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 will:

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I didn’t read this Steinbeck in school (I read Of Mice and Men), but I thought back then “I’m glad we moved past this. We wouldn’t allow such work today so blatantly”.

Well, education definitely isn’t wisdom. And it sure isn’t experience.

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.

this post is talking about “your” problems. Not society’s problems. Societal fixes need to be more subtle than “give everyone a million dollars”. But giving one person 10k dollars can be life changing money.

We separate the two fields for a reason.

Don’t know why you’re talking about income when I’m talking about assets.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/09/acs-rent-burden.html

any gains in household income was completely cancelled out by the fact that everything got more expensive, and more people were impacted by layoffs. Homelessness also increased, and those without a home (or who move into their parents’ home) do not count for household income

There are ways in which therapy can disempower you: it can teach you to ignore your instincts, paper over your concerns

Any therapist telling you to “ignore your instincts” without diagnosing you with a relevant condition (e.g. PTSD, OCD) isn’t worth their salt. And not all therapists are licensed to diagnose you, so you’d need to be referred to a potentially different professional.

It’s like any other professional. You try stuff they suggest, and sometimes it doesn’t work out or you simply want 2nd opinion on a matter. It’s not perfect, but generally it helps.

so I’m really hesitant to recommend it to people blindly with no caveats.

Worst case, they waste a few hundred dollars and learn its not for them. I’ve wasted more money with worse things. I think the risk of getting “addicted to therapy” is much smaller than gambling or drugs.

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.

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.

relatively cheap money and growing incomes

where have you been the last 3 years? It’s because assets have been outpacing inflation to the point where it’s destablizing society. the American GDP is being carried by AI speculation. Not productivity: hype.

Meanwhile, compensation has only been outpacing inflation if you’re an executive.

a million would eliminate my need to worry about next month’s rent and let me sit down and properly create stuff without worry for a few years (more like a decade, but I’d want plenty of buffer room). Sure, it’s easy to waste a milion and it won’t fix all my demons. But it’d take most of my stressors away instantly.

You probably have bigger problems (and a shit insurance) if a medical emergency is big enough to drain 6 figures.

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.

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,

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.

Pretty much what I try to tell my parents. I don’t need therapy. I know exactly what stresses me out and it’s this extended fall from grace from saving up for my own house to taking up any gig in my ability to keep the lights on in the span of 3 years. The ladder was pulled up and they actively pushed me out of the floor.

if it killed even 1 we’d have a bill passed next week. For the billionaires, ofc. But they’d react fast.

Never fall under the delusion that the government needs everything to move like molasses.

Universal healthcare is actually a bipartisan issue among the people. But as you expect, one side is really good at reframing terms to make it sound like It benefits the “non-deserving”. The main “issue” over the decades is that everytime they try to creep this into making all insurance worse they get pushback.

So, kinda.

Math.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/MSPUS

Plug 23900 into an inflation calculator

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=23900&year1=197001&year2=202606

I got 211,149.54.

Guess they had different numbers or calculator, but similar sentiment. Housing grew some 5x+ faster than inflation.

Probably because “radial left” has no real leg to stand on right now and the big talking points of what the GOP call “radical left” are just this. Exhibit A.

We can theorize about radical left. Meanwhile, radical right is happening in real time.

A bit hard to say. Since there’s two major types of contractors

1. the “basically employees” contractors are ones who do everything expected of an employee but aren’t granted the status of an employee. This is a “simple” matter in enforcing that they be actual employees under the law, either through courts or with a definition of duties that keep them from skirting that line (though employers will always try). Basically make the definition relatively lax so they can’t do stuff like “work 38 hours a week” to avoid it.

2. The “truly contractors” who essentially set their own hours and get paid for work provided. Basically stuff in the gig economy . These are pay as you go so I’m not sure you can enforce vacation time into this model.