u/MunkeyGoneToHeaven

I think we’ve all seen how therapists have raced to labeled themselves as “trauma-informed” over the past several years. Moreover, the IFS-informed model of the frightened inner child has become a popular framework for understanding the struggles of adulthood. There’s something nefarious going on here that isn’t unique to therapy.

For the past several decades, the “youth market” has become an extremely profitable and politically useful commodity across industries. The premiere archetype created by the music, film, and fashion industries has been the “rebel without a cause.” Young people, who feel misaligned with the systems they born into, who are at the highest risk of attempting suicide, are framed as, at best, misdirected.

This goes hand in hand with the perspective the mental health industry has adopted on trauma, particular youth trauma. Our disordered behaviors may not be “immoral,” as perhaps they once were deemed, however they remain inncorrect responses to one’s present state of being - they are trauma responses.

Trauma is retrospective. I rarely see it considered as ongoing - it always happened in the past. It doesn’t take sides. It’s not anyone’s fault. And it’s the responsibility of the victim to figure out how to live with it rather than prevent it.

Trauma sharply differs from abuse. Abuse would require a perpetrator. Abuse is an injustice that might require action. And if we identified similar patterns of abuse across an entire society, an aggressive or radical response might not be a dysfunctional behavioral at all.

While traumatized people are useful to our institutions as relatable, yet static, images of frustration and suffering, an explicitly abused and wronged population justifies the kind of radical action that industries like the mental healthcare system have never endorsed.

Today I’m grateful for therapists, the mental fascists who use their authority over reasonable behavior to bludgeon and exorcise social discontent (that evil self that resists its institutions).

I’m grateful for therapists, who individualize a public health issue and reinforce cultural hegemony.

I’m grateful for therapists, who call it a symptom of my condition when I oppose the systemic forces that harm me, including the mental health industrial complex.

I’m grateful for my mental health professionals who heal a mind made sick, not born sick. Because the contradictions of one’s social conditions are truly just the contradictions within a sick mind.

I’m grateful for our addiction treatment system that sends addicts back to lives on the street and then wonders why they relapse at such high rates.

Finally, I’m grateful for my mental priests, who during our confessions prepare me for a life that is inevitably an injustice battlefield that I “cannot control.”

The chorus of “brand new chanel$” by Slayyyter (starting at 1:22) feels very powerful and almost ethereal. From a music theoretic perspective, I’m wondering what is so compelling about the interaction between the music and vocals, particularly from 1:22-1:26 (“I wonder if you…”)? And even more specifically, what is the chord that comes in under the word “you,” and what note(s) is sung on top, as I feel that is the most interesting interaction.

I’ve seen therapists with different approaches, but what remains the same is their resistance to criticism, to the idea that they are incorrect, and that, perhaps, mental health as an institution has major issues.

I’ve seen therapists for a variety of reasons: my abusive parents (and their eventual death), debilitating OCD, and then very severe drug addiction. One-on-one,IOP’s, PHP, rehab, etc. and wherever I go I inevitably have to ignore or compromise about abuse and major negligence. Not only for myself, but witnessing it done to others - for example, I intimately know what the evidence says for the treatment of OCD. Nevertheless, I’d be surprised if even 1% of therapists have any better knowledge or intuition about OCD compared to the layman. I’ve had to watch therapist after therapist give damaging advice to a client about how they should handle their OCD. It’s basically a meme in the OCD world that the average therapist will make your OCD worse.

But if I do the basic due diligence of informing a therapist about ERP (the evidence based approach to OCD), they either ignore me, consider me as difficult, or have so little experience (or are so stupid) that what I’m saying is incomprehensible to them.

But IMO, addiction treatment is the absolute worst, most coercive, and pseudo-scientific domain of therapy. They DEFAULT to telling you to go AA, which is a religious cult imo (but whatever you think of it, it is not evidence-based treatment). And when you tell a therapist who’s into AA that you don’t like AA, you can not imagine the level of nonsense and straight up abuse you can be met with. I was told in an IOP that we “weren’t supposed to be happy,” that we should essentially be ashamed of ourselves, and that we needed to turn to God instead of listening to our own intuition, which only leads to ruin. Drug addiction treatment is institutionalized abuse, and at least in the US, the government is allergic to evidentiary systemic solutions - addicts relapse at extremely high rates, but if you ask the average therapist why, they’ll shrug their shoulders and say that’s just how it is, or worse imply that addicts are just not compliant.

I told the therapist at my school (who facilitates the drug recovery group) to please stop repeatedly telling me to go to AA (I’ve told him I’ve had quasi-abusive experiences with AA), but he explicitly told me he would not stop and that even people who don’t like AA should have it suggested to them. Myself and another member of the group left the group because of this and relapsed.

