Meme - "boys still go over to each others houses to play video games???"
"this is the type of therapy you don't pay for"
Meme - Olivia Reingold: "Me at 20 years old, trapped at a Hawaiian treatment center, heavily medicated on mood stabilizers and antidepressants. Fast forward to today: I'm now in the process of withdrawing from medications that doctors first prescribed me over 6 years ago."
Abigail Shrier on X - "Today's the Day! BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up My two-year investigation into why the generation that received the most wide-ranging mental health interventions is doing so poorly. And most importantly: How we fix it. Available NOW:"
Bari Weiss on X - "BAD THERAPY by @AbigailShrier is the #1 book on all of Amazon. But didn't make the @nytimes bestseller list. 👀 Buy her book. And listen to our conversation here:"
Rob Henderson on X - "Based on internal sales data Troubled should have debuted at #4 on the @nytimes list but wasn’t listed at all. The list is pro-wrestling for intellectuals; everyone knows it’s make-believe but still fall for it. In the mean time, it’s up to all of us to support bold authors."
Balaji on X - "Like everything else in Sulzberger’s paper, the NYT bestseller list is fake. They were forced to admit in court that it’s not a ranked list. It’s actually “editorial content” and they can exclude books they don’t like."
How Bad Therapy Hijacked Our Nation’s Schools - "American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an also alarming 14 percent. What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of parents hyper-fixated on the mental health and well-being of their children... the advent of therapy culture, the rise of “gentle parenting,” and the spread of “social-emotional learning” in schools is actually causing much of the anxiety and depression faced by today’s youth. In other words, Abigail argues that in our attempt to keep kids safe, we are failing the next generation of American adults... Most American kids today are not in therapy. But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students. Many of these interventions constitute what I call “bad therapy”: they target the healthy, inadvertently exacerbating kids’ worry, sadness, and feelings of incapacity... Our mandate: “trauma-informed education.” We pledged to treat all kids as if they had experienced some debilitating trauma. Subsequent interviews with dozens of teachers, school counselors, and parents across the country banished all doubt: therapists weren’t the only ones practicing bad therapy on kids. Often traveling under the name “social-emotional learning,” bad therapy had gone airborne... Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to inaugurate the school day with an “emotions check-in.”... I asked Leif Kennair, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of anxiety, and Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, what they thought of practice. Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated. If we want to help kids with emotional regulation, what should we communicate instead? “I’d say: worry less. Ruminate less,” Kennair told me. “Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do—less.” There’s another problem posed by emotions check-ins: they tend to induce a state orientation at school, potentially sabotaging kids’ abilities to complete the tasks in front of them. Many psychological studies back this up. An individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state. If she’s thinking about herself, she’s less likely to meet any challenge. “If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom,” Dr. Linden said... There’s a problem with in-school therapy, an ethical compromise, which arguably corrupts its very heart. In a remarkably underregulated profession, therapists still have a few ethical bright lines. And among the clearest is—or was—the prohibition on “dual relationships.”... school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers enjoy a dual relationship with every kid who comes to see them... As school counselors and psychologists came to see themselves as students’ “advocates,” they slipped into a dual relationship with their students: part therapist; part academic intermediary; part parenting coach... Over the past two years, I have been so inundated with parents’ stories of school counselors encouraging a child to try on a variant gender identity, even changing the child’s name without telling the parents, that I’ve almost wondered if there are any good school counselors. One parent I interviewed told me that her son’s high school counselor had given him the address of a local LGBTQ youth shelter where he might seek asylum and attempt to legally liberate himself from loving parents... In California, Illinois, Washington, Colorado, Florida, and Maryland, minors twelve or thirteen and up are statutorily entitled to access mental health care without parental permission. Schools are not only under no obligation to inform parents that their kids are meeting regularly with a school counselor, they may even be barred from doing so... One day, she cut to the chase: “What is something that is making you really sad right now?”