“Money doesn’t buy happiness”. Absolutely true. Look at all the miserable wealthy billionaires and trillionaires.
Money, however, does ENABLE happiness by warding off fear, despair, hopelessness and all other crap.
I think what we’re looking here is for breathing room. The cost of living must return to sustainability for people to expand and regain lost stability in all expects of their lives.
Of course, certain people will try to gaslight into saying that being a serf for Neo-Feudalism is the best thing ever, and that an organisation or state that doesn’t serve your wellbeing or interest is the best thing ever
Money doesn’t buy happiness but financial instability eradicates it.
I heard someone say “money isn’t everything, but not having it is.”
My take is that money doesn’t bring happiness, but poverty definitely can strip it away
“Money may not buy happiness, but it can but a jet ski, and I’ve never seen anyone on a jet ski that wasn’t smiling!” - some comedian
There was a commercial for a cruise line where the daughter stopped smiling as soon as she saw mom was filming, does that count?
Fiat currency and power. Two concepts that exists entirely in our minds. Two concepts that ruin the species. Maybe we arent intelligent afterall…
I just got a full time job and health insurance, after being without for a while.
My mental health is spectacular now. From the day I got my offer, I’ve felt cool as a cucumber. My dumbass ex also accidentally transferred me several thousand dollars, so just the feeling of having a nest egg and safety is like the world being lifted off my shoulders. Therapy never did anything even close.
In our current system and how late stage capitalism is decimating most of us, money literally solves everything
Therapy, is like cars, a sign of a failed society. I don’t mean that the failure is that we don’t pay for therapy, the failure is that socially we have no way to deal with suffering other than to pay a separately trained and certified and regulated professional to deal with it, one-on-one.
We have forgotten how to support ourselves, we have forgotten how to support each other. The systems that used to support us–family, church, bowling leagues, clubs, work–have collapsed around us, leaving us all alone, and isolated, and depressed.
The idea that this societal collapse should be dealt with one-person-at-a-time at $100+/hr is in itself more mad than anyone you will find on a couch.
I live in an area of high Indian immigration. They typically have multi generational homes. They are often larger homes, since everyone can contribute to the mortgage.
But the main thing that stands out is the children always have family around, sometimes cousins live in the same house too. Isolation doesn’t seem to be an issue. There’s always support and task sharing, so parents aren’t burnt out at end of day struggling to parent.
Out of 1000s of homeless people I see in Vancouver, they are mostly white or indigenous, rare to see an Indian homeless person here.
And then there is the huge community they have, besises church/temple meeting, but meeting in parks daily.
I think we lost a lot of community and circles of support when we adopted the isolation type lifestyle of “modern” life.
You bet! Modern therapy was created to treat the problems of modern life after modern life destroyed all the systems that kept us socially and spiritually healthy.
We’ve been abandoned by each other, so we look to “the state” to fix everything, but that’s extremely expensive. I remember being a social worker thinking, “You know what, just about every family I work with would be much better off with the money the state is paying for me to talk to them than for me to talk with them.”
Oof that’s rough
we have no way to deal with suffering other than to pay a separately trained and certified and regulated professional to deal with it, one-on-one.
There are plenty of ways. The issue is that some are individualistic and some are systematic. A therapist cannot fix a systematic issue; it cannot get you a better job, but maybe it can get you in a mindset to try and improve youself to get a better job (despite the job market being shit). It can’t build third places but it can prod you to look for the little pockets where some still remain.
It’s not a magic bullet. But sometimes a little perspective can help you improve your life.
A therapist cannot fix a systematic issue; it cannot get you a better job, but maybe it can get you in a mindset to try and improve youself to get a better job (despite the job market being shit).
This is an interesting example of therapists try to fit their practice into solving every problem there is.
If you can’t get a better job, maybe your money and time would be better spent with a job coach or resume services than a therapist?
Instead, a therapist can make some vague promise of some emotional or mental shift that will somehow make a difference when months or years of job searching have not? Doesn’t that seem kind of bogus to you?
I mean, I get it, I can see how it MIGHT work, but I also see it being a much more lucrative vector for absolute fraud.
If you can’t get a better job, maybe your money and time would be better spent with a job coach or resume services than a therapist?
I have considered it, yes. In a better market, if I was struggling it may in fact be worth it just to get a few weeks of guidance on how to redirect my career. It’s also less ambiguous because many people’s goals are met when they can get a job or get that promotion or whatever.
