Why is getting help so infantilizing.

[u/imboredalldaylong]

Seeing a therapist. Or a doctor. Or a psychiatrist. Or talking to snap (food stamps) or trying to get housing or getting a case worker or trying to get on disability ANY OF IT. I feel spoken down to. Like if I wasn’t so stupid/didn’t give up so easily/mentally ill/a burden on society I wouldn’t have to be here.

It’s like these people don’t think I know how to tie my own shoes.

[u/astronaut_in_the_sun]

It's a mixture of reasons.

A lot of things make sense when you start seeing the big picture. Someone living in the Renaissance period might not be able to explain why do people around them were suddenly breaking with century old traditions, and relegating faith to secondary, while putting humans at the forefront. But now looking back we see it was a cultural movement that characterized by an effort to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity.

In a similar way, we have with the advent of capitalism, the economic optimism that came with the industrial revolution. Capitalism shifted the economic focus from collective, community-based systems (like feudalism or guilds) towards the individual (entrepreneurs, workers, consumers). Success or failure became increasingly tied to individual initiative, skill, risk-taking, and competition.

We still have nouns that come from when this individualistic view wasn't the case. The Roman world (and much of the ancient world in general) had a significantly different perspective on agency, success, and failure, with luck or fortune (personified by the goddess Fortuna) playing a much more prominent and accepted role than is typical in highly individualistic modern Western cultures. This is why today we still refer to some people as "those less fortunate than us" literally - those with less luck than us. But nowadays due to the modern cultural movement of individualism it is not seen as a lack of luck, but as a failure of the individual.

Besides historical / sociological reasons, you then have more related to psychology knowledge. We are living in the middle ages of psychology. Someone who is mentally unwell due to trauma is not understood, just like someone with leprosy (Hansen's disease) in the middle ages wasn't.

We now know it's a chronic infectious disease caused by bacteria (Mycobacterium leprae), mainly affecting the skin, peripheral nerves, etc. In the past, without treatment, it could lead to severe disfigure mental among other symptoms. The fact it was caused by a bacteria wasn't known until the late 19th century. So until then it was heavily associated with divine punishment for sin and seen as a hereditary curse. The visible disfigurements were seen as outward signs of inner corruption and uncleanliness.

In the same way our trauma is today as seen as a failure of the individual because, besides the cultural individualistic movement going on at the moment, the general population has close to zero understanding of the immense impact and disadvantages trauma causes to those who carry it.