Then there’s my previous personal therapist who realized she had essentially set no therapeutic boundaries, and had begun using frankly intimate(but not sexual) language with me, calling me a friend, implying we could work together professionally someday, and implying she liked me more than other clients. After it came to a head, she 180’d on me and became stern and distant. It’s hard to describe how jarring this was for me (at a time when I had severe SI). Therapists already default to unhelpful platitudes when you’re suicidal, but she was actively making things worse. I told her I was having trouble with this new approach, and she said the change of approach was purposeful (but that she had done nothing wrong previously), and that she new it would make me upset. Then she just continually told me to ask myself “what my role” in the change was. It was clear to me something had been activated in her beyond what was reasonable. She went from telling me to call or text her 24/7 (and she replied 24/7 btw) to telling me she didn’t “have time for after hours crisis work”. She then implied to the next therapist I saw (when they transferred notes) that I provoke rejection (something she had never said to me, until my falling out with her).

These people try to fit you into both the DSM and their own model of an ideal patient, and when you don’t conform then your difficult and non-compliant. The power dynamic of the person who officially determines your sanity gaslighting you and telling you you can’t trust yourself is just awful, and I’m sorry for anyone who’s been through it.

Models are supposed to serve people, people aren’t supposed to serve models. I could go on forever. What I realized when I again went to rehab is that the content of the therapy was not helpful. What mattered was forming connections with others so that I could learn to trust again.

I frequently scroll through this sub because the dynamic is hilarious. That being said, it can make me occasionally self-conscious in that I have both a philosophy and an engineering degree (phil undergrad, engineering grad), and often engage with philosophy of science.

I am currently writing a novel in which a character proposes a theory of the self/identity, and they lean on some set theory for notation and technical rigor. Additionally, I’m appropriating the terms “transformation,” “projection,” and “image” from math as useful analogies. That all being said, the overall idea is more metaphysical than actually mathematical, but the maths usage is not a farce and should be coherent enough for the story.

I’ve been lightly surveying/refreshing myself on the fields I’m appropriating concepts from, but as I’ve been working on this I experience occasional moments of fear that I’m going to write something that could have been posted on this sub. Those moments become worse when I do in fact use an LLM to help collect research and check some facts.

Wondering if anyone has tips to help me avoid making the hilarious mistakes so often posted here? Thanks

I’m so disillusioned by what I perceive to be an overwhelming ignorance to OCD in mental healthcare. I feel very excluded.

I spent years working with OCD therapists doing ERP, but the reality is that I have co-existing disorders that require attention from other specialists. Specifically, I have a substance use disorder and CPTSD that causes a lot of issues. In the past year I’ve had to dedicate most of my time to the substance use because it was life threatening. I’ve been in and out of rehabs, outpatient programs, etc. I’ve had some successes and some failures, but never have seen any real understanding of OCD from clinicians in these other fields.

Recently I relapsed again, so I started treatment. But this time around the ignorance of the clinicians is particularly demoralizing. Ive really been trying to deal with some trauma related anxieties, but I don’t feel that these issues can be fully separated from my OCD. OCD just colors the way i think about most things. But the strategies and techniques prescribed by most clinicians have quite literally been the opposite of what I have been doing for years to treat OCD.

They tell me to “find evidence to disprove the thought,” “put the thought in trial,” “think about the probability of it really happening.” To say those things and not even have a disclaimer that those strategies will worsen OCD is very disappointing.

I feel like I’m trying to deal with non-OCD problems but the mental health industry is so stratified that upon leaving OCD world, I get antiquated and harmful advice from ignorant clinicians. It seems like ERP, CBT, and DBT have contradictory advice. Don’t really know what to do anymore

AOC recently posted a video on her instagram endorsing Letitia James (something she didn’t even do for the recent DSA slate of candidates). Letitia James spoke at the Israel day parade, and more recently criticized Mamdani for “blowing up” the Democratic Party due to his endorsed candidates winning.

I really don’t think this is acceptable from AOC. Letitia James does not even have a chance of losing her race. So the only point of AOC’s endorsement is to associate herself with Letitia James and the more mainstream democratic establishment. She really needs to be pushed away from this position.

AOC recently posted a video on her instagram endorsing Letitia James (something she didn’t even do for the recent DSA slate of candidates). Letitia James spoke at the Israel day parade, and more recently criticized Mamdani for “blowing up” the Democratic Party due to his endorsed candidates winning.

I really don’t think this is acceptable from AOC. Letitia James does not even have a chance of losing her race. So the only point of AOC’s endorsement is to associate herself with Letitia James and the more mainstream democratic establishment. She really needs to be pushed away from this position.

I don’t hear much criticism of AOC from other major leftist platforms like the Majority Report or Hasan, maybe because they both have personal history with AOC. For example, Emma was covering AOC’s initial race several years ago for TYT.

Vaush has said she is “captured,” and while I thought that might be an exaggeration, it’s seeming to be more and more true.

Edit: want to add this quote from Letitia James - “All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.”