eli5: What do psychiatrists do? They help you with mental issues but how? Are there any strategies, guidelines?
In: Biology
There are strategies and guideline. The first thing to understand is that everyone is different… And yet everyone works the same. At the end of the day, we are a specie of advanced monkey. We have common ancestors. So while we are unique, our way of handling things are unique, our brain are unique, a lot of it is extremely similar.
For example, by default all our hands have 5 fingers. And they usually have a certain ration in terms of size compared to your torso. Well your brain (that handles emotions) is the same. We are pretty much all capable of emotions, and these emotions are similar. So a lot of things that apply to mister X also apply to miss Y.
The second thing is simply repeated studies. Most people have problems and emotions. But by studying how each of these person handled these problems and these emotions, you can, by comparing how many succeeded and how many failed. Now you have a basis to say “so, have you tried taking an extra nap? about 40% of the people with your problem that have started taking a nap and they are happier.” If it fails, take the second most likely answer and repeat until something works.
And the third thing is categorizations. Now, I know it’s controversial these days, but… We’re not THAT unique. A girl is a girl, a boy is a boy, a man of color is a man of color, etc, etc. Certain groups of people face a certain problem more often. As a result, when you fall within the boundaries of that group, it might be better to look at how people like you are coping with it. PTSD for a war veteran isn’t always handled the same way as a rape victim. Two rape victim, one man and a woman won’t go through the same thing because the perception of society of their issue is different. This is where our uniqueness becomes an issue. You are always part of a large amount of group. you are unique because of the combination of all these categories. And each of them can make it so the same issue someone else has can be coped differently.
On top of that, there are some issue that just bring you to self destruction. Ever seen the picture of a snake eating its tail? Well some issue promote themselve, consuming more and more of your sanity. In these case, breaking the loop is important but difficult. most of these loop are emotion based (sadness, anger and so on) and can be more easily broken with some drugs. This is also part of the arsenal of tools they have.
I hope this makes it a bit more understandable.
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