It reinforces the idea for men not to bother getting help in the first place - you’re a man, they won’t take you seriously anyway, they will call you weak, don’t ask for help, just give up. That’s the inner logic of clinical depression and the comic supports it.

And it’s a really dangerous thing to imply because it could keep men further from the available support systems. It’s discouraging. I’m not questioning weather those things could have been said by someone, but it kinda seems like the author took some horrible TERF talking points and went “I guess it will be the same in mental health”.

You know what sucks as well? Taking too many painkillers against headaches actually causes headaches. Horrible ones at that. Glad to read that you’re feeling better, but that’s a real trap many people out there are stuck in.

Why doctors? Filming patients would be a nightmare in terms of privacy and data policy.

In my line of work (psychotherapy) it would be equally impossible. People are having a hard enough time as it is opening up to medical professionals, I don’t think that the additional barrier of being actively filmed would help anyone.

Doesn’t sound like a friendship to me. More like an acquaintance.

I want to know what’s up in my friends lives. I want them to tell me if they’ve got problems. I love them. I want to be there for them, and I want them to listen to me if I need it once. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Ironically, behind all this is a misconception that we’re actually constantly working on with our patients. The truth is that the clinics would function better and we could offer better therapy if, for example, we weren’t so overworked and enough staff were employed. But in order to achieve this, we would have to make decisions again and again in specific cases, which are less pleasant for patients in the short term. Specifically: saying no to our employers more often, strikes, and in the worst case resignation. Sensible in the long term, unpleasant in the short term. For our patients. And that’s the crux of it.

Unfortunately it is always easier to discover those mistakes in the thinking of others. I have met dozens of colleagues who avoid fighting for better working conditions for precisely these reasons (while advising their patients to avoid this error in particular). And clinics of course know this and take advantage of it.

So better negotiation skills are really only party of the solution (although also very important). I think in the long term we need better education and more focus on socialist ideas, specifically on how and why employee rights (and the ability to self-care) are such an integral requirement to a job well done.

That’s an interesting one. As a psychotherapist from Germany I can say we’re definitely not low paid, but it is much less than other academic professions, and especially in relation to the time it takes to get qualified (roughly 10 years) and the cost of approbation itself (varies from 30k-160k, and that’s in a country where education usually is free) it’s really not a good fit for someone who is very financially motivated. (Ironically because of the high upfront cost the job tends to attract people from well endowed backgrounds though.)

I think like in many helping professions we have a majority of very idealistic people who don’t negotiate very well. Employers get away with way too much because refusal at our side at first only ever hurts the patients, so we kinda keep up with it. Maybe something similar is happening in the professions that are in my mind actually the most underpaid for their time, and that’s nursing and care work of all sorts.

And Firmament is German. Bit of a fancy word, but I guess most people would know it anyway.