I just feel like some people are dipping their toes into Scientology-ish “all therapy is bad, never seek professional help for your problems” stuff

Maybe, but I’m also tired of “get therapy” or “go see a therapist” as this pithy response people online have.
It’s this weird mix of like…contempt and condescension where they basically just cast you aside while feigning concern for your emotional well-being.

Therapy is just confession for secular pmc liberals who can afford it.
It makes them feel self-righteous for going to some shrink and talking about how sometimes they feel sad and they look down on other people who can’t afford it or who have actual mental problems it doesn’t help.

Ideally people would know the difference between various services and gain a little insight into what they need either on their own or through some introductory talk therapy. Do you need DBT? Do you need EMDR? Do you need somatic therapy? Is basic CBT enough? Do you need someone who specializes in a certain disorder? Wading through all that can be hard and is rarely done properly.

If I go too deep into this sesh I’m going to get angry fast but I’m strongly of the opinion that therapy is pretty much useless and should be entirely replaced with support groups. Its far more useful to have connections and comradery than to pay some asshole with a jesus complex a fuckton of money. Even if it were free its a rip off, people you make friends with at support can look out for you and pick you up when you’re down, a therapist will never do that.

Almost everything trauma related requires significant community and medical intervention, just one person vibing with you for fat stacks isn’t going to do it

everyone loves to assert there are bad therapists, but no one likes to admit that there are bad patients

I’ve been seeing a therapist the past 6 months. Got a lot of stuff in my past I’m trying to work through.

I think that as long as you recognize therapy is there to help you cope with the hellworld we live in I think it’s valuable. It’s also good for just understanding yourself and your own relationships better (I’ve been working through some shit with my family).

It isn’t a cure all though. I think recognizing what it’s for and why you’re in it is important.

However, I am probably going to cut back to once a month pretty soon. Was starting with two a month because a lot of crazy shit happened right after I started therapy so like, shit was busy.

I suffered a lot of trauma as a child, physical mental and emotional abuse from both of my families and at school.

I saw dozens of psychiatrists, counselors, therapists and psychologists. Got absolutely nothing out of it.

Eventually i found my way to a Trauma Treatment Center where they specialize in fucked up little nuggets like me.

And then my life changed because I got the help I needed and was able to unwind a lot of my problems and develop coping tools for what I couldn’t repair.

I’m very happy that i kept at it, my life feels very good now and I have friends and community and love.

It’s never too late, never give up on yourself.

Shilling for big therapy

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There’s a lot to say about therapy, but imo it’s more systemic in regards to the whole health system (well all systems really), than any criticism I have about the ideas of therapy in general.

There’s a lot of different therapeutic treatments for a lot of mental health conditions. Anyone who makes sweeping statements is being overly jaded imo.

I personally have benefited from talk therapy. I think due to my isolation/neglect growing up, it’s been helpful for learning to open up in a safe environment. It also was a big stepping stone as someone raised a man who had created distance from themselves emotionally their entire life up to that point.

That being said, I’ve also had to come to terms with the fact that no amount of talk therapy was going to rewire the parts of my psyche that are fucked due to abuse I had growing up. I’ve seen that there’s different forms of therapy that try to help past traumas, but money is of course tight, and there’s no guarantees.

I still thank my therapists for what they tried to help with, and appreciated when they told me straight up “this is out of my wheel house. I think it would serve you better if you found a specialist”.

My view is that if you have the ability to self-reflect, talk therapy is 100% useless. They aren’t going to tell you anything you couldn’t think of on your own.

This gets especially frustrating with ADHD where doctors try to force you to take therapy as a prerequisite for receiving medication. Sorry, but I can think of ways to deal with my problems myself without needing some dipshit listening to me. What I can’t do on my own however is fix the chemical imbalance in my brain, without having access to the prescription meds that allow this.

I’ve been in therapy for a few months now and I can say it’s actually been extremely helpful. I thought I’d figured a lot of things out myself but it wasn’t until I started therapy that I realized there were more deeper issues that I hadn’t quite realized.

I’m not going to write a wall of text explaining everything, but at the very least if we understand that capitalism is the root of many of our problems, including our ability to get proper help, there doesn’t need to be an outright rejection of the science of how the brain works.

I agree but I think its important to understand the experiences people have with therapists instead of dismissing them.

Sure help is good and works… In the right conditions and format with the right specialist… IF you even know what is the root of your trauma in the first place. I imagine a lot of people here have quite serious traumas that aren’t alleviated by talk therapy and realistically need a healthcare system with empathy that can triage and direct to the right treatment.

Maybe instead of just telling people “go to therapy” try to understand their problems and maybe give better directed advice. To speak from my own experience i had multiple talk therapist who all made the problems worse and really all i needed was for someone to tell me I’m autistic cos for 25 solid years i had no idea and only really found out what neurodivergence is via this website. Once i found out i did the rest of the work myself as the pieces kind of fell into place and i could seek the correct approach to handle my issues.

I had been to mental health teams multiple times for various problems and not once was this mentioned. Infact the entire UK mental health system seems to actively think these disorders don’t even exist. Only recently did it start offering treatment to adults with ADHD and thought people just “grew out of it”.

Medical bigotry is pervasive and i can say with some degree of certainty a lot of users have experienced something like this. On the other hand i don’t think its useful to tell people not to at least try because for some it may be exactly what they need. But also don’t forget this shit isn’t free to people which plays a big part in perception. What’s needed is a free robust and empathetic mental healthcare system with a good supply of specialists not whatever the fuck mess we have atm.

i’ve posted about this before but here goes. i largely agree and sympathise with people who say talk therapy is bs. imo it’s at best akin to writing in a journal with some accountability. at worst it’s capitalist realist conditioning. however, there is a HUGE difference between talk therapy with some dude with a bachelor’s degree and going to see an actual brain doctor, a psychologist, or cutting-edge structured therapy like DBT. i’m autistic and suffer from chronic MDD and i used to meet the BPD criteria too. i was basically completely disillusioned with “therapy” writ large, until i checked into the psych ward where luckily i was able to have sessions with a real psych and then get enrolled in a DBT program through which those sessions would continue along with group therapy. i consider the DBT program the most successful mental health intervention i have ever undergone. i still suffer greatly, but i am largely a lot more stable and able to exert much more control over the harmful coping mechanisms and self-destructive urges that overwhelmed me in the past. i would recommend it to anyone suffering from any kind of long term mental health issues or disorders, especially those related to emotional regulation.

the tragedy is that “therapy” for most people, insofar as it’s what they can afford or have access to, is the former talk-therapy example which can range from useless to harmful for folks like me. i wish stuff like DBT was available to more people. still i think it’s important to draw the distinction.

My insurance classifies all psychiatrists and clinical psychologists as “talk therapy” and covers none of it

I have mixed thoughts on therapy, I started it a few months ago (my health care provider offered me free therapy, yippee) and the most helpful things my therapist has done for me is recommend me books that go in depth into a subject.

There are some things I could never tell my therapist bc I know they’d try to “fix” me (namely the fact I’m plural), and dealing with that would probably do a lot of harm. I can’t tell them about any self-harming thoughts because I’ll be institutionalized. But it has been helpful to work through understanding my abusive relationship, how to deal with anxiety, how to navigate my relationship with my parents in a safe way that won’t get me kicked out, etc.

Basically I don’t know everything about the world or myself and having someone tell me what they know is useful, but the interactions also inherently feel somewhat adversarial because of the aforementioned reasons, which limits the effectiveness. I sure as fuck wouldn’t pay money for it, lol.