You have chosen... wisely.
Getting better with ze wimminz helps a lot, also new age stuff and general confidence building, just what you said.
It's also interesting to study the history of psychiatry and to make inter-cultural comparisons to get a better picture.
As I see it, psychological/psychiatrical "illnesses" are just an instrument of power. Western culture is all about discipline and way less about humanity. If someone steps out of line, the nuisance must be dealt with quickly, so the wheels of the system can continue running again.
Psychiatry was and is there to tame unbehaving people, to tranquilize them, so the motor of capitalism can continue working. In the beginning of psychiatry, they even openly admitted it and even advertised that their goal is the control of humans. The therapy success was when the patient/victim was quiet again.
How was that achieved? So called psychosurgery, i.e. cutting off brain part after brain part till the patient was a veggie more or less. This evolved into lobotomy/leucotomy, that method even became industrial, you could make it at home with just an icepick, wonderful, eh? Other therapies include frying the brain via high voltage current till the cortex and other brain areas are more or less toast. The patients sure became calmer, there wasn't much left to think with. Other nice methods include insulin coma for instance. It's supposed to induce such a severe trauma, leading the patient to a childlike insecurity and deep despair, that he would accept anything afterwards. Some psychiatrists promoted this method for reprogramming the patients.
It's not like any of those methods were really scientifically assessed, either. They just worked somehow, or... not. Who would want to make experimental studies with normal people with such methods anyway, eh? That would be inhumane. :mengele:
What did that lead to? Most(read:all) people were more or less fucked up after the therapy, they may have seemed healed for a few days, weeks, months even, but then their psychosis or whatever came back, often even worse, maybe therapy-induced? The people that were put in the loony bin either stayed in there, came back soon after they were healed or just came out totally fucked up after some years.
In other countries where there are no such institutions people recover on their own or with the help of their family in like a year, or so. There was some comparison study with India vs USA iirc. Guess who's better in treating their "psychically ill".
Then there was the pill revolution. Funny enough, the pills were advertised by some psychiatrists in the 50s to chemically kill the brain of the patients. An easier method even than all that costy other stuff, awesome.
Nowadays people don't like to hear that anymore and it's all about helping the poor ill people. One still doesn't know much about the affects of psychopharmacons, they just work somehow. If they kill fantasy or affect, duh, that's not that big of a problem, eh, as long as one can work. If one gets med-induced parkinson from neuroleptics, just give them more meds like Akineton to counter that, jeez, what's the matter with you critics? Sometimes people just die from the psychopharmacons, but we all have to die sooner or later, so no problem.
Psychopharmacons are such a nice thing to control people. That requires less thinking about other ways of treatment and precautions, too, sweet. Humanism is old meme.
Gosh, I could ramble on and on about this topic. I doubt anyone is reading this incoherent blathering, anyway, apart from Dogmeatlives maybe, but whatever.