... Within minutes, half of the kids were sobbing. It was time for the math lesson, but no one wanted to do it. It was just so sad, thinking that the boy’s dad hated him. What if their dads hated them, too? “It just kind of set the tone for the rest of the day,” Laura said. “Everyone just was feeling really sad and down for a really long time. It was hard for them to kind of come out of that.” A second mom at the school confirmed to me that word spread throughout the school about the AA meeting–style breakdown. Except this AA meeting featured elementary school kids who then ran to tell their friends what everyone else had shared. Thanks to social-emotional learning, scenes of emotional melee have become increasingly common in American classrooms... “With children especially, whatever you focus on is what will grow,” Laura said. “And I feel like with [social-emotional learning], they’re watering the weeds, instead of watering the flowers.” Advocates of social-emotional learning claim that nearly all kids today have suffered serious traumatic experiences that leave them unable to learn. They also insist that having an educator host a class-wide trauma swap before lunch will help such kids heal. Neither claim is well-founded. But the predictable result is precisely what Ms. Julie saw: otherwise happy kids are brought low and a child seriously struggling has his private pain publicly exposed by someone in no position to remedy it... Good therapists know that it may be counterproductive to push a kid to share his trauma at school. Good therapists are trained specifically to avoid encouraging rumination, a thought process typified by dwelling on past pain and negative emotions. Rumination is a well-established risk factor for depression. But school staff who play therapist rarely seem aware that they might be encouraging rumination as they stalk a kid at lunch, waiting to see if he’ll open up about his father’s incarceration minutes before a history test. Social-emotional learning enthusiasts happily disrupt math or English or history because, to the true believers, education is merely a vehicle for their social-emotional lessons—the corn chip that carries the guac straight to a kid’s mouth... The only feeling apparently never affirmed in social-emotional learning is mistrust of emotional conversation in place of learning. A decent number of kids actually show up hoping to learn some geometry and not burn their limited instructional time on conversations about their mental health. But from every angle, such children could only be made to feel errant and alone."
"Awareness" about "mental health" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once again, people find what they're looking for
Salty Scallawag on X - "They are told from early on in school that the planet is in grave danger, that their race is either the oppressed or oppressor, recently they were told that they were virus carrying little germ factories that would kill grandma and grandpa, they are being forced into becoming sexual before their brains can comprehend it and to keep secrets from their parents. The department of education has ruined this generation."
Melissa Chen on X - "It’s plain to see that despite society’s increasing focus on “self-care” and therapy, our mental health crisis has only gotten worse. Particularly among our youth. Therapy can be a huge enabler of learned helplessness and justifier of personal narcissism. I’m sure there’s “good therapy” out there but but if your “therapy“ somehow always terminates in nothing ever being your fault or your responsibility, the problem is you.  And just like every domain of American life, I am certain that mental health as an enterprise and as an institution has been ideologically corrupted. I can’t wait to read @AbigailShrier ’s new book. Congrats Abigail!"
Alexander Boldizar on X - "Most therapy is just monetized rumination. And even psychologists agree rumination is bad. Go exercise, have a drink with friends, walk in the sunshine, climb a mountain, fight a man your own size under an agreed rule set--life is out there, not in your navel or your own head. (Not "your," obviously.)"
Richard Hanania on X - "96% of public schools now offer mental health services. As mental health awareness increases, kids are having more mental problems than any time on record. To fix this problem, California plans to hire 10,000 more counselors so kids can get even more therapy."
Mankosmash on X - "Therapists don't want to cure you. They want you to like them & keep paying them indefinitely. Therapists have a perverse incentive to make you feel dependent on them instead of helping you by confronting you or invalidating your mental illness."
The left love picking at conflicts of interest when it helps their agenda
Olivia Reingold on X - "“Gentle parents”—please listen to this before you create another kid like me, whose life was nearly derailed by 15+ years of therapy.
