This was an excellent question that ought to be asked much more often by therapists. I have found in the many years of doing mental health work,  too many therapists hold on to clients sometimes for decades when they have no idea how to truly help them. Here is how I answered this question: 

This may be a shock to you, but your therapist is doing you the best favor ever! I wish many more would have the common sense to know when they have gone as far as they can with patients and refer them to someone who has a different manner of working, maybe a specialization in the patient’s issues instead of feeling frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the work they are doing with their patients. It takes a form of humility that is lacking in the field to be willing to do this most important service for those patients who could do more and better with someone with different training.

The other thing that you need to realize is that unless you have a mental illness that is incurable, meaning personality disorders or schizophrenia, it isn’t meant to be a life-long deal. One needs to learn how to function in life for one’s self for that is the purpose of therapy – not a co-dependent affair where one is incapable of living without the weekly sessions. This is a huge problem that I personally have with the 12-step programs. There is a difference between getting the support one needs to come through a difficult situation and quite another feeling that one is lost without the support. And, in terms of 12-step programs, I have helped 1,000s of clients over the last 20 years let go of all types of addictions for over a decade and a half so it is doable, but one needs the right tools and techniques along with having open space for the client to actually be able to move on from their addictions for good! This sadly isn’t the paradigm for addicts, but it needs to be because it is possible for them to let them go for good be it substance abuse, eating disorders, sex addiction, etc.

Thanks for your question. Thank you therapist for his humility and see who he may have to refer you to. Do a free consult with them over the phone to see if you ‘clique’ and if so set up an appointment. If not continue till you find someone who is worth your investing your time and emotions into getting to know well enough to trust and work well with. Good luck on your healing journey.

This was an interesting question and one that comes up too frequently with misdiagnosis between 2 mental illnesses that seem to be quite similar. However, there are very distinct differences between the two. Here is how I answered this person’s question: 

There are some very clear differences in the two diagnoses so let us take a gander and see what is really going on with you as mental health pros misdiagnose all the time.

Bipolar: One is going to have much longer periods between the moods they experience. A rapid cycle is considered 3 weeks – though many go months before going from one extreme to the other.

Borderline Personality Disorder: the moods are labile meaning that in a split second when triggered a person can go from happy to throwing things and cursing.

Both illnesses have a lot of anger involved – however, the BPD person will be enraged when they don’t get their way. It is a personality disorder which means the person though as intelligent as anyone is acting at the emotional age of a very young person – it is always about the ‘id’ wanting what it wants NOW and when it doesn’t get it, has a tantrum such as a 2-year-old would.

Both are master manipulators of themselves and others but go about it differently

Bipolar people will manipulate to get what they want usually by creating their fantastical ideas in business exaggerating what they can do and what they have to work with.

BPDs will manipulate to get the hole in their soul-filled usually through buying things they do not need, always asking for favors from others, and usually glomming on to one particular person more than anyone else – when that person does or says something that the BPD person finds hurtful, the BPD will drop them in a second and talk shit about them to the next person they glom onto. This is called ‘splitting’ between two people and is something that only BPDs do.

BPDs will self-harm – usually superficially while in a very depressed state.

Bipolars – 85% will self-medicate themselves with drugs – so while up they will take depressives, while down they will take amphetamines.

BPDs have a great fear of abandonment – they will do anything to stop others from abandoning even to the degree that they will abandon others before others have the chance to abandon them.

Bipolars do not have a fear of abandonment.

There are more differences between the 2 diagnoses, however, this gives you enough to better understand where you fall. DO NOTE THAT A PERSON CAN INDEED HAVE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME as we found out was true with my mother from the psychiatric staff at the nursing home where she lived the last 7 years of her life.

If you think you have BPD the best thing that you can do is to learn how to stop the impulses you have to be overly emotional, and instead use logic to make your decisions. It is also very helpful to just be more mindful of how you are coming across to others. It isn’t an easy thing to do at all, but it can be done if one wishes to stop pushing people away with what would be considered infantile behavior.

If you have Bipolar the best thing you can do is deal with feelings of unworthiness by figuring out what your best attributes are and owning them, dealing with your anger and your issues of sadness. I was diagnosed with bipolar 2 back in 1990 and was lucky enough to turn it around so that it is no longer a part of my life on any level back in 2004. Unfortunately, those with personality disorders are unable to truly overcome them, however, if you do those things that I suggested above and maybe get some Dialectical Behavior Training by a person who specializes in working with BPDs, you will be able to gain much control over the almost instantaneous shifts in mood and learn how to reduce the impulses to act out to get your way if you are indeed a BPD.

