Liberals and Mental Health

Someone was crowing that Jonathan Haidt's finding that the younger and more liberal you are, the more likely you are to have been diagnosed with a mental health condition was wrong, but claimed that he was unable to show proof because of the conditions of the licence (the licence just says "you may not download, republish, retransmit, reproduce or otherwise use any such content as a stand-alone file").

He was probably hoping that no one would actually look at the data and expose him (he even taunted me with "It will take some expertise to open and process an SPSS file, but surely you're clever enough to do that?"), but too bad, I did (of course, if Haidt had really been lying, it's curious why no one had exposed his academic fraud for years).

His lies were really brazen.

He claimed "This survey didn't even feature the question whether the respondent is a conservative or liberal" and that "it didn't ask the person if they ever went to a doctor to talk about their mental health (which must be a prerequisite for any statistical conclusions like the one you did)"

The first claim is categorically false, because if you download Pew's American Trends Panel Wave 64 dataset, the variable F_IDEO shows the respondent's ideology. It's true that in the Wave 64 questionnaire, they were not asked about their political ideology - but that's because this is panel data and they already have this data from previous waves.

The second claim might be true in a very narrow technical sense, but the question asked (which you can verify in the questionnaire in the PDF in the dataset download) was "Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?" But what we're seeking to measure here is not mental health awareness - whether people go to the doctor to talk about their mental health - but mental health state (whether people have mental health conditions).

But the biggest lie is about what the data show. And they indeed confirm Haidt's charts:

- The older you are, the less likely you are to have a diagnosed mental illness

This is interesting because this variable is monotonic - once you have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, you can never truthfully say no to the question: "Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?"

You would expect older people to be more likely to have been diagnosed as such in their lifetime since they have been alive longer, yet young people are more likely to answer this question in the affirmative

Of course, the cope is that older people are just in denial, or don't seek medical attention for mental health issues. But if 41% of a population (young, very liberal women) report having a mental health diagnosis, this suggests that if the concept of mental health is to have any meaning at all, there must be overdiagnosis in some form, or it makes a mockery of the concept of mental health. In other words, if everybody is insane - no one is insane.

- The more liberal you are, the more likely you are to have a diagnosed mental illness

Naturally, the cope here is similar to the above. But we see a clear dose-response effect across sexes and ages - the more liberal you are, the more likely you are to have a diagnosed mental illness (with the possible exception of going from Very Conservative to Conservative). So for this cope to work, left wingers need to throw Moderates and Liberals under the bus - not just Conservatives - and claim that they are in denial as well. Apparently only Very Liberal Women are in touch with their own mental health - and everyone else is just suffering from false consciousness.

Furthermore, we know that liberals are less happy than conservatives, and that happiness has an inverse relationship with mental health (the original poster claimed that "Jon Haidt's piece was already debunked in a research paper. And in the most obvious way" but besides never making that claim, the paper he cited also cited many articles about liberals being less happy than conservatives). So the further cope needs to be that conservatives are not just refusing to go to the doctor - they are also in denial about being happy. But of course, any "theory" that can make conservatives look bad is a good theory.

- Women are more likely to have a diagnosed mental illness than men

Across basically all age groups and ideologies, women consistently are more likely to have a diagnosed mental illness than men.

Once again, one cope is going to be similar to the above, but another is going to be about "patriarchy". Yet, the gender equality paradox reveals that increasing gender equality is actually associated with worse female mental health (relative to male).

This supports the hypothesis that grievance politics and left wing ideology drive poor mental health (rather than objective oppression).

For a robustness check, I sliced and diced the data some more.

Looking at the data by race, black non-Hispanic respondents pretty much have similar levels of diagnosed mental illness regardless of ideology. Hispanic conservatives, very conservative and moderate respondents have similar levels of diagnosed mental illness, but liberal and very liberal Hispanics have significantly worse mental health. But it's white people who are really driving the ideology effect.

So for the earlier cope about conservatives being in denial or refusing to go to the doctor to hold, left wingers need to throw black liberals under the bus now, since black very liberal respondents (sample size of 76 notwithstanding) have almost half the mental health diagnosis rate of black liberal respondents. And liberal and very liberal Hispanics also have lower rates of diagnosed mental illness than their white fellow travellers.

Of course, one could come up with further cope about racial disparities in healthcare access but this would work in the opposite direction from the oppression-as-a-cause-of-mental-health-issues claim. The layers of cope are starting to collapse on themselves.

