Ask Men

For the record, I'm 100% in support of seeking help via mental health professionals. My wife had an extremely traumatizing childhood and she's able to function as a happy, normal adult thanks to years of continued support through professional advice and care.

But for me personally... I've only had negative experiences with my few attempts to seek help, so I'm more interested in dealing with it on my own.

I signed up for the US military literally a month before 9/11 happened and my 20-yr career has been filled with war and conflict.

Early in my career, we were told that seeking help through the Mental Health office at our base's clinic would automatically get us kicked out of the military. The mindset was that mental health issues meant you were unstable and a liability to the effectiveness of the mission, so your commander would recommend you be separated from the service. And commanders were automatically notified when their members sought mental health assistance. So a lot of military members just never sought help, and we had a lot of people who suffered alone, myself included.

Then around 2006 or so, after a military guy on our base had a mental break, shot his wife, and took his child hostage in our base housing, we were told that going to mental health would no longer be a career-ender. They realized that we needed to seek help before it got out of hand, so they told commanders to stop automatically recommending separation every time someone made an appointment with Mental Health.

Of course, the mindset was still deeply embedded in commanders, so despite being told it was safe to make appointments, commanders continued to separate military members for a while afterwards. A ton of people got kicked out suddenly around that time, and people stopped going to Mental Health again.

About a decade later, and after many promises that Mental Health was reforming, my wife decided she needed to see Mental Health. I warned her that it might affect her military career, but she went anyway. To my surprise, it had no effect on her career! She kept her security clearance and she wasn't reassigned or kicked out. Because she sought help for herself and proved she wasn't a danger to herself or others, they let her go back to work with no consequences. Her commander wasn't even notified; they kept no records of the details of her appointments, except that she attended an appointment.

A few years later, I was about to retire, so I figured maybe I should go talk to someone too. At worst, it would be on my record that I sought out Mental Health, which would only help my VA medical claims after I retired.

But it was shortly after the pandemic and they weren't letting just anyone go to Mental Health due to social distancing and manning issues. I had to make an appointment with Behavioral Health first. They assessed my daily habits (sleep, diet, exercise, etc.) and recommended I make healthy changes. They claimed that just fixing my daily habits could resolve most mental health issues and prevent Mental Health from needing to be involved, so they could focus on more urgent cases. They made me log my daily habits for a month, so they could determine trends in my behavior.

The problem was, I was already doing everything right. I ate healthy, I had a normal sleep schedule (minus insomnia brought on by PTSD, which was why I wanted to see Mental Health in the first place), and obviously, my exercise routine was excellent. I couldn't continue to serve if my fitness level dropped.

They didn't believe that I was doing everything right. They accused me of lying on my daily log, and I spent a few more months logging my daily habits to prove there's no suspicious activity in my logs. In the end, I retired before I got them to recommend me to Mental Health.

When I went to the VA after retiring, they collected all the medical records that the military had on me, but insisted on doing their own testing, because they're technically a civilian organization separate from the military. So I had to go through Behavioral Health all over again.

They wouldn't recommend me to Mental Health either, claiming that I'm already doing everything right in my daily schedule. They couldn't understand why I wanted to speak with Mental Health when my daily routine was healthy and normal. After half a year of fighting that, I finally gave up. I cancelled a follow-up appointment and never went back.

Now I just deal with my own issues by myself. I have a good support network and I'm able to function just fine. It's easier now, considering I'm completely retired. I don't have to adhere to a schedule or report to a job every day. I can plan my days as they come and I don't need to commit to anything. If I have a bad day, I can just stay in bed all day and try again the next day.

Honestly, venting on threads like this on Lemmy (and formerly, Reddit) is probably the best "therapy" I've had over the years. Sometimes, just writing down my struggles helps me to deal with them.

Of course, this is my public account that all my friends/family know about, and I don't have a private one. So I can't be too specific on some details of my struggles. But it's still therapeutic being able to share that I'm struggling in an open forum.

Ironically, I don't like mental health professionals because it's so impersonal; they're strangers with no emotional investment in me, so why would I open up with my deepest and most painful secrets to them? But when everyone is anonymous here on Lemmy, I feel comfortable venting about things. I dunno why this feels different, but I prefer it. /Shrugs