Dr. Micaela

So getting access to any mental health professional is way, way more hard, way harder.

It's worse than it should be.

What are words?

So yeah, trying to figure out like, oh, I'm going to find a therapist and maybe half the time it's not even going to be a good therapist, psychiatrist, et cetera.

That's depressing and can be very defeating in and of itself.

So maybe you don't try to access a professional.

I think if you were really, really interested in a diagnosis and can't access a highly skilled professional, I would turn to, I mean, of course, I'm going to say research literature because that's so boring of me as a psychologist, but also as an ethical psychologist.

Okay, so the way that I often talk to kids, and I don't assume that you're a kid, but because youth have less experience in like vetting sources and accessing like professional information and also the like top of the field professional people are like really shitty marketers, right?

They use all these like jargony terms and make it inaccessible just by definition of the way that they speak or use words.

So that's pretty hard.

um what i tell kids is go to the boring websites right check out the uh nimh the nhs whatever your um kind of like top tier scientific

American Psychological Association.

I live in the US, so those are the ones that I know best.

American Psychiatric Association.

There's the, well, that's a kid one.

So check out those resources.

See if you can get a general gist of things.

And then when you move into socials, look for people who are sharing things that sound similar or consistent with what the boring people are saying.

So that then you know, like, okay, these are the people who are packaging the good info

in a way that I can better make sense of it.