The Problem with Our Response to Mass Shootings (Therapy)

This has interesting implications for victim culture:

The Problem with Our Response to Mass Shootings

"In 1999, two young men entered Columbine High School in Colorado, gunned down 12 students and a teacher, then took their own lives. Grief therapists arrived “long before the gun smoke wafted away,” wrote Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley. The “self-appointed priests and priestesses of this New Age of self-awareness, unctuous parasites bearing portable confessionals who swoop down wherever catastrophe strikes, chanting mantras of pop psychology . . . [attach] themselves to the stunned, bewildered survivors of affliction, demanding that they give vent to their ‘feelings.’”

Yardley’s dismissal sounds jarring today. In the aftermath of a school shooting, the therapeutic response is no longer controversial; it's so ubiquitous that it goes unquestioned...

Officials emphasized the “profound anxiety and fear” felt by whole communities, offered proactive emotional support to “those most affected,” and promoted counseling services for all. The school cancelled finals and assured students it was “normal to experience a wide range of emotions, including shock, fear, sadness, anger, numbness, or confusion. There was “no ‘right’ way to respond,” except to take care of oneself.

While offered with compassion, these services and scripts are an exercise in bureaucratized empathy. They can, and often do, undermine resilience in those whom they are meant to help, while providing cover for institutional failings.

Post-crisis mental-health support rests on the assumption that trauma is widespread and requires professional intervention—a claim often repeated by state and federal officials. But empirical evidence undermines the claimed pervasiveness of trauma and the ostensible necessity of credentialed professionals to help survivors handle it. “The idea that a dangerous or frightening event might cause lasting psychological difficulties does not appear in recorded history, literally anywhere, until relatively recently,” writes George A. Bonanno in The End of Trauma.

Bonanno directs the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He has studied depression, grief, and PTSD symptoms following various potentially traumatic events, including mass shootings. He and his colleagues consistently find that the average person’s normal, day-to-day feelings of stress and anxiety typically rise only modestly after difficult events—even the most violent and disturbing.

The most common experience, by far, is a “resilience trajectory,” which Bonanno describes as “when people in otherwise normal circumstances are exposed to an isolated and potentially highly disruptive event, but nonetheless maintain ‘a stable trajectory of healthy functioning across time.’” For those who experience prolonged distress (estimates run somewhere between 2 percent and 10 percent), the vast majority recover within a year, regardless of whether they receive treatment. Why? Because not all human beings who feel distraught need formal mental-health help.

In their book One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Resilience, Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel review the effects of therapeutic interventions in the face of grief and loss. “Evaluations show that intervention programs that recruit clients, through advertisements for example, or that visit families within hours of a loss are far more likely to have no effect or a negative effect than programs that wait for the bereaved person to initiate contact,” they write. For people who proactively seek therapy, the results aren’t much better: “A number of studies have reached the conclusion that grief therapies are relatively ineffective and even harmful to a minority.”

Opening up about one’s emotions is by no means the best coping mechanism. In fact, repression and distraction can have benefits. Sommers and Satel describe studies finding that unduly discussing or focusing on one’s mood, its causes, and its implications is associated with worse and longer symptoms. By contrast, those with a coping style reliant on distraction felt better, even if they had been depressed before the disaster.

Of course, suffering and distress exist. They are not uniformly disabling, though. Nor is mental-health treatment always ineffective. But the therapeutic narrative should not be unquestioningly accepted as morally unassailable and always applicable.

When schools adopt a mental-health emphasis, moreover, they send an implicit message to students: that they’re psychologically weak, that they should be affected by trauma, and that they need formal support when something bad happens.

That message has consequences. Students who are functioning healthily may feel guilty for not being a mess; they may worry about being perceived as cold or uncaring, encouraging them to adopt a victim mindset. Some may ruminate on their feelings because an authority figure implied that symptoms are expected—which may itself cause symptoms to manifest.

A better message is the old adage to be strong, keep calm, and carry on. Bonanno, sees clear benefit in what he calls a “flexibility mindset” centered on “three interrelated beliefs: optimism about the future, confidence in our ability to cope, and a willingness to think about a threat as a challenge.” Together, these beliefs can help get us “in the game” and get through bad situations.

We can also depend on our communities... Mutual obligation does what self-care cannot. 

But instead of encouraging students to be there for others, Brown’s explicit message was to put personal well-being above all else. In a communication from the vice president of human resources to faculty and staff, nonessential personnel were given permission to work from home after the lockdown ended, and managers were told to prioritize compassion. Students and faculty alike might have benefitted instead from coming together, rather than stewing on their emotions alone at home or obsessing over related news on their phones.

