Strong Soviet women: how did our mothers do without psychologists
'06.03.2021'
Source: lady.mail.ru
Nowadays, many people go to psychologists. In any case, women. Columnist Mail.ru Yulia Verklova is trying to understand how people used to live without it.
In search engines, there are about the same number of requests for psychotherapy as for colposcopy. That is, on average, citizens go to psychologists with the same regularity as to gynecologists (to dentists, judging by the same requests, 10 times less often).
Approximately half of my friends (oh well, I myself, too) are treated for depression. The other half goes to therapy for "prevention." Although, it would seem, we have far less objective reasons for grieving than our mothers, who lived in the era of the Brezhnev deficit, and grandmothers, who found the war and the Stalinist repressions.
Time feats
Hardly anyone will tell about mothers and grandmothers better and more understandably than Petranovskaya in Traumas of Generations. They lived by turning off their senses. Depression was their background permanent state. And the main task is not even to survive, but to ensure the survival of the next generations. And now the future has come, future generations were born and raised ...
I know I'm going to run into angry comments, but even when faced with a problem personally, I continue to believe that depression is a disease of social well-being. As an individual, you must first earn yourself the right to longing, so socially.
Who could afford depression, say, in the 1960s-1980s in the USSR, when weakness and apathy were socially condemned, and parasitism was a criminal offense? Nobody except the dissident poets.
Who is the main clientele of psychologists and psychotherapists in our time? People are wealthy, educated, surrounded by empathic friends and have the financial reserve to indulge in sadness and not work for a while. Those who are forced to plow 12 hours a day just not to die of hunger do not know that they have depression - they live like this, this is their background state (like in the military generation).
In the USSR, psychiatry was punitive, so they chose not to get involved with it. “Pull yourself together, a rag” is the most odious meme of the last five years ... But only the last five years. For moms and dads, for grandparents, and for ourselves even at the beginning of the century it was quite a motivator. People knew how to control themselves without pills and psychotherapy: they simply had no other choice. If you do not pretend that you are doing well, then everything will become really bad.
Glorified in Soviet literature and history, "everyday feat" is a socially approved method of suicide. Step under the tank from the trench, rush into the burning house behind the kitten, fight for a duel, get involved in a street fight or just go into the mountains without insurance and communication - it was beautiful and cool. Death was romanticized in our culture - it was such a way to treat depression and legalize suicide. If you survived, you will be happy with this, if you die, you will be a hero.
This, in general, is not a Soviet history, universal. According to legend, when all three hundred Spartans died in the battle of Thermopylae, the king Xerxes who defeated them wandered around the defeated camp and found a pot of uneaten stew. After tasting the Spartan food, the Persian ruler said: "Now I understand why the Spartans are not afraid of death."
When life as a whole is enjoyable, depression re-qualifies from the norm to pathology. Because the new generation is much more likely to run to psychologists than all previous, combined. And because the rich are treated more often than the poor.
The problem of choice
In the USSR, depression was suppressed en masse with alcohol. It was our Soviet antidepressant. And, naturally, our main factor in mortality. The ability to drink a lot and for no reason was not condemned until Gorbachev came. And then, as all this perestroika and sobriety began - the norm of life, so depression began to manifest itself in every fifth person: there was nothing to suppress it. Around that time, the profession of a psychologist began to revive in the vastness of the disintegrating Motherland. But it took more than 30 years for the people as a whole to consider psychotherapy a good preventive measure. And the point here is, of course, not only in vodka. It's about freedom of choice, paradoxically.
Totalitarianism, for all its flaws, gives people a valuable (for health) advantage: frees them from having to choose, be tormented by doubts and reflect. Relax: everything is decided for you. "The doctor said to the morgue, that is, to the morgue."
It seems to me that even today's calls for a ban on abortions or for vaccination without the consent of are dictated by the desire to avoid self-selection. Leave a child or get rid of him? What is worse: a disease or a post-vaccination complication? Get married or can you? It is very difficult to make a decision independently. It is so difficult that the roof goes and you want to see a psychologist - let him hold back, let him help him to understand his own feelings and desires.
Under totalitarianism, everything “can / must / cannot” is predetermined - therefore, reflection, in principle, does not make sense. This means psychotherapy too. Why do you need to know what you really want if the list of acceptable desires and requests is approved from above?
Other speeds
At all times, all normal people loved themselves. All psychologists and philosophers have written about this - from St. Matthew to Dale Carnegie. Actually, one of the main functions of a psychotherapist is to allow a person to talk about himself.
In previous generations, trains were used for this purpose: from Moscow to Leningrad, the train took 9-10 hours - just enough to tell about yourself and listen to three fellow travelers. And then you disperse - and you never see each other again (that is, confidentiality is guaranteed).
And now the high-speed Sapsan and the ubiquitous social networks are neither time nor privacy. Easier and cheaper to go to a psychologist. Paid - and for an hour you can dig out loud in your own soul.
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