There are plenty of people who go to psychiatrists or to psychologists for all sorts of reasons, of which, the point of such sessions, should be to put the patient in a better place for having had these sessions. So then, for some patients, perhaps all they are really looking for, is a sounding board, or they simply want to say what they say, without being judged, or else to get something off of their chest. Then there are those others, that don’t feel right about a certain something that keeps on triggering in their mind and want to see some sort of meaningful resolution for that. Also, some seem to have “demons” of the mind that thereupon play upon their memory, that they wish to see disappear so that they will feel more normalized. In short, the reasons people visit a psychiatrist or psychologist vary, but the bottom line is that the hope is that by such a visit, the patient will ultimately be in a better place than they were before such visitations started.
It would seem that the purpose of psychiatry should be not just to understand where their patients are coming from, but rather to take what is the ostensible object of their discomfort and replace it with something which is beneficial for the patient. This would signify that for many a patient, there is something that is playing on their mind, perhaps periodically, perhaps constantly, that disturbs them, of which, they deeply desire for that disturbance to be ameliorated, once and for all. So then, for the most part, there are those patients who have specific thoughts and memories which for them, are so negative that it makes them unable to deal with the world per their preference, thereby signifying that the duty of the doctor attending to their mental discomfort or illness is to see that they do what they can to negate these negative thoughts and memories, by replacing such with something of positive worth.
No doubt, it’s no easy task to take something that appears to be ingrained in a given person’s psyche and replace such with something that will make them perceive things in a better frame of mind, but that should be the foremost duty of a psychiatrist. In other words, find the disturbance, and then correct that disturbance, by negating such or replacing such with something positive and beneficial. Indeed, as much as many a person believe that they cannot fully control their mind or their thoughts, the bottom line is that these can be controlled, by the sure knowledge that we, as individuals, have sovereignty over our own mind, our thoughts, and our memories.
It has to be noted that nothing remains the same, forever, thereby signifying that we have the agency to make the necessary changes to make our life better, of which, when we see a doctor for a mental issue, it is thereby their duty to help us in that task, in which, that doctor should thereby do their fair part to provide us with alternatives and pathways that will put us into a much better frame of mind, and therefore help to relieve the discomfort that we experience, which is the best purpose for any doctor, for they are meant to first do no harm, and then importantly to help improve the dynamic for the patient’s benefit.