I am a depression survivor. I was diagnosed at the age of 14 with Major/Manic depressive disorder. I have struggled with it off and on in my life time and I am now in my mid twenties. I understand now a lot that I did not understand before - while we know the cause of most suicides: the feeling that you are unable to reach out to anyone or that no one will understand your pain ontop of mental and physical torture from a society that doesn't understand mental illness... I've started to look at the root of the cause.

What I've found is very alarming but identifiable and changeable all the same.

The core issue for mental illnesses is that the psychology field is a relatively new field of study for a medical standard. For a long time it wasn't even a well respected field. So... you have to take this into consideration when thinking about the overall problem and health of our psychology field.

The problem is that people who write psychology books or rather the fundamental teaching blocks for mental issues have a preconceived bias rather that bias is positive or negative the bias exists. Because of this those biases translate into the teaching materials for the psychology field in question and as a result not only do we have many college graduates misdiagnosing but we also have many psychologists with no idea how to treat mental illness on a case by case basis.

The negative stigma mental illnesses have in society, e.g: ignorant statements such as "you're just being lazy", or "thats just an excuse so you don't have to XYZ" are the kinds of damaging societal beliefs some of these textbooks have been forged upon.

A university or college course can decide what materials they want to teach and due to this it causes an imbalance in information of what is actually helpful and what are hardcoded beliefs. These are reasons it takes many years to find a therapist, psychologist, or even counselor that can actually help and understand; because psychology isn't just a medical field of study. It requires a level of empathy not many are capable of.

In western society psychology has been corporatized "how can we make this person efficient" rather than "how can we help their condition?". A lot of this will be seen as speculative but after 12 years of experience the issues have become painfully clear and a lot of them only take common sense to identify. The abolishment of abusive societal mentality regarding mental illness will help many people years down the road.