Comment by alexpatin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexpatin | Hacker News Reader

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This exactly. One needs to establish trust with these people, as they have almost always dealt with some form of trauma one way or another - either physically, emotionally, psychologically, etc.

When this stuff is made into a process, it becomes robotic and the empathetic, human element of it is taken away from it.

These people need someone to listen and understand, not necessarily someone to shove anti-psychotics and whatever else caretakers are told to do.

I'm not saying drugs don't help, but it's best when trust is established, and one can help the patient see why the drug is necessary at the time.

That has always been my problem when seeking help for my psychological issues. I'll see a GP or a specialist, get a prescription, they may go over the mechanism of action with me if I push them to, but otherwise I'm told to take 2 every day and report back in a month.

I'm a lab rat. Not a patient. See why these people have trouble getting help? They don't feel like patients getting treatment.

A lot of people suffer of some kind of mental illness, and it is impossible to establish any kind of trust with them. The problem is to make a process to give the adecuate diagnosys to each person and the right treatment with proper funding and competent personnal. Hard, but not impossible.

Again I'm frustrated that people are just down-voting and not adding to the discussion.

aglavine is right, for example in the case of paranoid schizophrenia. I have personally seen someone I am very close to descend into this madness. When they are not lucid it is literally impossible to establish any trust because the fundamental axioms with which they view the world are skewed. You can reason, but all the conclusions are fore-gone and the paranoid mind will only find more and more fantastical explanations to support the delusion. The delusion is the core reality.

Those of you who down-voted, explain how to establish trust in this context?

You're right, I think you're encountering a lot of black and white thinking on the other side - something like: "if any temporary progress can be made then love will always triumph"; whereas someone who's very seriously mentally ill is not predictable. Even if you take five years to establish trust, as I have in one case, it just takes one irrational conclusion on their part and that trust can be gone in an instant with no way back; that they can be fairly rational or appreciative some of the time doesn't tell you what comes next. When the brain isn't working right, love and respect can meet a wall.

> and it is impossible to establish any kind of trust with them.

Once burned, twice shy. Mentally ill people are frequently harmed by the medications that they're told they have to take. Science now knows that these medications are palliative drugs that actually worsen the long-term prognosis for the patients, but these findings haven't made it to the hospitals yet. [1] [2]

[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2...

[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/psychiatris...

I witnessed a mental health crisis team do some very good work in convincing my friend to go to the psychiatric hospital. It was unfortunate that the psychiatrists refused to address the cause of her condition [by that point it was nerve damage from neuroleptics], but at least that guy got her off the street.

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