Empathy is not accountability—and can be a way to avoid it...

Brown, of course, is not alone in stressing empathy over accountability. Nearly all schools use this approach because it comes off as compassionate, is reputationally safe, and can be put into action immediately."

Clearly, there is no conflict of interest when the therapy-industrial complex tells us how important therapy and self-care are

Self-Help: Men vs Women

There is a meme about the difference between men's and women's self-help books.

">male self-help book
>ctrl+f "you have to "
>342 results
>female self-help book
>ctrl+f "you deserve "
>764 results"

This ties in with the majority of the literature, which finds that women have an external locus of control and men have an internal one. Nonetheless, I decided to do an empirical test of this claim.

Firstly, I had to find a self-help book for men and a self-help book for women to compare.

Only Indigo seemed to have listings for both categories, so I looked at the Best Match for both categories.

Under Self-help Books For Women, the first Best Match was The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About by Mel Robbins.

Unfortunately, many male self-improvement books could not be used for various reasons.

Under Men's Self Improvement Books, the first Best Match was The Richest Man In Babylon: Complete and Original Signature Edition by George S. Clason. However, this book was unsuitable due to the structure of the narrative, told in a serialised story that reminded me of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The next book, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, also seemed unsuitable as it was also a Holocaust memoir. Then, I was unable to find a copy of Self Help for Men: Confidence, Assertiveness and Self-Esteem Training (3 in 1): Use These Tools and Methods to Say NO more, to Stop Doubting and to Stop Always Being Mr. Nice Guy by John Adams. As A Man Thinketh: The Complete Original Edition And Master Of Destiny: A Gps Guide To Life by James Allen was published in 1908 with archaic language, and was also very short (the Project Gutenberg file is 33 pages long, vs 272 for The Let Them Theory).

In the end, Make The Impossible Possible: One Man's Crusade To Inspire Others To Dream Bigger And Achieve The Extraordinary by Bill Strickland seemed suitable.

I then searched for the two key phrases in both books. I also looked at the context of these phrases, and generally they were used in a way that matches the analytical framework above (e.g. "you have to" was not being used in sentences like "you have to know that you're worth it").

Results:

you have to (agentic language): 10 for male vs 42 for female
you deserve (entitlement language): 1 for male vs 33 for female

While there is more agentic language in the female self-help book than the meme suggests, looking at the ratios of the phrases is telling.

The ratio of agentic to entitlement language for the male self-help book is 10:1. Whereas for the female self-help book it is 1.3. So men are indeed told that they need to get off their ass and change their life more than women.

Related:

Rob Henderson on X

"Self-help books for women vs. men aren’t selling the same story.

If you walk through the self-help section and compare the books marketed to men with those aimed at women, the contrast is striking. The books for men tend to emphasize stoicism, discipline, and self-sufficiency: become more focused, toughen up, don’t let the world knock you off your path, no one is coming to save you. The message is essentially that you need to strengthen yourself and earn your way forward.

The books for women, by contrast, rarely begin with the idea that you’re lacking something that needs to be built. Instead, the theme is closer to: you’re already great, but you keep getting in your own way. The world hasn’t recognized your value because you haven’t fully accepted it yourself. The promise is that once you stop beating yourself up and embrace who you already are, others will see it too.

Two very different messages—one built around improvement, the other around affirmation."

Dr. Camilo Ortiz 👨🏼‍🎓 on X

"EXACTLY. And this isn't just true about self-help groups. Therapy itself mirrors this trend."

Mario on X

"I watched a doctor on YouTube talk about women and migraines. After rattling off a whole bunch of lifestyle choices that contribute to migraines, the doctor then said, “The first thing to know: is it’s not your fault.”

Make it make sense!"

Rose on X

"I have dev a deep distaste for female self improvement talks/books b/c their focus is make women feel good NOT get better. Reality is maj of 🚺 respond very negatively to self improvement b/c it requires self awareness"

David Wilson on X

"There's a similar orientation in kids/family movies: Frozen, Encanto, Moana -> “you're already enough, you/others must recognize it"

It’s harder to name recent movies where "you're not ready, you must improve"

It's easy to name old ones: Aladdin, Lion King, Nemo, Tarzan..."