By the time I was four or five, it was clear I had emotional problems. I would sometimes sit at the foot of our stairs, hyperventilating over something as simple as the discomfort of a seam in my sock. When a homeless person stopped my mother and me on the streets of New York City to ask for some change to “buy a cup of soup,” I remember going back to our hotel room to weep, disturbed by the way strangers—including us—walked past him without helping. By kindergarten, I was in therapy. By fifth grade, I was on mood stabilizers—perhaps justifiably, since by then I'd developed suicidal ideation. Therapy did not create my emotional problems. Neither did culture—this was before the rise of social media. But what therapy did was convince me that my problems were immutable, and perhaps even genetically encoded in my DNA. By the time I was 16, I was anorexic. When I had to drop out of college as a sophomore, a doctor looked me in the eyes and told me my condition was “like cancer.” “If you don’t treat this, it will get worse,” she said. Over the next five years, while I was in and out of treatment centers, various doctors reminded me that eating disorders have one of the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric illness—warnings the medical system now issues about gender dysphoria (although they say that is an immutable issue of identity, not mental health). Therapy is how I became convinced that I came from a line of eating disordered women. I reflected upon my maternal line and swore that my mother, her mother, and her mother’s mother all were riddled with eating disorders. The truth is that my grandmother was sick with anorexia, but I believe it was simply a culturally sanctioned way to express her distress. At 20 years old, I was freshly out of treatment—and 100% insufferable. I saw harms everywhere. We even had a word for them in my support groups—"trigger warnings." I had a vendetta against Starbuck’s branding of its low calorie beverages as “skinny” lattes, believing it was a slight to the anorexics of the world. I blistered over in anger when I learned that my cousin, a bar owner, was considering offering “skinny girl margaritas” to customers, convinced he was aiding and abetting eating disorders. I felt personally offended by gyms that kept scales in their locker rooms. I told anyone I dated to avoid mention of all “numbers,” that I never wanted to hear how many miles they ran, what pant size they wore, how much they weighed, or how many calories they consumed—not ever. You know what made me better? Less validation. It was the fearless parenting style of my beloved aunt Melanie that made me better. I lived with Melanie in Atlanta for five years. When I told her I was contemplating throwing up a meal, she told me she’d like to have a word with my eating disorder: "Yeah," she'd say. "Can you tell it to shut the fuck up?" She told me that yes, it was going to be hard to keep meals down, but that you bet I could do it. She helped me develop confidence. Slowly, I cultivated an identity beyond being just sick. The most surprising thing was the realization that I was not as sick I had thought. Yes, I had anxiety about things like picking up the phone, but what do you know—after a few months of practice, I no longer fretted over the phone. Melanie thought me that I could sit through discomfort—and that in fact, discomfort was my medicine. I’ll say that again: discomfort was my medicine. Your kid might be going through something right now, but I want to posit that what they actually need is less validation and these two sentences: 1) yes it is hard 2) you bet you can do it, kiddo. Thank you to all the parents with the courage to buck the system. Thank you to the non-gentle parents.
TLDR: how therapy broke me but some good old fashioned “rub some dirt in it” parenting from my beloved aunt healed me."
Olivia Reingold on X - "For anyone looking to make a change, here are some classic Melanie-isms:
After a certain age, you can’t blame your parents anymore.
On homework: done is better than perfect.
Assume you will achieve your dreams, because you will (she's a big believer of “The Secret”)."
An external locus of control is associated with negative outcomes
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Therapy is a near-total waste of time, unless it's something like serious training in CBT techniques. ~All studies show this: the bottom 20-30% of therapists make your problems measurably worse, by over-focusing on them and not offering workable solutions. TLDR: you can "talk to a smart friend" for free."
Eric S. Raymond on X - "The most important thing I've learned about human psychology in the last five years: therapy for depression in men is usually mistargeted and ineffective because therapists think men are like women, who become depressed because they don't feel loved. This is completely wrong. Men cope with feeling unloved relatively easily. What destroys them is feeling powerless. So yeah. Swing a sword. Restore a steam engine. Climb a rock. Do something - anything - that asserts your competence and control over your environment. For men, this is much better therapy than talking about feelings."
Thread by @LisaMarchiano on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " I’ve just heard another story from an acquaintance about a therapist encouraging someone to cut off contact with her parents. This is such a fraught and complex area, but I have thoughts. Here goes. First, of course, there are times when a parent has been so horribly abusive or is currently so difficult to contain that it makes sense to have no contact. However, I think these cases are unusual. Most of us have parents who tried to be “good enough.” James Hollis has said that life is traumatic, and parents can either mitigate or intensify that trauma.
