(Yes it is October 2024 and I've only just now had "avocado toast" for the first time, 😂)

Sooo, the cultural obsession with avocado toast is what, exactly?? I'd rather have chips and guac, I think!!

Oh, fantastic! One of my critiques of psychoanalysis (and the mental health field in general) is that there's not enough systems thinking. Sounds like this could be an excellent complement!

Yeah. That's roughly the first page I read from the flash drive. Some parts I already knew- but not the suicide attempt details :/

"Biologically fatalistic" is... yep. Exactly what I experienced as a teenager: "well her mother was a borderline so..." Like...!?

I haven't! I'll have to check it out. I've mostly landed in the psychoanalytic/dynamic camp myself, though it's also not without problems- but far better than what the DSM/medical model has to offer, anyway

Another piece of this that's particularly noxious is, when I was younger, that known trauma was erased in favor of a "biological mental illness" explanation. Now that I'm mentally well(ish)/physically unwell, that gd trauma hx is all anyone in medical establishment cares to see 🙃

And then when each of those children starts to exhibit signs of distress ("symptoms"), again, if mental illness is the only frame to work with, then one doesn't have to look too hard at the allegedly more mentally fit family (or system). One only has to point back to the mother.

...there's plenty of justification for taking her children away and no incentive to work toward reunification. After all, wouldn't the children be better off with another family? One much more mentally fit?

Here's my problem with the biopsychosocial and/or medical model of (so-called) mental illness: It doesn't take "mental illness" to imagine a scenario where a woman comes home from a weekend in jail to an empty house and then attempts suicide. But if that's your only frame then...