Therapists aren’t your friends

I accept that people suffer from things like depression, anxiety, mania, psychosis. I have struggled with serious depression myself. I have family history of suicide.

But I do not accept therapy as a form of treatment. It’s a social interaction or a secular religion. If people find it helpful, that’s fine, but I don’t think it should be part of the healthcare system.

Therapists really are much more like paid friends than doctors. Many seem to be indulging doctor fantasies, pretending to diagnose and treat disease. I see no reason to play along with this, and I think critical thinking is needed to counter their magical thinking.

Also the concept of “mental illness” is dubious at best. If depression, for example, is the result of underlying bodily disease, then it’s just that, bodily disease. The brain is part of the body and can malfunction due to things like thyroid disease, sleep disorder, chronic inflammation, gut pathology, toxic exposures, and so on. If the depression is due to social, spiritual, existential difficulties then it’s not a disease and should not be medicalized. So the MH system to me is fundamentally a fraud.

Friend in a more traditional sense — no, but that doesn't mean they don't care and aren't emotionally invested in you.

@Budfox Limiting the definition of illness to conditions with an identifiable physical cause would leave out a lot of very sick people - for example, people with anorexia nervosa. I am unclear who would benefit from demedicalizing such an affliction, regardless of one's stance on therapy.

Looking back (been around for a long time) I’d recommended therapy for people who don’t have a good support system. I know this is sad but I used therapy essentially as a place to go when I had issues and had no where else to go. At the very least it took my mind off the crisis of the moment. I’m sure some would say I was just purchasing a friend - probably but in hindsight it was better than walking down a dark alley alone. I’m envious of people who have good support around them - I never did. That’s where I think the therapy fell short - it can’t really change your circumstances if you don’t....your therapist ain’t gonna move in with you. Yes I’ve spent a lot of time and money on therapy - did it help. A little I’m still here and the world may have been even a harder terrain to navigate without it. Is it for you - depends on how many hands you have to hold..... thanks

But isn't disordered eating a physiological symptom of trauma or emotional/social distress? I don't understand framing this as medical. I realize there are gray areas.

Another example...if someone is lonely and super depressed, and starts binge eating as a coping mechanism, and this makes them physically ill, they are still, ultimately, suffering from loneliness, which is hardly a medical condition. If that person goes to a therapist and feels better, I'd think of it as buying support or companionship rather than getting treatment for an illness.

It sounds like you looked for what you needed when you needed it, and that's a good and healthy thing, not sad at all. Therapy has helped me work on building a better support system aside from the therapist. Hope things get better for you.

Then, is it sensible to conclude that "emotional" and "medical" are very blurred and can't be neatly separated into two completely different categories, and that what originates on the emotional level can eventually lead to physical symptoms, and then it needs to be addressed at the root (on the emotional and social levels) and also at the more surface level of functioning, which may require some purely medical interventions?

That said, I totally agree that conversations about emotional problems can hardly be called "treatment". Medical treatments are based on objective data derived from medical tests and well established and proven procedures. There is no such specific and precise knowledge in "therapy".

For that reason, I, actually, dislike the term "therapy" in general because it does have a medical connotation to it. "Counseling" or "psychological consulting" sounds more appropriate to me for the type of service it seeks to provide. At least, those terms make it clear that the service is not medical. Whether you believe in it or not is a different story.

As far as "intimacy" is concerned, don't even get me started on this. This "intimacy" BS, along with gaslighting, was the major cause of my therapy induced trauma. I wrote an article on this, which I've been wanting to re-write and develop into a book for a long time, but this is such a triggering topic that I can't bring myself to doing it. All I can say now is that you are correct in saying that therapy, as it is structured, is a form of paid campanionship/friendship, which I find tragic because it shows just how isolated and lonely people are in our individualistic society that they are willing to pay for the illusion of intimacy, friendship and just simple human connection, all of which they are supposed to get from others for free.

I guess, I confused this thread with the one on "intimacy". The last part of my previous post is referring to the other thread "Intimacy in therapy" and I just realized that this one goes under a different topic. Doesn't really matter because they are pretty damn close to me

Another thought to this whole "medical vs. emotional" controversy.

The ancients didn't split illness into physical and emotional/mental. Illness wasn't physical or mental for them. It was just illness. It manifested itself on different levels of human psycho-physical system (what we now call "mind-body"). The eastern approach to medicine still holds this holistic view of health and illness. Illness is seen as a dis-balance of the natural flow of life energy. It starts on the mental and emotional level and, over time, shows itself through physical manifestations.

In my experience, this view is correct. That doesn't mean that western approach is not valid. It is valid when it understands its real place, which is to take care of symptoms. That's the only thing it can do so far and it can only do it on the physical level, but it can do it quite well. And, sometimes, symptoms can be so severe that they become life threatening and need to be taken care of urgently without getting to the cause of the problem. In that sense, the western medicine is great. But it doesn't really "treat" a.k.a "heal" anything, if by "healing" we mean a complete removal of the cause of the dis-balance.

Sorry, I just realized that I, probably, hijacked the thread since it was about becoming friends with one's therapist. It seems like I went way off track. If anyone is interested in continuing a discussion on the topic of "treatment" and the validity of the existing western practices, please, start a new thread on this. I am too lazy to do it myself, but if anyone else does it I will join.

And, on the topic of becoming friends with the therapist, my answer is no, thank you very much. Been there, done that and can tell you from experience that it sucks. If anyone believes that taking a relationship with the therapist outside of the consulting room would, somehow, miraculously solve all the problems that come with the unnatural and destructive therapy structure, you live in the fantasy land. But I will not elaborate further. This and the "intimacy" **** is too triggering for me to get into arguments. It's pointless anyway.

IDIMW: Definitely agree western science/medicine stupidly puts divisions where none exist (mind, body, environment). Guess my main point is that there has to be some distinction between medical diseases and things like moods and behaviors. Otherwise everything can be exploited for profit by people selling "cures", and many conditions and mental states are distorted to fit this warped system where everything must have a diagnosis and fit into a box.

I appreciate your posts so much, and they are an important part of my checks and balances system for maintaining some equilibrium with therapy. I am prone to get way too caught up in a world created by my psychologist- there are whole lexicons, sects, literatures, and ceremonies to this world, and it is easy to get lost in it. I love his facility with metaphor, and the way he keeps my secrets and companions me through the underworld of childhood memories to help me figure out what really was going n then. The troubling part is when this companioning starts to feel like a two-way reciprocal bond. It is this- this blue eye empathy gaze into my eyes that does confuse me , and sometimes I find myself turning to my T in my thoughts when my real life love is twenty feet away. This DOES unnerve and confuse me- so well said by you.