None of us make it to adulthood without some wounding experiences. Our parents certainly did things that were wounding at some point. This is rarely abuse. Most of the time, it is the more ordinary, inevitable, and perfectly human ruptures in attunement. Weathering these ruptures will mold us, make us resilient, and shape who we become. But they are wounding nonetheless, and we will need to come to terms with them. We all must separate psychologically from our parents if we are to become the fullest version of ourselves possible. For most of us, this process begins during adolescence but continues throughout our twenties and even thirties. This process takes time. Part of it involves acknowledging parts of our childhood that were wounding. Evaluating these wounds – understanding where our parents let us down or hurt us and how that has affected us – is an important part of gaining self-understanding. The path to psychological growth means acknowledging the ways in which we were wounded. Every therapist has had an adult come into therapy claiming they had a perfect family and everything about their childhood was great. That is a sure sign that the person is defending against something too painful to acknowledge. If exploring our childhood through the lens of our woundedness is a necessary step toward psychological independence, it is not sufficient. We must move beyond grievance to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives. We cannot do this while remaining focused on what our parents did or didn’t do for us. To believe that everything that is wrong is our parents’ fault infantilizes us. It keeps us trapped in a black and white world where all of the “bad” is out there and we can protect ourselves if we just stay away from it. In truth, the world is complex. People are complex. We are complex and so are our parents. In the 2017 film “Lady Bird,” the titular character comes to accept and understand her mother’s fervent love for her even though her mom is flawed and held back by her own limitations.
Monstering our parents prevents growth in other ways as well. We are usually similar to our parents. If we are our parents’ biological child, we may have much in common with them. Making a parent out to be the villain makes it harder for us to accept those parts of ourselves that we have in common with that parent. For this and other reasons, we must move beyond guilt and blame if we are to grow toward wholeness.
Clients often need help from therapists identifying relational patterns in their family of origin that may have been maladaptive. Doing this work can bring up previously cut-off feelings of hurt and anger, and it's important that these feelings have plenty of room and validation. Clients may need help setting good boundaries with parents who are intrusive, demanding, or controlling. But care must be taken that therapist and client don't collude in creating a black and white narrative that paints the parent as “toxic” and irredeemable. All things being equal, being in contact with our families is better for everyone – as long as we maintain good boundaries. If your therapist encourages you to cut off contact with your parents without extremely good reason, consider that this may not be in your best interests.
"But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it... ...The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.” ~C. G. Jung"
The Kids Are Not Alright on X - "“Therapy is meant to radicalize us…I’ve been radicalized through grassroots movements…No, I will not call the police or recommend psychiatric incarceration.” -NY LMSW, ze/zir, “somatic pro-liberation & anti-oppressive,” “neurospicy queer” w/ “a splash of chronic disability”"
Alexander on X - "Hot take - the goal of therapy should not be to “radicalize” you. Political radicalization is associated with worse mental health. Having an external locus of control (e.g. holding beliefs that society is oppressing you) is also associated with poorer mental health.
Lahtinen, O. (2024). Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes. Scandinavian journal of psychology."
The left shove their shit everywhere they can
Overuse of the word "Trauma" : r/GenZ - "I'm old. 39 and counting. I work with a lot of young people right out of college though and I've noticed they all use the word "trauma" quite a bit. Especially the girls. What they call "trauma" I would call pretty standard difficulties/annoyances everyone experiences. Example: I was talking to a girl I work with and she was telling me she went on a date with a guy and everything was going good until he started vaping and that was hard for her because she had some "trauma" associated with vaping/smoking. I asked what she meant and she basically said that her mom smoked when she was younger and she hated the smell... I associate "trauma" with things like violence, death, abuse, etc. I think the way GenZ uses it sort of diminishes real traumatic experiences. Anybody else ever notice this? Am I the only one?"
"Trauma" is anything someone doesn't like
Understanding Birth Trauma: Emotional and Physical Impact of C-Sections - "For many mums, a C-section was completely unexpected. They spent the majority of their pregnancy speaking to their midwife about a vaginal birth (while C-sections are usually mentioned, they are rarely covered in great detail). Then, when it occurred, the emergency C-section came as a huge shock... Alongside the physical pain, which is traumatic in itself, C-sections can also cause intense emotional trauma."
Overuse of the word "Trauma" : r/GenZ - "And "boundaries". Another therapy term that's been misappropriated by folks who want to be controlling without seeming controlling"
"Not just misappropriated, but downright misused. People throw that word around often having no idea what it means or how it works. Boundary-setting is not a demand on someone else to change behavior. Rather, it simply defines how the boundary-setter will respond under such-and-such circumstance. A person enforces their own boundaries when they consistently do what they said they would do. People say “boundaries” when they really mean “rules.” Calling it a boundary doesn’t make it so."