However, reality can set in very quickly when I go to a temp job service and even they (which can generally find an odd job for you in a few weeks ) just outright say “yeah, there’s not much out there right now”. That’s the judement between “you need professional help” and “this didn’t work. job coaches are a scam!”. Job coaches aren’t magicians that pull labor out of a hat.
Instead, a therapist can make some vague promise of some emotional or mental shift that will somehow make a difference when months or years of job searching have not? Doesn’t that seem kind of bogus to you?
Not a surprise to me. a job is pretty obvious. your mind isn’t. And it’s biased towards yourself as well. I’d hope we’d advanced enough to start to take aspects of the mind like stress seriously. But at the same time we still have a lot to learn and a lot of old prejudice to overcome.
The main goal of a mental health coach is to at least help you look outside yourself. Sometimes the job market is bad and it’s not your fault even if you blame yourself for some random decision years ago. Sometimes it is in fact all your fault and they help you realize you’ve been actively cock-blocking yourself out of success over several opportunities you had to get a job. Because you’re depressed.
The goal of a job coach doesn’t care how you feel as long as you got your goal done. The goal of a mental health coach is to remove those bigger blockers. And that doesn’t always feel good. Confronting your demons rarely does.
I also see it being a much more lucrative vector for absolute fraud.
That’s why therapists need to be licensed, while a job coach doesn’t. Licensed don’t guarantee competency, let alone compatibility. But it mitigates the risk of someone pretending to be a voice of authority and telling you to kill yourself for the greater good.
The job of any professional is to convince you to give them money. There are valid and invalid way to do that. In my experience, a lot of therapists are more than willing to overpromise results.
I’ll give you an example: one therapist said she was CONVINCED she could fix me in a limited time frame; but before we got to the end of that time frame, she said she might have to discontinue therapy with me because she didn´t like my teasing. She brought up with her supervisor and everything and they decided that she’d had enough and she had to tell me: the teasing HAS to stop, or she would be discontinuing the therapy. The thing is, though, that when I teased her she would always LAUGH and say, “Oh, stop! You’re killing me here!” I would have immediately stopped if I’d known she wasn’t enjoying it. And the first time she seriously brings it up, it came with a threat of termination and this was the best course of action she came up with another professional. I quit the next session because I did not feel safe with her anymore.
And I know what you’re going to say (well, one thing you MIGHT say): that’s obviously a bad therapist and that does not represent every therapist! Yes, those things are true, but it’s kind of like an ACAB situation. What does it say about therapy as a profession that obviously bad therapist like her continue to practice, year after year after year?
She’s not alone. I’ve run into much worse therapists than her, people that showed their true colors almost immediately. One made me feel like I´d walked onto the Dr. Phil show in my first session! These people are licensed professionals who are bad at their jobs and making a living seeing clients every day for years and years and years.
Go look up your state’s licensing cases. See how many licenses are sanctioned for being “obviously bad therapists.” No, what you’re much more likely to find is people who has sex with their clients, or who had dual relationships with clients. Short of that, you can be as terrible a therapist as long as you can keep getting clients.
That tells me that professionalization of therapy isn’t being done to help and protect clients, but to help and protect therapists.
Yes, those things are true, but it’s kind of like an ACAB situation.
Cops are unionized and work as a team. Ultimately, most therapists work by themselves. Not to mention that systematic abuse of power gives cops that reputation. Which is a hard argument to make for therapists.
So I don’t really think the comparison applies here. If you feel you were wronged: since it’s a licensed profession, there is a board you can report to. It varies by state, though. If what they did was especially egrigious in terms of the rules in your state, you can get their license revoked.
Short of that, you can be as terrible a therapist as long as you can keep getting clients.
A license is to make sure they follow the laws and regulations of their state. Not to make sure they are “a good therapist”. The license is to meet a minimum bar of quality and from there make sure they stay in good standing with laws. Just like how a driver’s license can be given to people of varying skill levels.
The closest aspect to your scenario is a therapist’s rating and testimony. Most services (if not, a 3rd party website) will have a review board for such thigs to read and a scathing review can be a softer way to damage their reputation than the licensing board.
That tells me that professionalization of therapy isn’t being done to help and protect clients, but to help and protect therapists.
If you look at any job cynically enough, you can apply this to anything, and anyone. A firefighter doesn’t want to put out fires, they want to protect their job. An athlete doesn’t care about the game, they just want to be famous and get sponsors. [insert literally any job ever] is only doing it for the paycheck.
At the end of the day, it come down to trust. if you can’t trust your professional, you shouldn’t hire them. That’s for all of life. But your lack of trust alone isn’t enough to invalidate an entire field.
