For complex reasons, there are many prejudices and misconceptions about mental illness, and such prejudices and misconceptions seriously affect the normal access to medical treatment for mental patients, thus making their efficacy much less effective. Although the rationale for puncturing such prejudices and misconceptions is very superficial, they are very common in society.
There is a stigma attached to having a mental illness and therefore a reluctance to admit that the family member has a mental illness
A family member once told me personally, “Although he has had the disease for three years, I never admitted that he was mentally ill. In the face of a major blow, denial is a psychological defense mechanism that protects the person concerned from psychological suffering for a while. But the truth is the truth, and it’s not a matter of not admitting the truth if you don’t. It’s like covering your ears, you can only deceive yourself. Only face it correctly and don’t hold any illusions or flukes. Families may often think like this: “Maybe they’ll get better after some days”, which is not entirely impossible, but the possibility of natural remission of mental illness is very small.
Many things in life are not a matter of whether you are willing to do them or not, but whether you should do them or not. Whether to go to the hospital to solve the pain or to the theater to seek pleasure, facing this problem we can make the right choice, it should be said that eliminating pain is more important than getting pleasure. “This is also part of the family’s thinking, what disease you can choose, if you can choose the best is not to get sick, but people eat grains and cereals, who can say no disease for life.
Reluctance to treat for fear that others will know
As the saying goes, you can’t keep a fire in the paper, and only when the disease is cured can it be prompted to cause minimal adverse consequences, and the fundamental approach is to treat it thoroughly. Avoidance of medical treatment is a true reflection of this mentality, and the desire to cover up is the consequence of this concept. There are many lessons of blood and tears here. When I first joined the workforce, I once encountered such a case: a patient with postpartum depression, for various reasons, the family has not agreed to hospitalization.
Finally, it finally caused serious consequences. Because of the seriousness of her suicidal concept and the fear that her child would suffer after her death, the patient first strangled her child and then hanged herself, which was found by the family in time, the patient was fine, but the child left this world forever. And the patient was hospitalized for more than a month and the depressive symptoms disappeared. Mental recovery is normal, but his act of strangling his own child will leave an unhealed scar in his heart.
The more inpatient treatment, the worse it gets
On a random occasion, I heard someone say, “Don’t go to a psychiatric hospital if you have a mental illness, there is a person in our unit who often gets sick after coming out of the psychiatric hospital. Misconception number one is that relapse of mental illness is the result of hospitalization, which is obviously a logical error; relapse is the result of the disease and not the result of treatment. No one has ever said that if you have cancer, you should not go to an oncology hospital, because you will die after hospitalization.
This can be seen as a prejudice specific to mental illness. The second misconception is that being influenced by other psychiatric patients after hospitalization will lead to aggravation of the disease. The third misconception is that mandatory hospitalization will stimulate the aggravation of the disease. Most of the severe mental patients are not self-aware (do not admit that they have mental illness) and thus refuse to receive treatment, and family members always hope to persuade the patients to receive treatment, but countless facts prove that such persuasion is ineffective.
The above three misconceptions can be refuted with one fact: where do all mentally ill patients get their illnesses? They get sick in a social environment without the influence of other psychiatric patients; where do they get well? Most of them are cured in psychiatric hospitals. It is clear that the benefits of proper treatment to the patient far outweigh the disadvantages of other patients’ influence on the patient (or the stimulation caused by forced hospitalization). Do not make bad decisions with more serious consequences due to bad emotions.
Seeing a witch doctor for mental illness
It is said that with the development of science and technology today, most people know that witch doctor superstition cannot cure diseases and understand the reasoning, but the truth is something else. In a culturally and economically developed region like Tianjin, it is conservatively estimated that 70-80% of first-time psychiatric patients have seen a witch doctor.
Avoidance of regular specialized hospitals
The reason for the reluctance to come to a specialist hospital is not a matter of disbelief in the standard of such hospitals. Mainly, they are reluctant to admit the disease from the inside and believe in inappropriate medical advertising. For complicated reasons, medical advertisements are now more watery. I have seen advertisements for a cure for schizophrenia, which is a worldwide problem, and if this problem is solved, it should not be a problem to win the Nobel Prize in medicine, and if this is the case, you should advertise yourself.
Reluctance to accept Western medicine because of the side effects of psychotropic drugs
In medical thinking, the first consideration of efficacy, the second consideration of side effects, drug side effects are a possibility, must not be understood as all the side effects written in the instructions for anyone taking the drug. It is true that antipsychotics have more side effects, but they have reliable efficacy. So which one do you choose? Not to mention that the new generation of antipsychotics has been much less severe than traditional antipsychotics.
It’s a balance of pros and cons, and there will be sacrifices if you have to struggle, unless you don’t treat, and choking is not a wise choice, so to use or not to use the medication and which one to choose? It should be the doctor’s choice and not the family’s consideration. Some may ask, aren’t the side effects of Chinese medicine minimal, and they are. But as far as mental illness is concerned, herbal medicine is also far less effective than western medicine. On this issue I am willing to make a controlled study under fair and equitable conditions with those who hold the opposite opinion, and if we are wrong, we correct it, or even we are willing that we are wrong.
I hope that persuasion will lead to improvement.
Mental illness is a disease rather than a problem of thought, and this is especially true of severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression; can illness be persuaded to get better? If a person has a heart disease, will it help to persuade him not to get it? Only medication and physical therapy can make it better. This is also true for psychiatric patients. Persuasion is not effective. This is a different concept from psychotherapy.
The psychiatric patient in your own family is not as serious as the imagined psychiatric patient
We are often confronted with the inquiry that our children sometimes speak with special understanding. Is this mental illness? What people generally think of as mental illness or imagined mental patients are tattered clothes, hollering along the street, or dull-eyed, manic and impulsive. This is only the typical or extremely serious image of the patient. In fact, if you do not have in-depth contact with many psychiatric patients, you can hardly find any abnormalities in their appearance alone.
But to see whether a person is mentally ill is not to see whether he has normal behavior, but whether he has abnormal behavior. In other words: he is considered mentally ill as long as there are certain abnormalities, without looking at how many normal mental phenomena he still preserves.
The reasoning does not make sense casserole does not fight not leak. After reading this article in after their own thinking, I believe that we will make the right choice.