Reply To: What's Wrong With Therapy?

sacrilege:

1. You are correct that bipolar people in the manic stage will not go to therapy, but their behavior eventually makes normal functioning difficult to impossible and they usually are diagnosed sooner or later.

However, not every real disorder is as obviously debilitating. Just like, Ch”v lehavdil, people can have infectious tuberculosis and not realize it until it suddenly worsens and they need serious treatment, (I’m using TB because it’s less sensitive than other examples), narcissism affects every part of a person’s life and harms the people around them, but as long as they are successful (which they often are) they can’t be forced to go for help and will permanently damage others lives in order to keep up the appearance of their perfection.

As for REAL disorders: Everything is a REAL disorder, but people can have different levels of illness. Narcissism is in the category of Personality Disorders. Bipolar Disorder is not a personality disorder, it is a chemical imbalance that can be corrected with lithium for many people.

Just because something can’t be treated with meds doesn’t make it any less of a real disorder. Being a disorder doesn’t excuse the person for their actions; it means that they show a known pattern of symptoms. Narcissists are typically happy with who they are, but everyone else has problems with them! Also, schizophrenia for example is a very real disorder, but very difficult to treat – many people do not respond to medications.

I may be mistaken, but I am under the impression that by definition, personality disorders do not respond to medication.

The fundemental problem is that we are talking about two very different thing. A. There are people going to therapy for Manic Depression/ Pschytzophrenia/ Aggression… And then B. There ae people who go to therapy because they have a fear of public speaking 😉

(That may also be why people are off-put by therapy, they automatically assume A…)

(That’s a cute spelling of schizophrenia – I like it.)

I think whoever said that most people fall in the middle is right. Most people don’t have a full blown mental disorder, but need the support they haven’t gotten from parents/mechanchim/friends. This is the type of therapy that people refrain from getting due to stigma.