I bring an ACAB because ACAB means that even “good cops” will lie to protect bad cops, and they will certainly not call out other cops or report them. Though therapy is regulated, it operates in much the same manner. Therapists are interdependent and to call out another therapist would have professional ramifications.
It’s not as BAD a situation as ACAB, but at the very least therapists have been SOCIALIZED to shut the fuck up, or they have to get through 2 years of higher ed, and 2 years of practicum to get their license, years were they entirely dependent on the good graces of other social workers
And it’s funny you should bring up firefighters. Fightfighting houses notoriously would START fires so they could put them out and get paid. It was only when municipalities started hiring permanent full time fire departments that the arson stopped. Therapists still have financial pressures.
You say licensing boards are there to meet a “minimum standard of quality.” But what I just said that it does NOTHING for quality, just limits the amount of outright abuse (usually sexual). That is to say, a therapist can absolutely ruin the lives of every single one of the clients, but as long as they don’t sleep with them or use them to clean their houses, they will never run into a problem at a licensing board. And I invited you to see for yourself.
I don’t trust therapists for my own personal reasons, but I’ve laid a pretty systemic comprehensive case that therapy as a profession is extremely flawed (elsewhere in this thread): people are trained to learn facts and be experts in a way that can definitely hurt their work with clients while at the same time enhancing their prestige among other therapists. Meanwhile, the licensure system does nothing to set a floor for therapeautic quality or effective care. Meanwhile, bad therapists are out there ruining people lives, potentially even UNAWARE that they are doing it all without any repercussions from the profession.
Again, not that you can’t find a good therapist out there or that it’s not helpful, but as a profession that are several ways it’s not the same as, say, being a cardiologist.
Therapy is fantastic, but any therapist will tell you that for it to have lasting effects, you need at least 12 months of continual attendance.
Now ask yourself how many people can afford weekly therapy sessions for a year. Where I live the cost would be about 3.5 median paychecks.
Find a therapist that will guarantee results after 12 months or your money back.
I’ll wait.
Find a nutritionist who will guarantee results after 12 months or your money back.
I’ll wait
Find a physical therapist who will guarantee results after 12 months or your money back.
I’ll wait
Find any professional who will guarantee results after 12 months or your money back when the issue comes down to personal responsibility
I’ll wait
You don’t show up, say your week was fine, you don’t believe in therapy, you have nothing to talk about, go home and magically get better.
Yes, you’re right, I was being unfair to therapists there; nobody offers money back guarantees for services.
That said, I find it kind of repulsive how therapist imply you WILL get better if you just put in the time (ie, give them a lot of money). I’ve seen plenty of therapists, I’ve NEVER had a therapist terminate me because I wasn’t getting better, even though I never got better with any therapist no matter how long I´d seen them. It seems most therapist will happily cash your checks in perpetuity unless you become a problem (suicidal), in which case many therapists will find a way to drop you like a hot potato.
But if you actually do care about research instead of soaking clients for money, there was a paper that showed that therapy usually starts working after a relatively short time period (maybe 2 months?) [edit: if its going to work at all], so I’d counsel people to stop seeing a therapist if they’re not seeing any benefit from it–a piece of advice nobody you are paying for advice is likely to give you and at least try a different therapist if not a different approach entirely.
Anyway, my anecdotal or lived experience (depending on if you want to devalue it or value it) is that I only got better when I disassociated myself from the mental health care system. The mental health system CAN do an amazing amount of harm, even unintentionally, and I don’t see a lot of therapist even aware of the possibility.
I find it kind of repulsive how therapist imply you WILL get better if you just put in the time
Like literally anything else in life? Yes. put in the time, get results.
Are there exceptions? Yes. medical conditions can make you not see gains in the gym, learning impediments can hinder progress in acedemics. Maybe it’s a bad teacher sometimes, but for the most part: put in time, see results.
I’ve NEVER had a therapist terminate me because I wasn’t getting better, even though I never got better with any therapist no matter how long I´d seen them.
Okay. That’s personal responsibility too. How many trainers terminate because you aren’t getting gains fast enough? How many teachers stop tutoring you and say you’re hopleless?
You can call it perverse incentive, but at the end of the day you gotta speak up for yourself and figure out what works best for you. Sure, if you really have 10 sessions talking to a person and you feel no better than ranting to a friend, you probably need a different approach, But therapists aren’t some magical exception to capitalism.
If you put in time and effort, everything is possible, except sometimes its not and you have to know the difference. Thank you. Very insightful.
