Psychiatrists in USA Europe

Mangoperson88 wrote: »

Like lietchi i assumed everyone in USA goes to therapists or psychiatrists and lawyers and psychiatrists mint money because either everyone is suing everyone or undergoing therapy to deal with it. Again sorry if I'm offending anyone. I don't watch Netflix or tv shows but I've read a lot of crime novels and someone is always in a mental hospital, especially females, because they suffered scary abuse as children so they're seperated from their kids and it's a whole big conspiracy and stuff like it is supposed to be in books.

You seriously need to stop believing every novel and TV show/magazine article/"news" story you see.

Novels (especially crime novels) are FICTION. They are entertainment. People like outrageous behavior in their fictional characters.

That would be a whole different thread topic.

Mangoperson88 wrote: »

Like lietchi i assumed everyone in USA goes to therapists or psychiatrists and lawyers and psychiatrists mint money because either everyone is suing everyone or undergoing therapy to deal with it. Again sorry if I'm offending anyone. I don't watch Netflix or tv shows but I've read a lot of crime novels and someone is always in a mental hospital, especially females, because they suffered scary abuse as children so they're seperated from their kids and it's a whole big conspiracy and stuff like it is supposed to be in books.

It's easy to make assumptions from things like this, but I try to remember that I should ask the folks who live there, making it clear that I have an assumption from 2nd/3rd hand information (and maybe biased besides).

News media focus on unusual and dramatic exceptions to the norm. Fiction is fiction: There needs to be drama and conflict, or there's no story. Even published memoirs are likely to present people with unusual lives, because average ones are mostly boring reading. Even first person experience can mislead, if limited: If I meet 3 people from (country Y) and they're all braggarts/liars, I might assume that all Y-ians are braggarts and liars. Maybe I just met an unrepresentative sample?

Not so much on this thread, but I've seen people make themselves look pretty foolish on other threads, by telling residents of country X what country X is like, when they have no personal direct observation to support that.

The same thing applies to people posting confidently about what it was like in the 1960s or 1980s when they weren't even alive then (but they watched the movies about it!), what it's like to be female when they've always been male, etc. Caution, caution, caution: So easy to look really foolish, doing that kind of thing.

The audience will tend to forgive ignorant questions ("did lots of people do (ABC) in the 1980s?"), more than they will accept confident but ignorant assertions. Example: One dude on a thread asserted that people didn't know about calories in the . . . I think it was 1960s, but I might be off by a decade . . . so they couldn't lose weight back then. Um. No. (That's actually especially bad, because a person could Google that for a better answer, eh?)

In a place like the MFP Community, the only persona we have is the reputation that we create in other people's minds via what and how well we communicate. That's a little scary to me, TBH. It's hard to know what others' image of us may be!

P.S. @Mangoperson88, I think your English is excellent. It never occurred to me that English wasn't among your first languages. (I've had work colleagues from your country who grew up speaking English from babyhood, alongside other language(s), I'm guessing because of the history of British influence in some areas (though I dunno for sure if that's why)?

Things like which word choices are offensive in another country or culture - that's really nuanced and variable, I think. I agree that psychiatrists here mostly wouldn't like being called "shrinks", but there are subcultures here where that term would be completely accepted among everyday people, and the term "psychiatrist" might be used in a tone of voice that implies irony or with the implication that it's a fancy-dancy ivory tower kind of thing. Code-switching is real.

Sometimes I marvel that humans ever manage to communicate with each other at all, well enough to accomplish all the complicated things that get accomplished in the world.

I'm in the US, and I don't find that doctors dismiss psychiatric care at all. It's actually quite the opposite in my experience. When I (45 year old female) visit my primary care doctor or my OBGYN, they both ask about my mental health, and are in complete agreement when I give them an update that includes my psychiatrist and therapist. I have a well rounded team of doctors, thankfully.

As far as backlogs of doctors and having to wait, it really depends on what area you're in, and if your need is specialized. For me, I was able to get an initial appointment with my psychiatrist within 3 weeks of my call. For my 14 year old son, it took 5 months to get him in for an autism diagnostic screening (he is not on the spectrum, but was diagnosed with several mental health problems). Once we got the results, it was another 6 months before his first appointment was available. Now that we're established I am able to schedule a couple of appointments out so he's seen about once a month.

I find the biggest stigma around metal health comes from our peers and the general population (especially for men). You're seen as weak, a drama queen/king, or attention seeker if you talk about needing mental health or reveal that you're on medication and/or seeing a therapist. It's incredibly sad, especially when people are only trying to improve their lives, and be able to function like a "normal" person.

Alatariel75 wrote: »

Mangoperson88 wrote: »

We have a very skewed ratio of psychiatrists to patients here- 1:500 approx a celebrity shrink from a posh hospital in a posh neighborhood himself admitted this! He gives mental health advice in the newspaper. I'm very lucky to have 2 shrinks in my middle class neighborhood!! I've been to both my former shrink has gone crazy herself but my current shrink is brilliant!! Infact he's the one who motivated me to pursue law! And just the other day I read about a state run mental asylum in the next town having 7 vacant posts for shrinks despite good salary and incentives!! It's just that psychiatry is not a very popular profession in India. What's the ratio in USA and also what does your law say about euthanasia? I'm just asking generally don't get me wrong here!!

I thin you'll find the ratio is much, much lower than that - 2019 it was 0.75 psychiatrists to 100,000 people. Or are you saying that each psychiatrist has 500 patients?


In a lot of countries (or areas of countries) which are traditionally patriarchal, mental health issues have historically been treated as shameful, particularly when it is men seeking help. They've been expected to "man up" and having emotional or mental distress has been viewed as 'unmanly'. Women's mental health is just as disrespected, but on a different basis, they're not expected to be 'strong' and not have it, but more that it gets dismissed as 'weak women's issues'. Many countries, and cultures (including subcultures) are slowly becoming more open to accepting psychiatry and mental health treatment as mainstream medical treatment, but there's a long way to go, particularly as there is such a distant ratio of practitioner to population.

Or women's physical issues or (historically) non-domestic aspirations are treated as mental health problems.