The Conventional Medical Approach to Mental Health is Skewed

I had personally struggled with poor mental health for several years, thinking that feeling awful was just “a part of who I am”. Eventually I managed to drag myself into a physician’s office, where I was quickly diagnosed to have severe depression and anxiety, which made me finally understand that my poor mental health was indeed not a part of my personality, but an actual health condition. So, an obvious question arose from that: how can I fix this condition?

With a psychiatrist at the time, we did talk about some details on what could have brought about my mental health issues, but that discussion was honestly very shallow. He didn’t mention how, for example, diet, sleep and social connections could have a major impact, let alone provide any ways of addressing them. Instead, after only seeing the psychiatrist twice, he suggested for me to start using psychiatric drugs to alleviate my condition. I quickly thought that this should not at all be the first path to take, because in my mind I clearly had a lot of things going on that could explain my poor mental health, and addressing them should obviously be the lowest hanging fruit. I stopped seeing the psychiatrist and instead chose my own path to fix my mental health by addressing the issues my psychiatrist mostly ignored. And after a lot of work on myself, I was able to relieve myself from the depression and anxiety without the need for any drugs. The groundwork for this was to face my situation head on and adopt a mindset that it’s going to take work and effort to start feeling better. And then commit to that thought. The means that helped me were dietary changes, improving sleep, giving up intoxicants, altering my perspective on life, aiming and working towards something meaningful, forming healthier social connections, and just overall mentally and habitually working to be a better version of myself.

I have come across a similar story regarding psychiatrists’ or other physicians’ approach to mental health disappointingly often, which is to have medication as a top priority in curing depression and anxiety, without truly addressing potential underlying causes. Lifestyle and life conditions are at best discussed briefly, and the actual focus is on medication, which is considered to be the thing that can cure you. This has always baffled me. In perhaps the vast majority of cases, the first obvious option should be to try non-medical interventions to see what can be done to aid one’s mental health without medications, because depression and anxiety are very often a natural consequence of completely understandable causes: an inflammatory diet, poor sleep, difficult social connections, no goal orientation, lack of responsibility and meaning, past trauma, and so on, whilst psychiatric drugs often have difficult side effects and produce dependency. Depression and anxiety are certainly not caused by a lack of medication, so why should medication be the first option for treating them?

I’m currently studying in a medical school, and considering my future as a physician, I’m honestly fortunate to have had such experiences with the medical system, as they’ve shed light on many of the flaws that the current conventional approach to health upholds. Flaws that I’ll work my hardest to fix. In medicine, it’s disappointingly common to treat the symptoms, usually with medication, rather than tackling the root of the problem.

I think it’s very important to shift the paradigm regarding mental health treatment. It should be a physician’s obligation to first see what can be done to improve the patient’s mental health through natural means by addressing the underlying causes, and only if such interventions don’t work, should medication arise as an option. As a patient, this was the approach I desperately needed from my physician yet never received.

Ville Raatikainen is a second year medical student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He is socially active and plays different sports, all the while focusing on studies he has a passion for.