I understand that counselling is considered more acceptable in the US? Is that right or do people still assume it's for people who are nuts?

  Acceptable?  Yes. Effective?  Meh. 

~

"I think just getting involved in that line of thinking is a bit dodgy." Spending time worrying about whether your neighbor's life choices are socially acceptable or not. Seems non-productive to me.

A person wouldn't expect to find a lot of wisdom in a Comedy film, but at 2:00 is probably one of the most profound bits of wisdom I've heard.




                    "You city-folk sure worry about a lot of sh*t, don't ya."

I've had counselling. One in five people will suffer from some form of mental illness at some time in their life (mine was severe clinical depression, a common side-effect of chronic pain).
It's no different from seeing a doctor if you have a fever. Sickness is sickness, so you get treatment from a practitioner who knows how to help you get well.

Not only acceptable but has been very big business I would say most of my life and I am 60.   Never thought in terms of the reasons you mention but can see how some people might have those views.  Guess I have always rejected it myself as just a potentially complicating factor when real life is hard enough.   And I have seen so many people involved with different kinds of counseling and therapy become so self-centered when I think we are selfish enough as it is we don't need to be any more so.  But can understand it could help people in various ways.  Though I am as suspicious of the business and money aspects of it as I would be of any other industry.  I guess I was brought up more that you just get yourself together when you are ready.  Which some people probably never do so counseling could be a help for them to do that.  As well as showing them how. 

i think some people would still assume its for people that are nuts

people could still assunne its for people that are nuts

It's not the counselling but the admission of needing it, that people fear may be seen as weakness.

One of my employers made a great virtue of its Occupational Health schemes including a lot of information about work-place stress and advice to speak to someone before it becomes a serious problem. It struck me that that is one area where sufferers may be afraid to admit struggling to cope with the stress lest it be seen as admitting inability to cope with the work. 

As it happens I had to receive clinical-psychologist's help for mental problems arising from an intense period of stress, on top of a life-long mental fragility with which I can normally live. The cause of the stress? A cascade of bullying from high-up management down to shop-floor types like me, arising, with supreme irony, from a Health & Safety pogrom! 

Adaydreambeliever -

   -  going back to your original question, your by-line is a good point, but as you say, things are changing, at least here in the UK.

Mental illness of any sort used to be seen as somehow not respectable, or as a sign or failure or weakness - terms set by the critic's own definitions and criteria, of course. 

We have a come a long way, but perhaps the general problem is how mental illnesses present themselves: either invisible, or as strange, possibly antisocial or even psychotic, behaviour. 

I was diagnosed as mentally ill in some way when very young  - my NHS Records tantalisingly omit the symptoms and possible complaint - but given only sedatives, for a reason that these days looks very strange. The child-psychologist wrote that my "excitable mother" (his words!) seemed to blame herself, and he felt deterred from recommending the therapy he believed I needed. By the time I thought to obtain the records, my parents were both dead, so I could not challenge them on something I knew had happened but they never mentioned. Since that was c.1960 many parents in their position might have felt somehow guilty at having a son "not quite right in the head."

Also of course, whatever is wrong had not yet been identified clinically, but I wonder if it is very mild autism or similar: it is a myth that one "grows out" of an autism-type condition, but if it is sufficiently mild, learns to cope with it and lead a reasonably "normal" life.


You ask of American attitudes to it.

For decades, we foreigners' view of the nation's attitude to psychological counselling was hardly helped by how many films and TV shows showed their home society. The drama needs the hyperbole, but also a credible background, so the characters were often good-looking, affluent types apparently in the grip of mental-health hypochondria, hence "needing" a tame therapist for themselves and to ensure their unfortunate off-spring were "well-adjusted" - whatever that meant. (I mentioned that phrase to a clinical psychologist counselling me, and he didn't recognise it, nor think much of it.)

If that was a true reflection, perhaps it was a blend of two aspects. Firstly, over-reaction to a past in which both countries, and no doubt others, simply locked away the mentally ill in asylums, labelled people as "mentally defective" , and the like. Further, also a time of big strides in both physical and mental health care in the Western world, so it would be understandable if people wanted to latch onto the very latest in such care.