The Lies of the Stanford Prison Experiment

Russell T. Warne 🇺🇸🇨🇱🇮🇱 on X

🧵
I finished reading Thibault Le Texier's book, Investigating the Stanford Prison Experiment: History of a Lie. This is the most thorough treatment of the real history behind the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Buckle up for a doozy of a thread! ⬇️👇

After reading the book, it's hard to deny that Zimbardo lied about almost every aspect of the study at some point in the 53 years he lived after conducting it. Some of the most inexcusable lies include:

➡️Saying that 5 "prisoners" left the experiment early for mental health reasons. In reality, only 2-3 did. In fact, one left because the dry air and denial of access to his medication was causing problems with his eczema.
➡️Zimbardo's then-girlfriend (later wife) was NOT the cause of the study ending. In Zimbardo's telling, she visits on Day 6 and is horrified about what's happening and convinces him to stop the study. In reality, she had visited earlier, participated in a fake parole board, and was aware of what was happening in the study before it ended.
➡️No, the "guards" did not all turn sadistic. In fact, most were reluctant about embracing their role, and the day shift guards were actually pretty lenient about rules.
➡️The experiment did not get increasingly intense with each passing day.
➡️The guards' behavior was not spontaneous. They were coached, multiple times, about how to behave. They were given suggestions for punishments, and they did not invent the prison rules.

 

There are also lies of omissions, in which Zimbardo never or rarely mentions important aspects of the study which undermined his narrative:

➡️Zimbardo did not come up with the experiment himself. Some of his undergraduate students did a smaller version of it a few months early as a class project. He almost never credited them.
➡️The guards were misled into believing that they were part of the experimental team. They thought the study was only about prisoner behavior. As a result, the guards did not "lose themselves" in a role by being placed in a fake prison. They never thought of themselves as real guards.
➡️The participants were not all "good" or "normal" young men with no history of misconduct. Some had a history of a petty crime, drug use, social dysfunction, etc.
➡️Contrary to claims that participants treated the experiment as if it were real, both prisoners and guards were constantly aware that they were in an experiment and that they were not REALLY prisoners and guards. No one consistently "lost himself" in his "role."
➡️Variability was the rule in the SPE, not the exception. For decades, Zimbardo portrayed all the prisoners as becoming rebellious and then broken as the guards become authoritarian and cruel. In reality, some prisoners had good relationships with some guards. The day shift was "businesslike," and some prisoners or guards were saw the situation as a weird temporary job, whereas others desperately wanted out. 

 

The Stanford Prison Experiment was simply bad science. There are so many flaws that it cannot reveal anything about human behavior. In the past I called it "performance art." Reading Le Texier's book reinforced that view.

➡️The protocols were erratic, changed often (and haphazardly). Almost nothing in the Stanford Prison Experiment was systematic.
➡️Data collection was irregular, resulting in sloppy data. In the months and years after the experiment, Zimbardo's assistants and students warned him that the data were hard to interpret. He ignored them all.
➡️Zimbardo started the study with a predetermined goal in mind. He published a press release on the second day of the study, touting its results(!). He testified to Congress and gave dozens of interviews before he had even analyzed his data.
➡️The demand characteristics must have been overwhelming--especially for the guards, who were coached in their behavior. Everyone knew (or had a pretty good idea) of the purpose of the study and what Zimbardo wanted to see. There was almost constant supervision from Zimbardo and his assistants.

 

The conditions only superficially resembled a real prison. This has two consequences:
1⃣Running this experiment was sometimes cruel and definitely unethical (even by the standards of the time)
2⃣The Stanford Prison Experiment does not tell us anything about the effects of real imprisonment.

Among the conditions that were worse than those of a real American prison were:
➡️Prisoner uniforms were gowns worn without underwear, which sometimes exposed prisoners' genitals
➡️Conditions were unsanitary. Bathroom access was severely limited. At night, prisoners had to urinate and defecate in a bucket. Sometimes prisoners even had to clean out the buckets with their bare hands. The prisoners were worried about disease.
➡️The prisoners could not shower and were only allowed to shave or have a sponge bath if outside visitors were expected.
➡️The prisoners had no access to fresh air or exercise
➡️Access to recreation was almost zero. Books were taken away, and prisoners were not allowed to have any personal effects or mementos.
➡️The "parole board" was a total sham that had no power to release prisoners early.
➡️Prisoners wore chains almost constantly, which caused discomfort and injury.

For Zimbardo, the lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment was that potential for cruelty and evil lurks inside everyone, and the right (or wrong) situation could let out that inner monster. I think Zimbardo thought this message resonated because he actually did do cruel things to other people. The conclusion that everyone had evil inside them probably greatly assuaged Zimbardo's guilt. Sorry, Phil. You and I are not the same. 