Why the Children of Immigrants Tend to Be More Anxious Than Their Parents - "As a first-generation American, Portillo is more likely to develop an anxiety disorder than her parents, according to a new study that states that immigrants have lower rates of anxiety disorders than U.S.-born adults across most racial-ethnic backgrounds. These findings align with the immigrant paradox, a phenomenon experts and researchers have observed about recent immigrants to the U.S. outperforming children of immigrants on health, education, and crime-related outcomes. According to licensed therapist Stephanie Contreras, whose clinical work focuses on immigrant youth, there’s no current answer for the incongruity... Immigration is often traumatic"
Since migration is so "traumatic", it needs to be banned to protect migrants and their children
Of course, this has nothing at all to do with overdiagnosis, therapy culture and identity politics
Dr. Jen Wolkin | ADHD + Trauma Therapist on X - "You are NOT lazy. You are exhausted from the grief and trauma you’ve endured. Also, one very real response to trauma is shutting down - according to polyvagal theory this is called dorsal vagal shut-down. Its when you freeze and maybe even dissociate, have little energy, and feel stuck. Obviously we are accountable for the healing, AND also, please give yourself GRACE. -Dr. Jen"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "No. You're probably just lazy. None of you are prisoners of war. Almost none of you have PTSD or have endured "trauma" behind the common-if-awful car wreck/DV/uncle-died stuff of life. 46% of young women are not diagnosed with dubious mental illnesses today because life is 11x as hard as it was in 1952. If you have the energy to argue with me on X, get up and go to the gym."
Meme - "girls thinking their psychiatrist cares abt them is the same as men thinking the stripper actually loves them"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "In the modern USA, "therapy" is the process by which you learn that opposing males changing in your women's locker room is "dysfunctional" and having any expectations whatsoever of your wife or partner is "abuse." Successful men avoid it for a reason."
Lulu Cheng Meservey on X - "> One of New York City’s elite private schools told families on Thursday that “students who feel too emotionally distressed” the day after Election Day will be excused from classes, and that psychologists will be available during the week to provide counseling. Fragility culture."
Wesley Yang on X - "The psychic fragility inculcated by the therapeutic statism endemic to modern educational institutions is permanently wired into the limbic system of a rising generation of elites"
These are the people who go on about "white fragility"
Alexander on X - "Many approaches to therapy revolve around “trauma.” Talk about your trauma. Uncover “hidden” trauma that you didn’t know you had. Get really mad about it! Turns out all of this probably just makes people worse. It’s psychologically - and even physically - damaging. Dwelling on your trauma, negative feelings, and victimhood is one of the worst things you can do.
Seligman’s conclusion: “Venting your anger is not good for your health. It has no clear relation to cancer, it may increase - rather than decrease - your risk for coronary heart disease, and it can exacerbate depression.”"
Therapy wars: the revenge of Freud - "there’s a very well-known narrative when it comes to therapy and the relief of suffering – and it leaves Pollens and his fellow psychoanalysts decisively on the wrong side of history. For a start, Freud (this story goes) has been debunked. Young boys don’t lust after their mothers, or fear their fathers will castrate them; adolescent girls don’t envy their brothers’ penises. No brain scan has ever located the ego, super-ego or id. The practice of charging clients steep fees to ponder their childhoods for years – while characterising any objections to this process as “resistance”, demanding further psychoanalysis – looks to many like a scam. “Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say” than Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Todd Dufresne declared a few years back, summing up the consensus and echoing the Nobel prize-winning scientist Peter Medawar, who in 1975 called psychoanalysis “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century”. It was, Medawar went on, “a terminal product as well – something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.” A jumble of therapies emerged in Freud’s wake, as therapists struggled to put their endeavours on a sounder empirical footing. But from all these approaches – including humanistic therapy, interpersonal therapy, transpersonal therapy, transactional analysis and so on – it’s generally agreed that one emerged triumphant. Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, is a down-to-earth technique focused not on the past but the present; not on mysterious inner drives, but on adjusting the unhelpful thought patterns that cause negative emotions. In contrast to the meandering conversations of psychoanalysis, a typical CBT exercise might involve filling out a flowchart to identify the self-critical “automatic thoughts” that occur whenever you face a setback, like being criticised at work, or rejected after a date. CBT has always had its critics, primarily on the left, because its cheapness – and its focus on getting people quickly back to productive work – makes it suspiciously attractive to cost-cutting politicians. But even those opposed to it on ideological grounds have rarely questioned that CBT does the job. Since it first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, so many studies have stacked up in its favour that, these days, the clinical jargon “empirically supported therapies” is usually just a synonym for CBT: it’s the one that’s based on facts... experiment after experiment seemed to confirm the superiority of CBT – which helps explain the shocked response to a study, published last May, that seemed to show CBT getting less and less effective, as a treatment for depression, over time... That puzzle was still being digested when researchers at London’s Tavistock clinic published results in October from the first rigorous NHS study of long-term psychoanalysis as a treatment for chronic depression. For the most severely depressed, it concluded, 18 months of analysis worked far better – and with much longer-lasting effects – than “treatment as usual” on the NHS, which included some CBT. Two years after the various treatments ended, 44% of analysis patients no longer met the criteria for major depression, compared to one-tenth of the others. Around the same time, the Swedish press reported a finding from government auditors there: that a multimillion pound scheme to reorient mental healthcare towards CBT had proved completely ineffective in meeting its goals... “Freud was full of horseshit!” the therapist Albert Ellis, arguably the progenitor of CBT, liked to say. It’s hard to deny he had a point. One big part of the problem for psychoanalysis has been the evidence that its founder was something of a charlatan, prone to distorting his findings, or worse. (In one especially eye-popping case, which only came to light in the 1990s, Freud told a patient, the American psychiatrist Horace Frink, that his misery stemmed from an inability to recognise that he was homosexual – and hinted that the solution lay in making a large financial contribution to Freud’s work.) But for those challenging psychoanalysis with alternative approaches to therapy, even more troublesome was the sense that even the most sincere psychoanalyst is always engaged in a guessing-game, always prone to finding “proof” of his or her hunches, whether it’s there or not. The basic premise of psychoanalysis, after all, is that our lives are ruled by unconscious forces, which speak to us only indirectly: through symbols in dreams, “accidental” slips of the tongue, or through what infuriates us about others, which is a clue to what we can’t face in ourselves. But all this makes the whole thing unfalsifiable. Protest to your shrink that, no, you don’t really hate your father, and that just shows how desperate you must be to avoid admitting to yourself that you do... scholars have begun to ask pointed questions about the studies that first fuelled CBT’s ascendancy. In a provocative 2004 paper, the Atlanta-based psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues showed how researchers – motivated by the desire for an experiment with clearly interpretable results – had often excluded up to two-thirds of potential participants, typically because they had multiple psychological problems. The practice is understandable: when a patient has more than one problem, it’s harder to untangle the lines of cause and effect. But it may mean that the people who do get studied are extremely atypical... Many neuroscience experiments have indicated that the brain processes information much faster than conscious awareness can keep track of it, so that countless mental operations run, in the neuroscientist David Eagleman’s phrase, “under the hood” – unseen by the conscious mind in the driving-seat... This doesn’t mesh well with a basic assumption of CBT – that, with training, we can learn to catch most of our unhelpful mental responses in the act. Rather, it seems to confirm the psychoanalytic intuition that the unconscious is huge, and largely in control... Perhaps the only undeniable truth to emerge from disputes among therapists is that we still don’t have much of a clue how minds work... This may be why many scholars have been drawn to what has become known as the “dodo-bird verdict”: the idea, supported by some studies, that the specific kind of therapy makes little difference... What seems to matter much more is the presence of a compassionate, dedicated therapist, and a patient committed to change"
This is revealing - the left doesn't want cost-effective treatments that work but expensive ones that presumably don't work
Therapy Isn't Fixing America's Mental Health Crisis - "The U.S. has reached peak therapy. Counseling has become fodder for hit books, podcasts, and movies. Professional athletes, celebrities, and politicians routinely go public with their mental health struggles. And everyone is talking—correctly or not—in the language of therapy, peppering conversations with references to gaslighting, toxic people, and boundaries. All this mainstream awareness is reflected in the data too: by the latest federal estimates, about one in eight U.S. adults now takes an antidepressant and one in five has recently received some kind of mental-health care, an increase of almost 15 million people in treatment since 2002. Even in the recent past—from 2019 to 2022—use of mental-health services jumped by almost 40% among millions of U.S. adults with commercial insurance, according to a recent study in JAMA Health Forum. But something isn’t adding up. Even as more people flock to therapy, U.S. mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics. Suicide rates have risen by about 30% since 2000. Almost a third of U.S. adults now report symptoms of either depression or anxiety, roughly three times as many as in 2019, and about one in 25 adults has a serious mental illness like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. As of late 2022, just 31% of U.S. adults considered their mental health “excellent,” down from 43% two decades earlier. Trends are going in the wrong direction, even as more people seek care. “That’s not true for cancer [survival], it’s not true for heart disease [survival], it’s not true for diabetes [diagnosis], or almost any other area of medicine,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, the psychiatrist who ran the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 to 2015 and author of Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health. “How do you explain that disconnect?”