> People really should turn to medical professionals and not internet strangers for help.
For your own safety, you are to only discuss your health with NHS certified healthcare providers and no one else. Doing so with others can lead to unprovoked, unsanctioned and dangerous anecdotes, advice and memes. Worse, you might find community and make friends with people who have similar life experiences, which can distract from your state sanctioned treatment plan. This extends to your friends and spouse, they might mean well, but they are not medical professionals.
Your health is your private matter, let's keep it that way!
Your sarcasm sounds like we'd be living in some extreme 1984-like dystopia, while the reality is: there is more bullshit one can read online than a bullshit one can get from a poor doctor/therapist.
From my experience, the best one can do is to get a good and affordable therapist by a word of mouth.. and sometimes one can get lucky as such person is doing also service for a state, for free. Main point is to actively start searching
Main point with depressed people is, they often do lack initiative and enthusiasm to go find that unicorn therapists. When you are struggeling already in general and then you have to struggle even more to maybe find help (and then you don't know whether you can afford it) .. no wonder people turn to online help and LLM'S.
So yes, you are right in that activly start searching is the better way. But that insight is often lost on the target audience.
Well in my European country therapists hourly rates are very flat and practically the same as hourly rates for physiotherapists, massage practitioners and basic doctors, plus an LLM can really quickly tell that, so it is much faster to get to know if one can afford it than to look for a general solution of the whole problem.
For your own safety, you are to only discuss your health with NHS certified healthcare providers and no one else. Doing so with others can lead to unprovoked, unsanctioned and dangerous anecdotes, advice and memes. Worse, you might find community and make friends with people who have similar life experiences, which can distract from your state sanctioned treatment plan. This extends to your friends and spouse, they might mean well, but they are not medical professionals.
Your health is your private matter, let's keep it that way!