That’s all I’m saying, yea. Therapists aren’t any different from any other professional you seek for improvement. But generally, in the wide spectrum of 100s of millions of people, professional guidance improves you.
Biggest sin of social media is people further misunderstanding statistics and acting like an individual failure is a societal letdown. Sometimes you just have a shit teacher. doesn’t mean all teachers are shit.
I guess there’s a certain question of autonomy. There’s a tension between, “I need help running my life” and “I know when something isn’t helpful and can walk away.” There are ways in which therapy can disempower you: it can teach you to ignore your instincts, paper over your concerns… there is a real risk that someone who just can´t handle anything about their life will be trapped in an unhelpful (or openly abusive) relationship for years, so I’m really hesitant to recommend it to people blindly with no caveats.
Yes therapists are like shoes. Sometimes you need to try a few, and I can see why most therapists don’t say this (Because there are some bobo shoes) but they really ought to.
You absolutely 100% do not need a full year, agreed. The therapists should being a form of therapy such as EMDR, or being teaching skills very quickly after your initial appointment.
If all they ask is ‘How is your day’ with no plan to graduate you, or moved to a lower contact situation - they probably aren’t very good therapists
Ok, we agree mostly then. I think I just want people to go in with their eyes open and maintain their autonomy in therapy–be able to say “this isn´t working” and move on if necessary, to another therapy or another way to deal with their problem entirely.
There’s just a sheer passivity that seems to be implied in these conversation, like “just go to ANY therapist and let them fix you” which I really don’t want to leave unaddressed; glad that’s not what you’re saying.
Edit: Also, maybe some people do need a full year or even more! My point is only that you should be seeing regular and steady improvement, or at least motion. The idea that you can just hammer yourself with therapy sessions for a long enough time to get healed is wrong.
Even just $1000 would be extremely helpful to most Americans, but $10,000 would be transformative for MANY people.
7.62x39 is about 42 cents a round on ammo seek. $1000 would be about 420 rounds not counting shipping.
Or just, wealth/stability. So many people would give away money to have their own vegetable garden attached to a multi-generational home - they can then figure the rest out from there.
Humans are different and have different interests but one thing common to all of us is that we enjoy:
- being outdoors
- exercising
- having community
- learning skills and creating things
There are actually some people who successfully self therapise. This is hard to do, so it’s actually a testament to just how many people out there need therapy, which reflects how unhealthy modern life is for humans.
The core idea of the tweet is correct - people can heal mental health sounds when given the right environment to. We live in a time where almost nobody is in the right environment for this, which requires what I listed before (healthy community, access to green space, purpose and recreation). This is basic stuff, I think it’s covered by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - which, ironically, is often shown to business students in universities, but then disregarded by the capitalists who rule this world.
So many people would give away money to have their own vegetable garden
I guess I’m in the minority. I’m perfectly happy living in a townhome with a postage stamp backyard if it puts me walking distance from a fully stocked grocery store stuffed with fresh food harvested out in the country.
Humans are different and have different interests but one thing common to all of us is that we enjoy
I mean, I’ll spot you fresh air and friendly neighbors, relatively speaking. But being outdoors when it’s muggy or freezing or ozone-y is highly overrated. Exercise isn’t something I need (or prefer) to do in my home when a park or gym is nearby. And hobbies are, similarly, nice to do in a communal space where all the tools I need are at hand.
So I might spot you “quality public amenities” in lieu of “disposable income/savings”. But I think your mileage is really going to vary by climate and weather conditions when it comes to just telling people to touch grass.
This is basic stuff, I think it’s covered by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - which, ironically, is often shown to business students in universities, but then disregarded by the capitalists who rule this world.
Maslow’s a great “Intro To” for sociology, but it does run into a lot of caveats and limits. People will periodically risk or outright sacrifice lower “basic” needs in pursuit of higher goals. And influencing that behavior is exactly what business-and-marketing seeks to achieve. Capitalists don’t neglect Maslow, they aspire towards exploiting and subverting it. The ideal commoditized bit of human capital is going to live in the pod and eat the bugs and own nothing and still be happy.
Maslow is for the real people, not the NPCs.
With money, I could even get therapy!
Alternate plan: do away with people’s need to have money to live by dealing with the broken system that puts them in that position.
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I don’t think “contributing to society” should be the bar for whether someone has a right to live or not.
We are the only animals on the planet who hoard resources and then block distribution of said resources behind little pieces of paper. We have basically solved scarcity already, and instead of sharing, we are burning the world to the ground for paper.