... Some experts, however, believe the issue goes deeper than inadequate access, down to the very foundations of modern psychiatry. As they see it, the issue isn’t only that demand is outpacing supply; it’s that the supply was never very good to begin with, leaning on therapies and medications that only skim the surface of a vast ocean of need. In most medical specialties, doctors use objective data to make their diagnoses and treatment plans. If your blood pressure is high, you’ll get a hypertension drug; if cancerous cells turn up in your biopsy, you might start chemotherapy. Psychiatry doesn’t have such cut-and-dry metrics, though not for lack of trying... research suggests both misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis are common in psychiatry. One 2019 study even concluded that the criteria underlying psychiatric diagnoses are “scientifically meaningless” due to their inconsistent metrics, overlapping symptoms, and limited scope... In a 2019 review article, researchers re-analyzed data used to assess the efficacy of supposedly research-backed mental-health treatments. Some methods—like exposure therapy, through which people with phobias are systematically exposed to their triggers until they’re desensitized to them—came out looking good. But a full half of the therapies did not have credible evidence to back them... Even styles of therapy with solid evidence behind them can vary in efficacy depending on the clinician at the reins. One of the best predictors of success in therapy, research has shown, is the relationship between patient and provider... The APA says about 75% of people who try psychotherapy see some benefit from it—but not everyone does, and a small portion may even experience negative effects, studies suggest. Those who improve may need 20 sessions before they have a breakthrough. Given the significant investment of time, money, and energy that may be required for therapy to succeed, it’s perhaps unsurprising that medication, which is by contrast a quicker fix, is so popular... In the early 2000s, the NIMH ran a large, multi-stage trial meant to compare different antidepressants head-to-head, in hopes of determining whether some worked better than others across the board or in specific groups of patients. Instead, Insel says, “what we came out with was the evidence that, actually, none of them are very good"... “You can put them on medicines and they’ll have some improvement,” in some cases more than others, Higgins says. “But guess what? They’re still anxious and depressed.”... Seemingly non-medical solutions—like improving access to affordable housing, education, and job training; building out community spaces and peer support programs; and increasing the availability of fresh food and green space—can have profound effects on well-being, as can simple tools like mindfulness and movement... Research suggests fewer than 20% of mental-health clinicians measure changes in symptoms over time."
Alternatively, "awareness" is a self-fulfilling prophecy, bad therapy can worsen the problem and victim culture means people want to be labelled as hurt
How therapy has turned generation of Americans into 'victims' and may be CAUSING depression epidemic, according to top experts - "experts are starting to wonder if the widespread use of therapy may be having the opposite effect and actually fueling America's depression crisis. They argue the treatment, however well-intentioned, can instill a 'victim' mentality where people become hyper-focused on their feelings and less engaged with the world around them, making them more depressed... Therapy speak has become so common it has permeated mainstream culture in the US. Clinical words used during counseling like 'gaslighting', 'trauma' and 'microaggressions' have become household terms. Professor Robert Dingwall, a social scientist and adviser to the UK government, told DailyMail.com that looking on at the situation in America, there is a concern among sociologists that people are being referred to therapy at the slightest sign of hardship in their life. 'There is a tendency to medicalize everyday problems in pursuit of commercial interests,' he said, whether it be rejection from a partner or a failed job interview. 'This is something that people have been saying for 50 or 60 years, a concern that's been expressed by both psychiatrists and sociologists.' This fosters a victim mentality, said Shawn Smith, a clinical psychologist based in Colorado. Mr Smith told DailyMail.com therapy may be harming America's youth by 'encouraging kids to spend, frankly, too much time staring at their own belly button, and not being involved in the world and developing meaningful relationships and activities.' 