 

The book joins other recent works that question Zimbardo's narrative about the Stanford Prison Experiment. For example, last fall, Disney+ and Hulu released a documentary about it that took a distinctively skeptical tone about the study and Zimbardo's conclusions.

 

The skepticism about the Stanford Prison Experiment started when Le Texier published the French edition of his book, and an American journalist summed up the conclusions in an article in Medium in 2018. Zimbardo spent the last 8 years of his life defending the study, and I understand why: Nothing else Zimbardo did in his career was as impactful, memorable, or infamous as the SPE. If the SPE is debunked, then Zimbardo is no longer a luminary... he's another run-of-the-mill researcher who published some articles. 

The SPE really does overshadow everything else in Zimbardo's career, and he had a good run for 53 years, riding its wave of popularity. But, fundamentally, Zimbardo was a one-hit wonder. That's why I got a kick out of this quote in the book: "And Zimbardo's Twitter feed sometimes reminds one of those rock stars who released a cult song in their youth and continue to tour 40 years later, simply because the public still enjoys listening to that song."

 

The only deficiency in Le Texier's book is that it doesn't fully explain why the study was ended on Day 6. Clearly, Zimbardo's story of his then-girlfriend persuading him to end it isn't true. Nor is the claim that the study was growing increasingly dangerous.

Le Texier states, "My hypothesis is rather that Zimbardo interrupted the experiment because he was exhausted, had obtained the results he wanted and Clay Ramsay's hunger strike was challenging the authority of the guards. He probably also feared the legal complications that the lawyer could create . . ." (p. 102). But he doesn't know for sure. 

I think the lawyer's visit is a stronger reason than Le Texier implies. On Day 4, a Catholic priest visits the "prison." He contacts the mother of a prison and urges her to call her nephew (the prisoner's cousin), who is a lawyer. On Day 5, the lawyer makes an appointment to visit the following day. After the visit, the study suddenly ends.

Le Texier never states what happened during the lawyer's visit, and there is no record of explicit legal threats. But Zimbardo had denied access to a lawyer to a different prisoner. He could have been sued and possibly criminally charged with false imprisonment for his behavior (which would have been deliciously ironic). 

 

So, I highly recommend the book. There are a lot of details about Zimbardo, the study, and its aftermath that I didn't know before. Zimbardo thought that his study revealed disturbing universal truths about the human condition. Instead, it teaches the most about him.

Links - 1st January 2025 (2 - Therapy)

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.'"

Why a moratorium on microaggressions policies is needed

When you realise the vagueness and self-contradiction are the point, to maximise grievance mongering, you realise why the concept is so problematic. The fact that microaggressions are a self-fulfilling prophecy is precisely the objective.

Why a moratorium on microaggressions policies is needed

"Despite the good intentions and passionate embrace of this idea, there is scant real-world evidence that microaggression is a legitimate psychological concept, that it represents unconscious (or implicit) prejudice, that intervention for it works, or even that alleged victims are seriously damaged by these under-the-radar acts. It is entirely possible that future research will alter some of these verdicts. Until the evidence is in, though, I recommend abandoning the term microaggression, which is potentially misleading. In addition, I call for a moratorium on microaggression training programmes and publicly distributed microaggression lists now widespread in the college and business worlds...

Microaggressions have not been defined with nearly enough clarity and consensus to allow rigorous scientific investigation. No one has shown that they are interpreted negatively by all or even most minority groups. No one has demonstrated that they reflect implicit prejudice or aggression. And no one has shown that microaggressions exert an adverse impact on mental health.

I am hardly the first to raise questions regarding this body of research. Over the past few years in particular, the microaggression concept has been the target of withering attacks from social critics, especially – although not exclusively – on the right side of the political spectrum. These writers have raised legitimate concerns that concepts such as microaggression and trigger warnings (warnings to people regarding distressing material to come) along with so-called protective safe spaces can at times discourage controversial or unpopular speech, and inadvertently perpetuate a victim culture among aggrieved individuals.

My major concern is the rigour of the psychological science itself...

The term microaggression was coined by the psychiatrist Chester Pierce at Harvard University in 1970 to describe seemingly minor but damaging put-downs and indignities experienced by African Americans. Pierce wrote: ‘Every Black must recognise the offensive mechanisms used by the collective White society, usually by means of cumulative proracist microaggressions, which keep him psychologically accepting of the disenfranchised state.’

