I'm deeply depressed and contemplating suicide
No matter where you are you can visit http://www.befrienders.org/
I'm deeply depressed and contemplating suicide
No matter where you are you can visit http://www.befrienders.org/
reddit.com/r/suicidewatch
I think a lot of people who read HN are in the same pseudo-category. They're smarter than the people they'd talk to. They don't need someone to listen because they can talk/write to themselves--some people find that scary to do, and talking with others is very helpful! And for volunteer things it's incredibly likely a person on HN knows more about psychology than the volunteer and can help themselves more-so by learning about why they feel the way they feel instead of repeating stuff they already say to themselves to a passive listener who may just repeat it back. I think a lot of therapy is about helping people to introspect, but the tech-crowd members tend to do that on their own. I'd rather talk to an actual friend who physically cares (as opposed to abstractly cares like a volunteer or someone you pay) anyway.
If you can talk to the right person, then sure, it's going to help more than talking to yourself. The right people are few and far between even among paid therapists, some of which are paid commissions on how many drug prescriptions they give, and a random person is incredibly unlikely to be the right person. Where smartness comes in handy is that a smart person can do the relevant research for their particular case.
My own opinion is that a lot of the "best practices" and so on are aimed mainly at extroverts, and similarly educational practices are aimed at whatever majority group of student-types you can describe there. (Techniques hackers would love in school don't seem to work well on the general population.)
Also, therapists cannot prescribe drugs. No one with the ability to write a prescription calls themselves a therapist. And I seriously doubt that anyone who can prescribe drugs gets paid a commission for doing so. That would almost certainly be considered a massive ethics violation.
If you don't believe the medical industry suffers from the same problems as the political industry, with "sales reps" taking on the roles of "lobbyists", you should do some googling. Here's a nice database: http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2010/september/settlement-in...
I don't believe that kickbacks are common (I'll change my stance if evidence shows that they are wide-spread), even for on-label uses. I'm pretty sure they're still considered a serious ethics violation and probably illegal.
A slightly different twist: a friend of mine is a pharmacist and he was decrying the end of free lunches provided by pharma companies after he finished first year (a few years ago). The influence of drug companies may exert is a recognized problem, even where it doesn't take the cash for prescription model (that I agree with you is probably illegal but I haven't looked into it). I do think it's likely though that there are creative ways out there that drug companies have come up with to encourage prescriptions.