This is good advice. Sadly, many on HN are very pro "mental health professionals". I see the opposite advice proffered frequently. These "professionals" make things worse by pathologizing normal life. Their availability to function as ersatz "friends" discourages people from making the real kind, imho.

It's just inviting downvotes but I also agree with you.

Therapy is a scam and no doctor can explain how or why anti-depressants work (also why they have people "try" many before finding the "right one for you").

But people are too cool for friends and family now and hearing hard truths so they pay someone to be told they matter and how to run their lives.

I have seen different approaches to therapy being done to different friends and only one friend got better - this tells me it can work for some, but the odds are you're getting a grifter. In this case their therapist told them they didn't need anti-depressants (shocker) and after ~15 sessions said they were fine and didn't need help anymore. Everyone else is medicated and still going every month, presumably til they die.

1) Length of therapy is strongly correlated to school. CBT and it's forks are relatively short and ability-oriented, where psychodynamic is very long with hazy endpoint. And generally CBT should be pushed much more, as it's faster, more goal-oriented, and less prone to, let's say, therapist biases.

2) Although I get the idea that people need friends and family, it's easy to forget that people with severe issues do not look like they have them. And taking care of eating disorder/personality disorder/*PTSD/whatever else treated through therapy, not medication patient is a lot of work to which most people are not equipped, and which drains a lot, to the point of resentment (if they can't run away) or just ghosting. Also, it's not that people do not hear "harsh truths" - it's more about not being able to comprehend them, due to broken thought patterns.

There's a big spectrum and you have good points.

I honestly believe that a small amount of people are better off being medicated, keyword being very small (<0.1%). Those that would be a danger to themselves or others in a real way. So I concede some ground.

But I refuse to believe that a society with a significant % of people on anti-depressants is a way to live. Look at my country's statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1020727/antidepressants-...

Most of my friends on them are just bummed out about their life but not enough to change their situation. Perhaps CBT is the answer, my big issue is that the majority of therapists over-prescribes, and that makes me lose trust in the whole thing.

It's like trying to see the good parts of cryptocurrencies, you need to ignore a lot of shit and in the end you wonder if its worth it.

You ignorance on the matter shows. You are probably living in the US where pushing pills is the norm. Honestly, this entire anti-therapy subthread is a shitshow of misinformation.

Let me shed some light: there are psychotherapists, that are not doctor, and can't prescribe anything. Then there's psychiatrists, which are medical doctors, and might approach your depression with the pill du jour. SSRIs just cure the symptom, not the actual bloody problem one has.

You don't need a pill, nor a doctor unless it's an actual curable condition (bipolar, ADHD, etc.). You need someone to talk to.

Some of us are saying that paying a professional because you just "need someone to talk to" is a situation created, enabled, and perpetuated by this talk therapy culture. Some of us are pointing out the history of this profession and its incredible lack of scientific rigor and perverse incentives.

I dislike immensely the idea of CBT and I reckon it's the reason therapy got such a bad rap. Talk therapy is immensely more free form. The goal-oriented approach works great in our modern productivity focused society, it's not a way to just learn to unleash what you actually want to be.

Source: 3 years of talk therapy.

Not sure if there's a branch of talk therapy you are engaged in, but if you look back into the history of the "profession" you might have a good idea of why it got such a bad rap.

Agree that CBT or other behavioral approaches are preferable and that there are some legit disorders that can't be easily helped. Point is that most people don't need or benefit from therapy, and are more likely to be harmed.

> Therapy is a scam and no doctor can explain how or why anti-depressants work (also why they have people "try" many before finding the "right one for you").

We also don't know the mechanism behind how anaesthesia works, this doesn't mean anaesthetists are grifters.

Mental health issues are not easily distinguished, "depression" is a cluster of conditions which probably have different treatment responses but all present alike. It's not unusual that some people will respond to SSRIs, others will need beta blockers and a third group will need talk therapy.

I don't remember seeing many studies about anesthesia doubling the risk of going unconscious like anti-depressants and suicide. Or many situations in which someone just doesn't respond to the anesthesia. That's the track record we're talking about here. Not sure it even rises to the status works sometimes.

Have you ever been to a therapist?

My family did a few group therapy sessions when my dad died, and it wasn't anything like you suggested.

At no point did the therapist suggest there was anything wrong with us or suggest medication. She just listened and helped us deal with the new situation.

Was it absolutely necessary to talk to a therapist? No it wasn't.

Did it make the situation easier to deal with? Yes it did.

Group therapy is basically like having a mediator in a room to facilitate conversation. It's not quite the same as individual therapy. I'm glad you got some value out of that interaction.

Therapy is a scam, see the replication crisis on hackernews's front page today. An enormous amount of studies don't replicate.

This, and the sibling replies are utter bollocks.

I might be the only person on earth that got something out of therapy, and I blame being and staying depressed my entire adult life because I listened to idiots like you. And trust me, I'm restraining myself here. We have a mental health crisis, a broken support system, male suicide at a all-time high, and your opinion is still mainstream. Shut up and listen.

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Advice for the people struggling: don't be afraid to fire your therapist. Going to therapy should feel like having someone to dump your crap and feel they've listened to you with no judgment whatsoever. You should feel you talked to a better, non-opinionated version of your $favorite-relative. If that's not the case, get another one.

AFAIU there's a lot of approaches to therapy. What worked for me was having a person that listen attentively for 99% of the time. In 3 years they have never told me what to do, nor prescribed their vision of the world.

I feel like the people complaining about therapy have no idea what therapy is like.

We’re not idiots, just people with communities and appropriate support structures in place that people like you threw out the window on the altar of individualism and shortsightedness. Modern therapists turn around and attack the same ideas that enable people to have and maintain those communities and structures in the first place while leading broken lives and peddling their sorry wares to other broken people they put there in the first place. You really think an institution that has been around for 60 odd years can compare to a stable equilibrium human society settled on for thousands of years? You really think your psychologist who listens to your minutia while “chasing a career” and having her kids raised by some people at a daycare really knows what she’s talking about? She’s just unwittingly making future clients.

This %100. People don't seem to understand how pernicious and subversive the therapy profession is, and how self-replicating. The only point I would correct is the "60 odd years". Its roots go back to the early 1900s and there was an explicit anti-family program from the beginning. Destroy the family, destroy the culture. It's a cultural suicide pill.

Have you ever talked to a professional therapist or are you talking out of your own ignorance?

While you are certainly entitled to your opinion, almost every single word of what you said is wrong.

Readers beware.

he said, offering his own opinion without evidence...

I don't want to upset you but, imho, the so-called "mental health crisis" is, in part, caused by therapy culture. Of course there are people who are deeply disordered and those may need medical or institutional help. But, many people believe they need "therapy" who absolutely do not. Consider the possibility that having a good friend, sibling, or spouse might have helped you equally.