But it was not until 2007 that the microaggression concept began to filter into the academic mainstream. In an influential article published in American Psychologist, the counselling psychologist Derald Wing Sue at Columbia University defined microaggressions as ‘brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of colour’. Microaggressions can be verbal comments, for instance subtle racial slights; behaviours, such as ignoring minority individuals; or environmental decisions, including naming all buildings on a college campus after white individuals, or even former slave owners. Sue and his team have called microaggressors ‘perpetrators’, but I prefer the somewhat ungainly term ‘deliverers’ to avoid any connotation of intentionality or malevolence.

To Sue and his colleagues, microaggressions are pernicious precisely because they are usually ambiguous. Victims are typically trapped in a catch-22. Because they are uncertain of whether prejudice has actually been expressed, recipients frequently find themselves in a no-win situation. If they say nothing, they risk becoming resentful. Furthermore, they might inadvertently encourage further microaggressions from the same person. In contrast, if they say something, the deliverer might deny having engaged in prejudice and in turn accuse minority-group members of being hypersensitive or paranoid.

Sue and his team differentiated among three subtypes of microaggressions, based on observation. Microassaults, which are the most blatant of the three, are explicit racial derogations ‘characterised primarily by a verbal or nonverbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name-calling, avoidant behaviour, or purposeful discriminatory actions’. They might include using racial slurs, drawing a swastika on someone’s door, or referring to an African American as ‘coloured’. In contrast to other microaggressions, microassaults are often intentional.

Microinsults are barbs and put-downs that impart negative or even humiliating messages to victims; they ‘convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person’s racial heritage or identity’. For example, an employer who says: ‘I believe that the most qualified person should get the job, regardless of race’ is delivering a microinsult, as is a teacher who fails to call on a minority student who raises her hand in class.

Finally, microinvalidations ‘exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feelings, or experiential reality of a person of colour’. According to Sue, a microinvalidation could be a white person informing an African American that ‘I don’t see colour’; it might also be an African-American couple receiving poor restaurant service and being told by white friends that they were oversensitive in interpreting this poor service as race-related.

Sue and his research team list a series of microaggressions that they say could be particularly dangerous, divided into categories: for example, the statement that ‘America is a melting pot’ falls under the category of ‘colour-blindness’ and ostensibly communicates the message that minority individuals should conform to majority culture. Saying ‘I believe the most qualified person should get the job’ falls under the category of ‘myth of meritocracy’, and is said to communicate the message that minorities have unfair advantage when applying for employment.

Intriguing as they are, Sue’s conclusions are really just theoretical conjectures based on information gleaned largely from focus groups, and are in no way backed up by rigorous data or experimental techniques. Despite this limitation, the past decade has witnessed the extension of the microaggression concept to other groups who historically have been the targets of prejudice and discrimination, including women; gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals; Asian Americans; Latinos; Muslim Americans and the obese. Virtually all of these extensions presume that the microaggression concept has already been validated and is well-established in African Americans – despite the fact that, by any standard of psychological science, this concept does not pass scientific scrutiny.

Microaggression, like most and perhaps virtually all psychological constructs, such as intelligence, extraversion and schizophrenia, is what philosophers term an open concept, characterised by intrinsically fuzzy boundaries, an indeterminate list of indicators, and an unclear inner nature. Open concepts are not necessarily problematic. To the contrary, they often allow researchers to explore a poorly understood phenomenon in an open-ended way.

As scientific knowledge progresses and information accrues, the concept can become less ‘open’. For example, in the days of the 19th-century Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel and even much later, the gene was initially a ‘wide open’ concept, understood only as a hypothesised unit of transmission of heritable traits. With the discovery of the structure of DNA, the concept became considerably more closed. At the same time, there is the risk of an open concept being so imprecisely defined and porous in its boundaries that it is not at all apparent where it begins or ends. When this is the case, concepts become ripe for abuse by advocates with different, even opposing, political agendas.

In the case of the microaggression concept, it is dubious whether its definition is sufficiently clear or consensual to permit adequate scientific progress. For example, it is not evident which kinds of actions constitute a verbal, behavioural or environmental indignity, nor what severity of indignity is necessary for an action to constitute a microaggression.