This take is so hot it could burn down the trash heap that is contemporary society!
Reminds me of https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/12/money-money-everywhere-but-not-a-cent-to-spend
Specifically:
In this case, it was that – well, the guy is a minimum wage worker from inner city Detroit. He didn’t tell me exactly how much money this debt was, but from a couple of numbers he mentioned I got the impression it was in the ballpark of $5000. That might not seem like an attempt-suicide level of money to some people, but to this guy with his job the chance of ever paying it off seemed low enough that it wasn’t worth waiting and seeing.
So what bothered me is that psychiatric hospitalization costs about $1,000 a day. Average length of stay for a guy like him might be three to five days. So we were spending $5,000 on his psychiatric hospitalization, which was USELESS, so that we could send him out and he could attempt suicide again because of his $5,000 debt which he has no way of paying off. And probably end up in the hospital a second time, for that matter.
Money gives you the freedom to choose your job. If you have enough backup money, you will basically not let your employer bully/mobbing you, because you can resign. When we normal people talk about money, we don’t mean billions; we need money that basically gives us freedom of choice for basic needs and helps us survive on bad days(2-3 years of unemployment)
Can confirm. Once I became wealthy enough to quit my job I liked it a lot more, because I could speak my mind without fear. The last 6 months I worked was the easiest 6 months.
100% agree. Now, I can’t speak freely because I fear losing my job.
Seriously. I’m someone that’s had a background in engineering but has really struggled in office jobs due to what I now know to be AuDHD related. I’m currently exploring a mid career transition to K12 teaching. I’ve had prior experience in education, just not K12 classroom teaching. But I have real reason to believe this would work a lot better with my neurology.
But frankly, the only reason I’m able to explore this is because I have a partner, and we’re fortunate enough to be able to get by on their income alone. We both need to be working for us to really make progress on our savings and retirement goals, and I owe it to them to do all I can to pull my own weight. So I can’t just not work. But I have the luxury of being able to try to find work that works for me.
With as rocky as a career history as I have had? If I hadn’t been with my partner, I would have probably had to make a living on my back or end up living on the street. I certainly never would have had the luxury of being able to take the time to explore alternate career paths. It’s that bad.
I have struggled with very real career impediments from this. And having a bit of money has made all the difference. We’re not rich. But just having enough to have a stable home situation and the ability to afford treatment is life changing.
I 100% agree. If you have enough backup money, you will basically not let your employer bully/mobbing you, because you basically can resign.
It’s honestly one of the best benefits of marriage if you can manage it. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to keep your mandatory expenses below either of your individual incomes, you both gain tremendous leverage against employers. There is no more powerful negotiating tool than having the ability to walk away.
100% agree. Otherwise, it is the cost of living, especially if one of the partners has more expenses.
Yeah, it is actually very difficult to manage. It’s called the two-income trap for a reason. But my partner and I do this. We at least try to keep our mandatory expenses under one income. If we have a long duration job loss and savings aren’t enough, we can at least cover our basics - mortgage, food, property taxes, health insurance, etc. off one income. That might require pausing all retirement savings, cutting out all eating out and any subscription services, and not traveling anywhere. But we try to at least keep our bare survival expenses below either of our incomes.
And we’ve just planned our life around this. For example, we could easily afford a much nicer house than we currently have…if we were willing to be dependent on both our incomes to cover the mortgage. But then you’re in trouble if either of you loses a job. Instead of providing stability, the extra income actually compounds your risk!
I know many, perhaps most, people can’t do this even with great frugality. But if you can manage to do it, it is a life hack that brings such an incredible amount of peace, stability, and safety to your life that, to me at least, no fancier home could ever be worth giving up that safety to obtain.
I agree with you. But people are too greedy and jealous of each other. Usually, one of them say ohh my friends go to holidays, have a good car; why don’t I have one?
temptation of these populist people is the biggest problem. If people did not consume more than they need, we might not have these problems.
They want workers dependant. Ever since the end of slavery, big business has been trying to rules lawyer a back door into having it again.
💯
Also the Therapist: So anyways I started billin $300/h
Hey she’s most people too
Maybe by extension it’s time.
Having had kids I’ve really learned that I need time to just fritter away. Down time. Not for chores or for date night or for my hobbies or for tv.
Just time to do nohing important and watch the day while away.
Sadly I need a lot of this time. Or maybe I’m just running a huge deficit so it seems like I need a lot.
To quote the goblins from World of Warcraft, “time is money, friend!”
It always was.
Money is how we convert human work into convenience. It’s the universal bartering good.