Thank you for asking this question because these 2 diagnoses are mixed up all the time as are those with schizophrenia and with bipolar with psychotic features and many other types of diagnoses because the Diagnostic Statistical Manual has so many symptoms that overlap from one diagnosis to the next, especially in the 5th revision which basically notes that every normal human emotion receives its own diagnosis so the pharmaceutical companies can make even more money on their poison – NOTE: the only people that I believe ought to be placed on psychotropic medications are those who have psychotic features and at the most minimal dose to minimize their hallucinations. I have come to this conclusion after 30 years in the business both in conventional psychiatry and in complementary mental health in the form of hypnotism and neuro-linguistic programming (for 20 years now so plenty of time to have lots of case histories to prove the point that the mind is the best asset anyone has to make transformational change. However, I am unable to help those with psychotic features or those with personality disorders. Though I am able to help those with anxiety, major depression, bipolar, OCD, eating disorders, and sex addictions as I have been successfully doing this since 2002.

This was a great question that a person on Quora asked. Here is how I answered it: 

After working with all types of folks in mental health for about 30 years now here are the ways you can build your psychological resistance.

1. Take on new experiences especially if you find them a little scary. When you find you are able to do them, you will feel empowered.
2. Understand that when most people are acting out against you in some form, it usually has nothing to do with you and everything to do with where they are emotionally. Most times it is helpful to just validate how they are feeling and let them know that you hope that their day gets better – crack a joke and all of a sudden that grumpy person is sweet and smiling all so appreciative of your interaction.
3. There are going to be many times during your life when you may be challenged to see something from another perspective. Your job is to see it from that other perspective because you may find that even though the comment made may feel personal, it wasn’t personal, it was just another perspective. We need to understand that each of us has a right to our opinions, and sometimes when we stretch our thinking we may find that we actually agree with the other person’s viewpoint.
4. If someone close to you is angry and yelling at you, you need to find out why that person is angry – more often than not it had to do with something else that occurred during that person’s day, and you were targeted because you were closest at the time the anger exploded. So clarification of the situation is what is called for – and again empathy -validating the other’s feelings will allow you to escape an unnecessary argument.
5. Many times when one has had a tiring day, one may come home grumpy – if this is the case, acknowledge that. the other person is tired and tells them to relax for a bit. Again, the best way around so many of these situations is to understand them from the other person’s perspective and validate whatever is the main cause of the problem.
6. If you do something that is hurtful to someone else, come clean and apologize by letting the other person know that you did indeed do something that wasn’t in their interest, ask what you need to do to make it up to them, and then do your best to follow through on that, and let them know that you realize that it may take them a while to forgive you and you are okay with that – because that is a fact – different people take different amounts of time to forgive others.
7. Spend your time on this planet doing things that you enjoy and that bring joy and consideration to others – be kind and helpful and you will find that you will feel great about yourself because the folks you demonstrated this behavior too, will let you know how meaningful it was. to them which can only grow you as a person.

Use these ideas and my guess is that you will become psychologically resilient in very little time at all. 

This was a question from a person on Quora and this is how I answered it. 

Therapists all too often jump to conclusions where their patients are concerned in many ways and yes it can be harmful as I have had many clients come to me for healing work as. a direct result of their therapists saying and doing unprofessional and damaging things to them. I even had a client who saw a psychiatric social worker who asked the client if “she ever had suicidal thoughts” and my client said yes having experienced depression – though she was there for drug and alcohol issues.

Well, inside of 5 minutes of that appointment the social worker left the office and got the police to take the client to the hospital for a psych evaluation. She was stuck there till 1 AM and she had to be at work at 6 AM – so this client was a very unhappy person.

The problem here was that the client was NOT asked if she was experiencing suicidal thoughts at the time in which case if she was, getting. psychiatric evaluation would have been appropriate. She was asked if SHE EVER EXPERIENCED SUICIDAL THOUGHTs which are two very distinct questions and needed to be handled differently.

The next day the client was on the internet and saw that I do hypnotism and NLP and decided to give me a call to see if I would be able to help her. She basically begged me to take her on as a client knowing she needed the help and never trusting the conventionally trained mental health professionals again.

By the way, in this client’s case, she didn’t have depression per see, she had a genetic situation from both sides of her family that prevented her body from naturally making GABA for sleep, dopamine, and serotonin – so all the psych meds in the world and therapy would never help her to release the symptoms she was experiencing. Because like pain, depression is merely an indicator that there is something wrong – but till we get to the root cause we will never be able to help the client overcome the symptoms and move on with his or her life.

More often the issues that my clients have with their previous therapists have to do with telling the client what they think or feel – very invasive and inappropriate. One needs to confirm that what they are hearing the client say is what they mean so they are both on the same page.

