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Secretum Thank you. What you have said above is very intelligent and insightful. Also, it is a kindness to me to be understood and have my situation appreciated. Not much of that comes my way, outside of PC. I've made exactly the same analysis about how distress and functionality are perceived by the System and how one's subjunctive experience is not ever remotely as important to "the System" as ones objective behavior.
I believe I understand why that is. Behavior that is low functional or dysfunctional is more apt to cause problems for others . . . . for one's family/community . . . . for society. That's what provokes a response. In responding, the intention - really - in my opinion - is to stop the afflicted person from becoming a problem to others. Also, health care professionals have to concern themselves with liability issues. If the afflicted person credibly threatens self-harm, there is a legal mandate for the system to respond. The system will respond, even, to less than truly credible threats, sometimes, just to avert potential liability in the short and long term.
If the afflicted person demonstrates "grave self-neglect," again, there is a legal mandate to intervene.
There really is no mandate to intervene in ameliorating personal internal anguish, in the absence of incompetent functioning. The bar for what constitutes competent functioning is set fairly low. A rationale for that partly concerns respecting the rights of individuals to not function highly. One must be gravely dysfunctional to be considered "incompetent," and I suppose most of us, including myself, wouldn't have it any other way.
Still - there is a mandate to respond to severe emotional distress that gets assessed as constituting clinical disorder. What I suspect confuses the issue is that experiencing considerable emotional distress is a part of normal living for even psychologically well-integrated persons. Furthermore, people experience great emotional distress often due to choices they are at liberty to make. It would be counter-productive to undermine the feedback system that motivates change.
Deciding when a person has truly exhausted their internal coping capacity/mechanisms can require a fineness of judgement that may indeed exceed what clinicians are even capable of exercising. There is an arbitrariness to specifying where the limit lies. It is only ever truly known after the fact - when tragedy establishes that the limit of a person's tolerance got exceeded.
Even then - circumstances beg the question: Did the afflicted person truly run out of resilience - or, maybe, just . . . patience? One does have the freedom to simply give up.
Loneliness, as you point out is a "nasty enough beast" all on its own. For the depressively inclined, it hugely exacerbates that problem.
I thank all members who have posted here. I feel less alone, and that is no small thing.
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