If I don’t want to do something, I exchange time spent doing something else for it. This also lets me specialize in doing a single thing, which is how we progressed as a society.
Therapy would be great… if I had money.
Check your local social services department, you might have a mental health provider in your area that’s government funded. You likely won’t see a therapist right away – or often – when you begin the process, but it’s better than nothing at all.
Wow I got three therapy appointments. I learned so much about mindfulness and CBT.
And it was years before I dated a trans woman again, so I couldn’t even use the CBT.
$10,000 would change my life entirely
The only and one time i had 4 digits in my bank account was after the covid stimulus checks.
It is until it’s gone, I live in a vhcol area and have 100k in savings, that literally a lost job and a medical emergency away from being gone. It’s all relative
You probably have bigger problems (and a shit insurance) if a medical emergency is big enough to drain 6 figures.
No job likely no insurance
I know, it can be bad. I had a sudden hospial scare and was in there for a few days without insurance. If I had to pay everything out of pocket (and holy shit there is so many 3rd party bills) it would have been 11k.
But that’s the thing: 11k isn’t 100k. An accident bad enough to drain 100k is probably way more debilitating.
Have money for therapy… Therapist selection to get the one fitting for you would also be essential.
It’s not about parent trauma and standard stuff for everyone.
Also als neurodivergent a new planet with the opposite 99% / 1% distribution would be very healing.
Yeah, I’m not having a great day.
Don’t do it. They don’t care. My sister in law has a masters in this stupid field and was working doing these therapies, and I can assure you she herself is a total nutcase
Just because you know one shitty therapist doesn’t mean that there aren’t excellent therapists out there.
My therapists helped me put my life back together after over a decade of spinning my wheels and struggling with PTSD. Sorry about your sister, and it’s not like I haven’t also seen shitty therapists, but that’s definitely not everyone and I think it’s a bad idea to discourage anyone from reaching out for help. People should leave therapists they don’t click with even if they’re not bad per se, because if you don’t like them or they don’t respect you then nothing productive is going to happen.
But also there are a lot of alternatives to talk therapy.
Talk therapy is 1 ingredient in the mental healthcare burrito.
It’s the tortilla.
People have existed long before therapy has. Do you think people 500 years just suffered in misery until someone invented therapy?
The problem with therapy, I find, is what you can teach people. You can teach people facts. You can’t teach people what it is like to be someone else. If you have a therapist that can ONLY relate to you in terms of theory, you’re going to have a bad time. So that depends on who you are and what problem you are bringing.
An easy example, that the field is just now grappling with, is existential depression. That is to say, a depression that doesn’t come from distorted thinking but thinking TOO clearly. Unless a therapist has been through it themselves, they might try a bunch of tools to “fix” the depression, trying to convince you that you are having distorted thoughts, etc…
But to come back to my historical point: therapy will just take tools from existential philosophy and recycle them as “therapy”, thereby continuing their monopoly. There are entire fields of therapy that have been entirely lifted from other philosophies. CBT is basically stoicism. ACT is basically Buddhism.
There are great therapists out there, but I think they are DESPITE the systems in place to train and certify them, not because of those systems.
As Daniel Mackler has said, “it is easier to become a good therapist, than to find one.”
Do you think people 500 years just suffered in misery until someone invented therapy?
For the most part, yes. At least in this context. Granted, functions similar to those covered by therapy (teaching, guidance, healing, realignment) have been carried out human-to-human for probably millennia.
But the proportion of people that were helped before there were systems and science was likely much lower than today.You can’t teach people what it is like to be someone else. If you have a therapist that can ONLY relate to you in terms of theory, you’re going to have a bad time
Therapists (especially good ones) aren’t unable to relate to you beyond theory unless they have literally experienced circumstances similar to yours. Empathy + experience goes a long way. Compatibility is an important factor which is why you’re encouraged to keep looking until you find someone that matches, but they don’t need to share your philosophical views in order to be effective.
That is to say, a depression that doesn’t come from distorted thinking but thinking TOO clearly […] they might try a bunch of tools to “fix” the depression […]
Well, if you went to them because the depression is making you suffer and you would like to get rid of it, they should try to help you deal with it. How that is best to be achieved is of course a dialog between you and your therapist, but even if the root cause is “thinking too clearly” there are ways to mitigate the depression.
There are entire fields of therapy that have been entirely lifted from other philosophies. CBT is basically stoicism. ACT is basically Buddhism
Philosophy and psychotherapy are completely different subjects of study with mostly disjoint areas of applicability. Sure, one draws heavily from the other, but that’s not exactly particular to psychology - philosophy is the mother of all science, after all.
