“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 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
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
Therapy would be great… if I had money.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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”.
Just because you know one shitty therapist doesn’t mean that there aren’t excellent therapists out there.
$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
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.
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.
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.
To quote the goblins from World of Warcraft, “time is money, friend!”
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 great cost is itself absolute madness.
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.”
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.
No it’s people to stop ripping them off. We don’t need more millionaires. We need our money to go further.
Just to away with money.
No amount of therapy makes a concentration camp fun after the acid wears off.
People don’t realize this but USD(money) is how we Access world wide economy ( and each other), so depriving someone of money is basically cutting them off from society.
That is the idea. It is not enough to kill people for being weak (unlucky), you also have to torture them along the way.
“money can’t buy happiness but it sure can pay the rent”
With money, I could even get therapy!
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 yo 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.
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,
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…
Limit the amount of assets everyone can have to 1M-10M and tax inheritance, so peoples start position is drawn more equally. So the money will end up by people who start with none thru the government thru taxes. Solved next
I’d correct that to:
Money helps up to a point, and everything going beyond that needs therapy.
But you need money for therapy
I’d suggest one better: stop gating the provision of subsistence behind financial transactions.
But then the smart high-status people wouldn’t get economic rent! People would poison themselves and we’d have an opioid epidemic! You’re basically a patent medicine snake oil salesman. /s
I think that’s at least partly because people don’t understand money. We could give every American household a million bucks right now and I can guarantee you it would not solve their problems. In fact, it would almost certainly make them worse.
You mean like when everyone got their stimulus checks during covid and a lot of people used it to pay down debt and bills?
The inflation rate in the US has been above the Fed’s 2% target every year since 2022. That’s by no means a result of the stimulus checks, but it is a result of relatively cheap money and growing incomes without a sufficient corresponding increase in the supply of goods and services.
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.
Median household income has increased about 18% since 2021. Source.
I’m not saying those caused inflation. The original idea was that just giving people money would make them worse off. So I pointed out a real world example where people were just given money and a lot of people used it responsibly. Yes some people bought meme stocks but that wasn’t the norm.
UBI is not theoretical. It’s been tested numerous times, and the chalkboard arguments like this have been disproven. Look it up!
What if instead you gave them Universal Basic Services? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_services
Bringing the costs of necessary goods and services down would help people significantly. But the opposite would happen if everybody had more money. And that’s what I’m saying: more money isn’t the answer, lower prices are the answer. Just giving people more money to try and keep up with ever increasing prices is a never-ending cycle that doesn’t result in anyone actually being better off.
We’re not talking about printing money and giving it away. We’re talking about taxing and spending. This doesn’t cause inflation as resources are redirected from the pet projects of the wealthy to the needs of ordinary people.
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.
The problem is if you get a million bucks, and everybody else gets a million bucks, demand for goods and services would skyrocket, taking prices with it. Essentially everything would get more expensive. Your rent would go up. A lot. Now, if only you got a million bucks, then, yeah, everything you said would apply, but while that would fix your problems, everyone else would be left in the lurch.
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.
I’ll wait
Find a physical therapist who will guarantee results after 12 months
I’ll wait
Find any professional who will guarantee results after 12 months 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?), 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.
Yes therapists are like shoes. Sometimes you need to try a few, and I can see why most therapists don’t say this (Because their bob 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.
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 on the assumption that will end up with the rare great therapist and not the much more common shitty ones.