But, most often the problem is that of going to therapy sometimes for decades as was the case with the client case above without ever getting a resolution – knowing why the problem is it is totally different than releasing it. So, many come to me to get into their subconscious mind to where the content is that needs to be transformed from self-harming to self-fulfilling. And, the great majority of conventionally trained mental health professionals have no idea of how to do this never having been trained in hypnotism and NLP and practicing with it enough to learn how to use it proficiently. I have had some clients come to me with therapists who tried to put them into a trance and do hypnotism but it failed because the therapist did not know which type of induction to use to get them into trance – different personalities need different types of inductions, nor what to do with the client once in trance if they got them into a trance. Like any profession, it takes years to learn how to do this work well – not just a weekend beginning training.

Many thanks for your question because too often the realities from the patient’s perspective is not taken seriously by those who have all those fancy degrees. To do this work well, we must listen to what the patient is saying, not saying, and between the lines of what they are saying AND ALWAYS MAKE SURE, WE UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF WHAT THEY ARE SAYING BY CHECKING IN TO FIND OUT IF WE GOT IT CORRECT.

The article “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: a Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence” published July 20, 2022, proves the notion of ‘brain chemistry’ causing mental illness most especially depression as being nothing more than a great marketing ploy. Their article reviews the research up to now and there was never been any real data to back up these claims EVER!

For many patients, the idea that it is their brain chemistry that is off, instead of dealing with the real underlying cause of most of these issues, emotional issues most often based on experiencing trauma was a relief. However, this whole notion of brain chemistry did more harm than good for the many people who truly needed to deal with the negative effects of being traumatized, feeling that they were unworthy of love, money, etc. Instead, they were led down this path of potentially relieving the symptoms that were being caused by these emotional problems with medication, instead of doing the real healing work involved in overcoming these problems.

Unfortunately, most doctors do not have the time to read the actual studies so they believe what the pharmaceutical reps tell them as they peddle their psychotropic medications to them through office visits and having other doctors speak on their behalf at hospital conferences and meetings.

The findings of the meta-research are:

“This review suggests that the huge research effort based on the serotonin hypothesis has not produced convincing evidence of a biochemical basis for depression. This is consistent with research on many other biological markers. We suggest it is time to acknowledge that the serotonin theory of depression is not empirically substantiated.”

So, what are those in the health care field who are feeling depressed to do? And, how can they better help their patients without mind-altering and with negligible positive results?

How about doing the obvious:

Getting some exercise which may take you a couple of minutes to get into, however, the serotonin starts releasing making you happy for the day. If you do your exercise outside by biking, hiking, swimming or playing a sport you enjoy, you will be able to get your Vitamin D which is important in helping one feel happy and alive.

Fish Oil was suggested by my psychiatrist back in 2000 when the lithium I was on was slowing down my kidneys after 13 years of being on it. I never tried it because I found a 5-minute technique shortly thereafter that took care of the problem forever.

I will tell you that my manic depression which was diagnosed in 1990 which is why that term was used instead of bipolar 2, was treated for 13 years with lithium, at times at such a high dose I could not do the most mundane of things because I could not think clearly, and my energy level was so low. I finally got rid of it through a process called Time Line Therapy (R) which my neuro-linguistic trainer, Tad James created in the 1980s. It is a simple process. However, when I was told this is what I needed to do, my brain was so non-functional that I could not recall how to do it even though I had been using this great technique with my clients for the past 8 months. It was a good thing that he was able to tell me the 3 negative emotions that needed to be cleared as I was taken off the lithium as a result of my kidneys beginning to slow down. That 5-minute intervention got rid of the symptoms of bipolar 2 – so hypnotism and neurolinguistic programming are my go-to modalities to heal myself of pretty much anything considered a chronic illness these days.

Dump your negative friends and relatives. No one needs to have that in one’s life.

Dump the mass media news as most of it is paid for by big pharma which is why you are not going to receive the truth regarding health care, and most of it is created to make one nervous, angry, and have feelings of loss.

Listen to uplifting music, or watch comedy on Youtube. It’s hard to feel down when you are allowing happy energy into your life.

Call a friend who cracks you up. I call my Godson whenever I am a bit frustrated or miffed about something because he has the great talent of knowing how to make me laugh without even thinking about it – he just says something and it cracks me up. It’s his greatest talent as far as I am concerned.

Some people have symptoms of depression because they are unable to metabolize the amino acids from the proteins they consume to make the neurotransmitters. If you have not experienced trauma, etc then this may very well be the real cause of your problems.

A leaky gut is another issue that gets in the way of making neurotransmitters, so if you are feeling muscular pain throughout your body because of the inflammation caused by tiny food particles going between the one-cell thick lining of your stomach into your body, this is something to get checked out by a functional or integrative doctor because they have the means to get the correct testing and the right nutrients, and pre and probiotics to help you heal your gut.