There are areas of philosophy that are particularly rich in resources (e.g. ethics), but even if there are philosophical schools that tell you how to live, for most people they aren’t concrete/practical enough to be applied (not to mention the time needed to sift through dozens of philosophies, and the risk of choosing one that is unhelpful; or worse, misunderstanding it).
Most people need help with this which is why we have a field that actually has the human psyche as its central subject of study.Therapy works, it helps a great number of people, and for most of them philosophy is not a viable replacement.
There are great therapists out there, but I think they are DESPITE the systems in place to train and certify them, not because of those systems
Absolutely not. I don’t know if you have qualms with specific institutions in a particular country - those might well be justified. But organizing and systematizing a discipline leads to increased quality of practitioners rather than the opposite. Without training, most therapists would be significantly worse, especially during the early years of their career. Without certification, you’d get many more people doing the job that are simply not qualified for it.
Therapy is hard and unfortunately many therapists are mediocre or worse. There are probably also many institutions that overall don’t produce high quality professionals. But I think laying the blame on the education/certification system as a whole is misguided.
As Daniel Mackler has said, “it is easier to become a good therapist, than to find one.”
As I said, just now, “it is easier to become a good therapist if you study and get certified than if you don’t”.
Somebody from Canada replied in this thread about their experience with Indian families… my experience with people in my life is if there is a groundswell need among the population something will develop that at least claims to meet that need. Just look at “The Secret” a massively bestselling book premised on the idea that everything that happens to you–good or bad–is your fault. People want to believe it, someone will sell it.
I think we have therapy now and not in the past because society and the human spirit wasn´t as thoroughly broken as it is today. Before, people would live and die in the same village, have their funeral in the same church that baptized them, do the same job their entire lives, be married to the same person from a young age, have a defined role in various sectors of their society. Modernity is not like that, so we had to develop a “science” of wellness to deal with the new misery generated by the various crises of modernity. I doubt people suffered the way they do today with no response.
systems and science
I find this is an interesting way of looking at things, and I think I really did sincerely share it. But if you want to look at a critical look from inside the profession, I´d recommend the book “The Heart and Soul of Change” which really goes into depth about the very many flaws of the research of therapy, starting with the bedrock argument (I think it’s in this book) that therapy, for all the research that has been done, is no more effective today than it was 50 years ago.
There’s a lot of little data points along the way, but I find that sometimes it’s helpful to have a very clarifying fact. Like you can get into the weeds on AI is successful or not, but all anyone needs to do is show a general LLM business that is making a profit to establish the possibility that LLMs are the future. If no general LLM business is making a profit, or even on track to make a profit, then perhaps the entire project is flawed. Likewise, if therapeautic outcomes have not improved, then perhaps the “systems and science” of therapy are flawed.
Other fun data points: there is no type or amount of training that demonstrably reliably improves client outcomes. There is no training any therapist can take that will make them demonstrably a better therapist. Instead we see a pretty reliable rise in outcomes for all therapists over time that plateaus after a short time (maybe 2 years), maybe goes up a bit, but then actually often starts to DECLINE after several years. (This does contradict what you’re saying about training; I don´t know if you have a source for your claim?) (Also, please show me where passing a standardized exam improves client outcomes.)
After reading all of this and more, I came to the conclusion that therapy is effective for probably a multitude of reasons that are hard to predict, but that ultimately, the “systems and science” is largely there to entertain the therapists, give their brains something to do, and to give the profession a corpus of knowledge that can be taught, tested, and regularized so that is can be a respectable profession; as I pointed above, all this research has not increased in improved client outcomes, so what good is it?
I don´t know how you feel about Chinese Medicine, but I take a lot of inspiration from it that example. Basically the theory is that there is energy that flows throughout the body. It is total and absolute nonsense. Practitioners that supposedly work with this energy can’t tell the difference between a body under a sheet and a heater under a sheet. There is no scientific validation of any of this energy. Has this prevented Chinese Medicine from amassing a MASSIVE library of books and learning and diagrams? Nope! It takes years to get a certification in Chinese medicine, even though the theory itself is based on bullshit. There is a TON to learn! But it’s all based on total garbage, though it might contain some effective treatments.
I’m not saying that therapy is based on total garbage, I am saying that research has not led to better outcomes, and that we shouldn´t be dazzled by an enormous library into thinking we’re making definite progress.
