I'm also a firm believer in, when it's feasible, we should be advocating for people using SC benefits to grow and get better as to not need SC benefits going forward. I realize this may not be feasible for everybody, but I'd imagine a statistical majority are able to improve functioning as to be more independent and less reliant on disability benefits.
Agreed, and here's the deal.
Anyone who is 'helping' veterans by 'bending' the truth is fooling themselves and their patients. The thing about reality is that when you try to 'bend' it more and more is that...eventually...inevitably...it's going to 'snap' back into place at some future point in time and you are going to be even more injured by the result.
Any life built on a lie is not going to work. You would hope that people who are professional psychotherapists would understand this simple truth. Self-deception is the root of all psychopathology.
Anyone who aids and abets people lying to themselves isn't actually 'helping' them.
You may not know what 'the truth' actually is (e.g., it can be really difficult to impossible to know when someone is lying to you regarding their symptom presentation) but...you don't have to. All you have to do is NOT LIE yourself when interacting with patients. You know when
you are lying--that is--you know when you are saying something that you don't actually believe to be true. Just stop doing
that.
Medicine has a Hippocratic Oath regarding 'doing no harm' (
primum non nocere). I think this broadly applies to psychotherapists but I think that a corollary moral responsibility is 'don't lie to your patients...ever.' That means saying 'I don't know' when you don't know. I have known PhD level psychotherapists to just blithely document in their notes, 'Mr. X is unemployable due to his PTSD.' To be clear, this isn't a
summary statement at the end of some sort of actual evaluative process. They just flat out
state it as a known fact in the middle of a several line clinical process note. There is no
way they can know this. They are dooming that person to never working productively ever again and never having any self-esteem related to being productive vs. 'just getting by' on whatever the taxpayer deems is enough for their subsistence. Good luck to that person (especially if they are still relatively young (late 20s, early 30s) living a long, healthy, and happy life. And if that veteran happens to also suffer from substance abuse issues (and these are very common), then, look out. This is pouring gallons of gasoline on that fire. They'll likely end up dead in less than a decade from it. All because a loving psychotherapist decided to 'help' them by lying to them and/or lying for them.
We are going to
have to get the 'climbing the service connection percentage ladder' issue out of the outpatient psychotherapy office or we will
always have 'access issues' and not enough 'therapists' around to do 'therapy' with the population.