Hormonal imbalances especially around mid-life when estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone get much lower are another huge problem for folks. I had two nurses come into my practice for whom this was their problem. However, men also can feel low mood with a lack of testosterone being made in their bodies. One needs to see an endocrinologist or a compounding pharmacist that specializes in sex hormones to have this situation best resolved. A compounding pharmacist saved my life when I was going through this problem myself 20 years ago.

Prescription medications especially antidepressants have been known to cause depression and homicidal feelings in people, many younger patients are affected in this way, but not always which is why there is a ‘black box’ caution on the package of antidepressants and has been for quite a while now. And, there are other medications that can cause depressed feelings, so get that checked out with your pharmacist since they are the experts in medication and the interactions between medications.

Some herbal health products can also cause problems, especially when used while one is taking prescription medication. This was something another of my clients experienced by taking a ‘natural anti-anxiety herbal product while she was on pain medication. She fainted in her boss’s office. Her sister found the problem reading the insert on the herbal product.

So, depression, like physical pain is a symptom that something is wrong and the ’cause’ of the depression needs to be found to effectively get rid of it.

So how about using those methods that have been proven to help – that are non-invasive and will not injure a person’s brain processing? How about doing what we know helps because these interventions are based on how the body was created to work? And, how about we stop beating ourselves up for feeling the way we do and take the proactive steps we all can take most of them easily implementable if we would only take the actions to do them on a daily basis?

Resource:

Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R.E., Stockmann, T. et al. The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Mol Psychiatry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100062364&CJEVENT=f59e0ead126e11ed8370005a0a1c0e0c#Sec13

This was an interesting question that a person on Quora asked and here is how I answered it:

This is a great question.

Every person is going to have their own individual values and biases based on how they were raised and any negative events that may have negatively affected them through life.

It is imperative that anyone who is working with others realize that it is never okay to foist one’s own values and beliefs onto a patient or client. The goal is to work within the patient’s or client’s value system respecting it for what it is.

The problem is that many people cannot discern themselves and their values and beliefs from others therefore falsely believing they have ‘the answer’ to living a great life, evangelizing their own values and beliefs.

The other issue that is brought up in this question is that of therapists with their own biases. Again, the work is based on the client and has very little to do with the personal ideals of a therapist. The therapist’s role is to focus on the patient’s best interest and that interest always has to do with helping the patient to heal. This is the only reason for a patient to be seeing a therapist, so it is mandatory for the therapist to keep personal biases out of the session work.

Again, many therapists have not done their own work of healing, therefore, carrying around a lot of false notions about what their role is. Unfortunately many do not receive the guidance needed to fulfill their roles in an ethical and helpful way in training or post-training compounding the problems you raise.

I would also add that those with licenses to protect, will force their patients to do things that may be unnecessary in the higher need of ‘covering their asses’ in the cases where they are concerned for the patient’s wellbeing. Too many are incapable of truly hearing the answers to their own questions looking for reasons to have a psych evaluation, or continuing a patient on drugs that are not only not helping the patient function, but are causing mental, emotional, or physical problems because the therapist is fearful of what may happen if the patient is taken off the drugs. This is why so many mental health patients complain about being forced to figure out for themselves how to get off these mind-altering and all to often physically toxic drugs.

These are real issues that I have had to help my own clients contend with over the decades that I have been in mental health so they are real and need to be respected for what they are. It is impossible for another person to understand what the patient is experiencing themselves – the only thing they can do is listen carefully and change the course of treatment if that is being requested due to unnecessary duress on the part of the patient – but many will not do this for the above reason.

Most licensed therapists will never admit that these are real problems, instead stating that the patient is incapable of knowing what is going on in their own body, which of course is a bunch of garbage, one more way that those with the stigma of mental illness are further marginalized.

So, the best course of action is to find a therapist that one feels comfortable with because that therapist is emotionally healthy, and is able to respect one’s input regarding the type of care given with the understanding that the therapy and medication need to benefit the patient regardless of what the therapists own values, beliefs, or biases may be. That means finding someone who is capable of both listening to the patient’s concerns and taking the actions needed for the comfort and capacity to live a decent life of the patient – for they are there to serve the patient, not further marginalize and demean them because they have the ‘fancy letters after their names.’

Thanks again for this question – it is one that the therapists will not be able to answer honestly because they truly believe that they do everything possible to help their patients when the facts do not bear this out – as noted by the many questions by patients asking why it is so difficult to find a therapist that can and will truly help them – right here on Quora – I receive this type of question way too often to believe otherwise.