I think, fundamentally, therapy can NEVER be a science. Not that you can´t measure outcomes and inputs, etc., but there is such a WILD variation of how to even define a problem that therapy is ultimately an extremely subjective enterprise.
That said, I do think therapy can be helpful, but I honestly think the “systems and science” perspective actually makes therapists worse practitioners, encouraging people to lose contact with their client and consider them as an abstract puzzle to be solved instead of another human being to relate to. And, of course, it CAN also help a therapist gain insight into the issue which can also be shared with a client. I’m just saying everything about therapy is very messy and it’s much more complex than just, “read this and you’ll have better outcomes.”
I mean, one of the dominant theories about why therapy works is the relationship between the therapist and the client, and if you ask around for “how to be a better therapist”, you’re more likely to find a set of skills you want to be monitoring when you’re talking with people than a list of books you should be reading. Not that you shouldn´t be reading, of course, just that it might not have anywhere near as much impact as being keenly aware of how you are interacting with your client. That’s why I think the “system and science” business has to be taken with a grain of salt and that ultimately maybe therapy is more about two people meeting each other than an educated professional applying a knowledge base to cure someone. But such a belief is extremely threatening to the professionalization of therapy, a professionalization which, not surprisingly, serves the people who can afford to go to school and who can be trained to excel in testing (btw, testing requirements for licensing have not been shown to improve client outcomes, but they have been very effective in keeping out minorities).
I legitimately think that this is a situation where you can follow the science into becoming an unbeliever, the same way studying the bible will make you an atheist. You don´t have to believe me, just follow the research closely. If you don’t want to read the a whole book, (“Heart and Soul of Change”), then at least familiarize yourself with the parameters of the “Dodo Bird Theory” debate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict), and if you just want to listen to a podcast about it, Very Bad Therapy is two student therapists struggling with the research.
Sorry for the fire hose of information.
Edit: this came up this morning, from Alice Miller’s obit
Long-term suffering could be avoided only, in her opinion, if the child had an adult in his or her life who could acknowledge the reality of their experience. She called these adults “empathic witnesses” and this acknowledgment, she said, not interpretation, should be the role of psychotherapists with their clients. She attacked psychotherapy, especially psychoanalysis, because she saw it as a system of thought that denied the reality of those treated.
That’s Alice Miller; celebrated author of Drama of the Gifted child talking about a tension the has been existing in therapy forever, between being a doctor (where therapists derive their social legitimacy and largely statps) and being a human being (where they derive their effectiveness). Also see Daniel Mackler on youtube, on why he stopped being a therapist.
So what you’re really saying is therapy IS great and vital and people have been getting therapy this whole time but just not calling it that
Your sophistry does not interest me.
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I never said there weren’t. Art therapy, equine therapy, music therapy, there are plenty of options that aren’t ’sit on the couch and tell me about your mother.’ But for a lot of people who feel like they can’t talk about their mental health struggles, talking about it is exactly what they need.
Yes.
My issue is that a lot of times, talk therapy is presented as the ONLY option, and, as you have pointed out, it isn’t. There are also things that aren’t officially “therapy” that can be hugely therapeautic. But everyone is different, and I think learning to tune into yourself is an important skill that can be learned through therapy or just as well independently.
I think money would solve about 90% of my problems, which would likely do wonders for my mental health.
Everyone thinks that way, everyone is competing, and everyone is drained. Money makes our problems.
With money, I could stop working, fuck off to some forested area with a fuckton of supplies, buy experimental treatments, have my own garage 3D printer to experiment with.
Maybe I would not be so bland and my friends would actually like me.
I’d quit my job, sell my house, get a box in the middle of nowhere and work at a gas station the rest of my life. I’ve got kids though, and a wife, they are more important than me so my mental health gets ignored for now. Maybe once these kids are grown…
Yep. Make damn sure you are willing and ready to die a torturous death, before you do your part in the cycle of life.
When there are way less humans though, that is the only situation I see people being valued.
We are all replacable and interchangable to each other. You can find every type of person in the world, there is no reason or price to screwing someone over. You can just throw down judgement on people easily, as you don’t depend on them whatsoever.
It seems like it would be really hard to earn enough money on your own to create your ideal environment. Maybe the real solution is finding friends who’d help you build that life.
it would be really hard to earn enough money on your own to create your ideal environment.
In this economy, yes. Because any savings goes into increasing cost of living.
Maybe the real solution is finding friends who’d help you build that life.
They too busy working too,
Yes! THIS economy is broken, so there’s no point in expecting anything from it. Let’s make another one!
