What makes ppl become mental health proffestionals?

Whilst I am not sure what attracts mental health workers in general, I am very skeptical of the motives of people who become psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, a conviction that has an experiential component given the experience I have had on wards and with psychiatrists. The most worrying thing is that psychiatry offers a kind of legal haven to what are commonly known as "psychopaths" (a label I reject), a place they can act on their impulses free from judicial scrutiny and the moral strictures of the populace. If people's critical, reasoning and judicative faculties weren't so impaired in this regards, I think there would be greater acknowledgement of this.

Instead, people prefer to plumb to even greater depths of naivety than they would regarding other classes fertile for the growth of corruption, claiming that psychiatrists simply want to help their patients, ignoring firstly the many distancing mechanisms and barriers that seperate and estrange people emotionally and spiritually in modern societies, mechanisms which militate against the forging of empathic bonds and which serve to lay the groundwork for abuses and complicity in abuse, both being two of the threads out of which the vast historical and contemporary tapestry of the profession has been woven, at least from my perspective. It is not that psychiatrists are in general evil or sadistic (although who knows!), but human, all too human, with all the limitations that generally human flesh and specifically man in modern society is heir to.

Or put another way, all this talk we hear about "therapeutic alliance", and other such unpardonable guff and unmitigated tripe, from my perspective, is mostly a lie, as well as a classic example of the contrapuntal dissonance between words and reality. The reality as I see it is that such a bond is mostly non existent. This is explicable once one understands just how emotionally, experientially, and intellectually estranged patients often are from their psychiatrists, which facilitates abuse, just like politicians (although this is an extreme example) who wage war on innocent countries find it easy to do so because of the immense geographical distance between them and their victims, which of course implies also the kind of estrangement I have just referred to.

Yet I have wandered from the course of the discussion. Coming back to the issue of what makes people become Mental Health professionals, whilst this whole discussion is, of course, anchored firmly in the realms of pure speculation, I think another possibility is the wish to distinguish oneself in a given sphere of activity. We humans are (well, mostly at least) very ambitious creatures who are seemingly propelled towards positions and roles which bring with them the conferment of power and status, so ambition may be a determining role.

Yet instead these people prefer to romanticize their motives and paint pretty pictures of themselves as medical variants of good samaritans and franciscan monks, parading themselves in borrowed plumage, and people buy into it and label people like me paranoid (one of those words whose utterance always connotes some sort of conflict).

I am sure there are some people who embark on this path with positive ideals, yet do they survive the crucible of human conflict, do they emerge unsullied and unscathed after initiation into a class of corrupt individuals and a system of evil, after initiation rites such as being ordered to administer electricity and drugs forcibly to a visibly distressed individual, rites which contain the seeds of moral and psychological corruption, and that precipitate those who go through with them down the steep slope that leads to perdition and which takes so many beyond the moral and psychological rubicon?

In regards to psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, as you specified, I think many of them start out choosing this profession with an honest desire to help people. Psychiatry is the laughing stock of all medical professions. I think most people who are going to choose to become a doctor would choose a career path with more prestige. That is unless they have some personal experience, or desire to specifically want to help this population. That being said, I think that oftentimes what happens is that during their schooling, they are not taught recovery principles, and the original drive gets lost as all they are taught is "medication is the only way."

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/prj/36/1/35/
Through my school I have access to this full article, and had to use it for a paper I am writing. The abstract is enough to get the gist however. Basically, if medical students are taught recovery principles, they are more likely to be recovery oriented than those who are not.

they are convinced and taught that the drugs are effecctive through witnessing it in a lot of c ases, yet they coulld also be programmed according to the open dialogue program that psychosis naturally reveres and that often the subject recovers weller then well havinga dressed foundation issues and overcome past deficits in personality functioning...The machine is self fullfuilling coz they like to see that every recovery is the drugs when the majority would have recovered better without. they are clearly deluded about how this effctiveness comes about, while sorta acknowledging that patients can become zombies but with a disgruntled patinet thiese issues become symptoms of the illness.

-- Tue Jul 23, 2013 1:48 pm --

they like to imagine an improvemnet, although a lot of what they say about me is imaginary like I put pressure on them so they put pressure back by claiming I am disorganised about it or something....so they adjust medicaation and like to see improvemnet even when there is none, just wishfull thikking and faith in the mysticism of mediciations

I originally was attracted to the idea of becoming a mental health professional for a lot of reasons...the subject of how our minds work has always fascinated me and a lot of the information I picked up in getting my psychology degree has actually been very helpful to me in dealing with people in general and sorting out my own emotional conflicts and biases, although my ultimate career choice was to become a professional soldier in the US Army for 20 years. My father was a Roman Catholic JFK Democrat ex-Marine DI who was one of the first Americans to see Nagasaki after the atomic bomb and my mother was an Episcopal Nixon Republican who wanted to be a ballplayer like Madonna in "A League of Their Own" and died from a terminal illness when I was a teenager. They were both alcoholic high school dropouts who ended up divorced. My two younger sisters and me...all of us are self-supporting college grads today...were bounced around between various foster homes and relatives growing up including the home of a Presbyterian minister who ended up losing his faith and becoming a marriage counseling self-help book author. Most of my buddies in high school back in the 1960's were smoking pot and dropping acid. A seemingly normal strait shooter Eagle Scout kid in my junior high school class in New Canaan, Connecticut, went home and murdered everybody in his family one day in a psychopathic outburst of rage. Essentially, I think being better able to predict and control the behavior of other people which is what psychologists train to do was something my environment growing up made very attractive. I agree with Dr. Szasz that psychology has become a sort of secular religion with therapists as its secular clergy. Like with all other religions it has it's strengths and weaknesses and should not be allowed to become an unquestionable theocracy which is an invitation to dangerous abuses of power and corruption in any religion.