All this vagueness and ambiguity can lead to outright contradictions in what is or is not a slight. For example, both ignoring and attending to minority students in classrooms have been deemed to be microaggressions by some authors: one researcher called out ‘teachers ignoring the raised hands of Asian-American students in classrooms’ as a microaggression. Another regarded complimenting the student with a remark such as ‘That was a most articulate, intelligent, and insightful analysis’ as a microaggression. In still other cases, they have regarded both praising and criticising minority individuals as microaggressions. In one striking example, researchers solicited reports of supervisor microaggressions from 10 African-American graduate students in clinical and counselling psychology programmes. The authors identified both withholding criticism from supervisees and providing them with tough criticism as microaggressions.

Compounding this problem, microaggressions necessarily lie in the eye of the beholder. It is doubtful whether an action that is largely or exclusively subjective can legitimately be deemed ‘aggressive’. After all, referring to an action as aggressive implies at least some degree of consensus regarding its nature and intent. Take the statement: ‘I realise that you didn’t have the same educational opportunities as most whites, so I can understand why the first year of college has been challenging for you.’ If one person interprets the comment as patronising and hostile while another sees it as supportive, should it be classified as a microaggression?

The ‘eye of the beholder’ assumption generates other logical quandaries. In particular, it is unclear whether any verbal or nonverbal action that a certain proportion of minority individuals perceives as upsetting or offensive would constitute a microaggression. Would a discussion of race differences in personality, intelligence or mental illness in an undergraduate psychology course count? Or a dinner table conversation regarding the societal pros and cons of affirmative action? What about news coverage of higher crime rates among certain minority populations than among majority populations? It is likely that some or all of these admittedly uncomfortable topics would elicit pronounced negative emotional reactions among at least some minority group members.

The boundaries of the microaggression concept appears so indistinct as to invite misuse or abuse. For example, according to Sue’s team, ‘the fact that psychological research has continued to inadequately address race and ethnicity … is in itself a microaggression’. Although few would dispute that the field of psychology should accord greater emphasis to certain scientific questions bearing on prejudice and discrimination, the rationale for conceptualising this insufficient attention as a microaggression appears flimsy.

One major scholar in the field even regarded the statement ‘I don’t usually do this, but I can waive your fees if you can’t afford to pay for counselling’ as a microaggression. The University of California system informs faculty members that referring to the United States as a ‘land of opportunity’ constitutes a microaggression, presumably because many minority individuals are not afforded the same opportunities for success as majority individuals. At least one research team has even classified saying ‘God bless you’ following another person’s sneeze as a microaggression, presumably because it could offend nonreligious individuals. According to some expansive definitions of microaggressions, this article itself could presumably constitute a microaggression, as it challenges the subjective experience of certain minority-group individuals.

Given the fluid boundaries of the concept, in hindsight even statements that might appear to be explicitly anti-prejudiced have been interpreted as microaggressions. Sue’s team, for instance, analysed what the Arizona senator and then-presidential candidate John McCain said in response to an elderly white woman during a 2008 campaign stop in Minnesota. The woman said: ‘I can’t trust Obama … He’s an Arab,’ and McCain immediately grabbed the microphone to correct her. ‘No ma’am,’ McCain retorted, ‘he’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with … He’s not [an Arab]!’

While acknowledging that McCain’s defence of Obama was ‘well-intentioned’, the researchers dubbed it a ‘major microaggression’. According to Sue, McCain’s assertion that Obama is ‘a decent family man’ implicitly communicated the message that most Arab or Muslim males are not decent family men, as well as the message that were Obama in fact a Muslim (which he is not), it would have implied that he was somehow dangerous or at least unworthy of admiration.

Although these post-hoc interpretations of McCain’s comments are interesting and might be defensible, they are concerning. In particular, they raise the possibility that a vast number of statements can be retrospectively labelled microaggressions. For example, had McCain responded: ‘No ma’am, he’s not an Arab – but what would be wrong if he were?’ – which is the response that Sue said McCain should have given – some advocates could have contended that McCain was subtly intending to insinuate that Obama might indeed be a Muslim. Furthermore, Sue’s interpretation overlooks the possibility that McCain was merely responding to the affective gist of the woman’s comment – namely, that Obama is a bad and untrustworthy person – rather than to its literal content. In doing so, he effectively communicated his central point – namely, that although he disagreed with Obama on many things, he did not believe that Obama was trying to conceal or lie about his ancestry, or that Obama was a bad person.

