It may include (but not be limited to) pressuring them to get counseling, prescribing that they “learn to live with” the harms being done to them, or worse, blaming them for their suffering.
“Tough love” is easily the same thing as abuse (and if you’re dealing with a person who has developed defensive behaviors, all you’re doing is making that wall more impenetrable). If a person’s own behavior is contributing to their problems, there are ways to address this without victim-blaming. It may require more knowledge about what has shaped their current behavior so that you can talk to them with the correct context and language.
Prescribing how to feel about harm being done, and victim-blaming, are things our culture does to people on a daily basis. That doesn’t make it acceptable. People (like all animals) generally have a good sense of what hurts them and how to solve it (get away from the source of the injury, and remember that source for future reference). There’s value in pushing beyond comfort zones, but there is no value in trying to get used to being injured. You don’t get used to repeat injury; you just get more damaged (and more reactive, and/or more callous). Everyone’s tolerances are different. What you may consider as “adaptation” might be “living in misery” for another person.