'To whatever extent, therapy contributes to that. It's a problem,' he said. More US adults have received mental health diagnoses than adults in any other high-income countries, according to the Commonwealth Fund, leading people to wonder if Americans are that much sicker or just being over diagnosed. Comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher recently hit out at the rise in Americans with mental illnesses and said: 'PTSD is for people who fought in Iraq, not for people who want to bring their dog on a plane.' 'The way we know people are depressed is, there's this turning inward... and usually, you will see a relentless scrutiny of the self, of one thoughts, and one's feelings and one's presentation,' said Dr Smith. Over-therapizing can contribute to this, he said, 'if we have kids, just pointlessly scrutinizing themselves, then we are setting them up to turn inward and collapse within, collapse in on themselves and become depressed. ' Professor Dingwall said that whether or not therapy does more harm than good is a long-standing discussion in medical sociology. Not only has the number of people in the US getting therapy risen, but the amount of time spent in therapy has also increased. In 2022, 13 percent of Americans visited a mental health professional five or more times within the previous 12 months, compared to six percent in 2004. In the UK in 2014, just three percent of the adults were receiving psychological therapy, according to the Mental Health Foundation. Abigail Shrier, author of Bad Therapy, a book about mental health myths and the medicalization of American kids, said on a podcast that she feels therapy is counterproductive. 'Whenever there's greater treatment in a population, greater accessibility for anything from breast cancer to maternal sepsis with more antibiotics, you want to see the point prevalence rates going down. 'We want to see the incidence of depression or anxiety in teenagers going down, because we know these kids are getting flooded with treatment. Instead it's skyrocketing... so we know at the very least it doesn't seem to be helping.' In 2021, a group of researchers termed this the 'treatment prevalence paradox.'... A record one in three adults in America have had clinical depression at some point in their lives, a Gallup poll in 2023 has found... nearly one in five (18 percent) of US adults are currently depressed, another record high. Professor Dingwall said: 'It's hard to disentangle the extent to which we are seeing a crisis in mental health among young people, or an expansion of definitions of mental health problems, which is generating more business for pharmaceutical companies and therapists. That's the debate that needs to be had more widely.' Dr Smith said that the expansion of definitions of mental health problems may also be a lowering of the bar for some mental illnesses. He said: 'It certainly can become a bad thing when it interferes with somebody who's otherwise doing just fine in life, and then suddenly they start to think of themselves as disordered. 'And then they start to treat themselves as if they're disordered and then they're not doing as well if they were before.' This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy for teenagers, he added... As therapy has become more socially acceptable, Professor Dingwall said, people without mental illnesses may be seeking it out... Dr Paul Minot, who has been a psychiatrist for almost four decades, told TIME he feels his industry is too quick to gloss over the 'ambiguity' of mental health, cementing diagnoses as certain when there is actually a gray area. There is also the risk that people become dependent on their therapist... 'If the experience of therapy becomes overly comforting, a sort of addiction to it and the therapist is certainly possible and we then have what Freud called, an interminable therapy. That is, one that cannot be properly brought to a mutually satisfactory conclusion,' said Australian psychotherapist David White. Depending on the type of therapy, some people may come out of it feeling worse off. 'There's also a debate within the therapeutic community themselves,' Professor Dingwall said. 'There's a group known as brief therapists who are very critical of their colleagues, for exaggerating problems, for perhaps trapping people in therapy for unnecessarily long periods, and turning over their lives in a way that increase rather than diminish distress.' By contrast, brief therapists focus on short-term practical interventions, which are designed to move people on as quickly as possible. 'The brief therapists argue that they focus on solutions, rather than necessarily expecting to go sort of deeply into people's troubles.' Dr Max Pemberton, British psychiatrist and DailyMail.com columnist, said the over diagnosis of mental illness 'limits' young people and that therapy can mean 'they never really move on, [are] stuck in a land of perpetual victimhood, chained to a grief or trauma or difficulty, dragging it around like a weight around their ankle.' He said that while the younger generation have embraced the idea we must constantly examine our feelings, they are not better off for it, and instead people have become 'a bit more self-obsessed and a bit more narcissistic.' 'So many seem to wear their problems like a badge of pride, allowing it to define them,' Mr Pemberton added. Any intervention with the potential to help also has the potential to harm patients, Shrier told UnHerd... She listed known harms of psychotherapy as things like making anxiety worse, making depression worse, feeling of inefficacy like I can't do [things] for myself, a feeling of demoralization as in I'm limited by this diagnosis, and alienation from family members. Shrier said there are two groups of people: one with severe mental illnesses who are undertreated and underserved in America, and one known as the 'worried well.'"