Conversation demands precision, but in the realm of microaggression, ambiguity reigns. Indeed, the recipient of a microaggression always harbours the nagging question of whether it really happened. Sue himself says that many racial microaggressions are so subtle that neither target nor perpetrator might entirely understand what is going on. The deep ambiguity of the phenomenon means that these statements can give us more insight into the respondents’ personality traits, attitudes and learning history than anything else. Furthermore, without evidence that external observers can agree on the presence or absence of microaggressions, how can we know whether a given microaggression occurred or was merely imagined?

The idea of microaggression stands at loggerheads with swaths of social and cognitive science. As José Duarte, then a psychology graduate student at Arizona State University, and his research team observed in a widely discussed article, much of contemporary social psychology are characterised by embedded values – typically of a politically progressive slant. The problem arises when researchers are unaware of the extent to which their sociopolitical perspectives infiltrate their assumptions regarding scientific phenomena. ‘Values become embedded when value statements or ideological claims are wrongly treated as objective truth, and observed deviation from that truth is treated as error,’ write Duarte and colleagues. Widely accepted studies show that all of us, researchers included, are oblivious to many of our biases, and that the best means of combatting such biases is to collaborate with, or at least seek the input of, colleagues who hold differing and ideally offsetting biases.

The microaggression field, like much of psychology, lacks diversity of thought, and it shows. For instance, statements such as ‘everyone can get ahead if they work hard’ or ‘I believe that the most qualified person should get the job’ are seen as microaggressions, but they might also be endorsed by those with highly individualistic worldviews, no prejudice involved...

A compelling argument could be advanced that many putative microaggressions, especially microinvalidations, lend themselves to a myriad of potential interpretations, some of them largely malignant, others largely benign.

Moreover, many of the implicit messages posited by Sue and colleagues appear to reflect the distortion of mind that cognitive-behavioural therapists term mind-reading. In this scenario, individuals assume – without attempts at verification – that others are reacting negatively to them. Cognitive-behavioural therapists typically regard mind-reading as a subtype of the broader tendency of individuals to jump to premature conclusions...

Even the word ‘microaggression’ can lead us astray. It implies that statements are aggressive in nature. Yet, confusingly, microaggression advocates posit that such behaviours are typically unintentional. As a result, the root word ‘aggression’ in ‘microaggression’ is conceptually confusing and misleading. Essentially, all contemporary definitions of aggression in the social-psychological and personality literatures propose or at least strongly imply that the actions comprising this construct are intentional. From this perspective, the concept of an unintentional microaggression is an oxymoron.

Does it matter? Research suggests that it might, because the perception of intent is a critical correlate of, and perhaps contributor to, aggression. Specifically, social-cognitive research on hostile attribution of intent suggests that if individuals perceive aggressive intent, they are more likely to respond aggressively in turn. Hence, labelling ambiguous statements or actions as ‘aggressive’ might inadvertently foster aggression in recipients. And labelling certain statements or acts as ‘microaggressions’ could fuel anger and even overt aggression in recipients: this possibility should be examined in the lab...

One study includes such items as: ‘A White person failed to apologise after stepping on my foot or bumping into me’ and ‘At a restaurant, I noticed that I was ignored, overlooked, or not given the same service as Whites.’ Being passed over by a taxi driver for a white person has been listed as a microaggression. In a study of microaggressions experienced by African-American faculty members in counselling and psychology programmes, the researchers identified a student calling a professor by his or her first name as a microaggression.

Yet it is likely that virtually all individuals who have lived in a major city, regardless of their race, have at least once been passed over by a taxi driver for a white person, and that virtually all faculty members, regardless of their race, have at least once had a student address them by their first name. Without at least some information concerning the frequency of the events, it’s difficult to exclude the possibility that many microaggressions merely reflect everyday occurrences in the lives of both majority and minority individuals...

How do we know that offence taken at these comments derives from widespread social upset rather than the individual pain of the personalities who share the assumptions of microaggression researchers?

All this requires a hard and careful look. Numerous studies have revealed robust correlations between microaggressions and adverse mental-health outcomes, such as psychological distress, anxiety and depression, among minorities. Researchers have argued that the cumulative effects of microaggressions shorten life expectancy and even foster suicidal ideation, but where is the solid proof?...

Microaggressions should be the start of an open dialogue, not the end. Telling someone: ‘What you just said is a microaggression. You offended me and you have to stop’ is unlikely to be conducive to a productive two-way conversation. In contrast, it could be a fruitful entry point into a difficult but mutually enlightening discussion to say: ‘You probably didn’t mean this, but what you said bothered me. Maybe we’re both misunderstanding each other. I realise that we’re coming from different places. Let’s talk.’"