this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Socialism
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I feel bad for whoever made this comic. Clearly they haven't been having a good time with therapy. I've been going for a few months now and I've gained a lot of insight into myself. Each to their own, though.
Yeah, I'm not fond of the anti-therapy/psychiatry bent a lot of leftists take. Therapy and psychiatry can be enormously helpful and would be necessary in any world. Capitalism contributes to mental health problems, but I personally would still be profoundly mentally ill even in a socialist utopia.
yeah therapy and psychiatry end up being what you make of it in the end. If you don't find it helpful that doesn't necessarily make it bad as a generalization, it's just that it didn't work for you.
Therapy may be helpful of course, but the criticisms are also broadly valid.
Psychotherapy tends to address certain subjective experiences, mostly ones born largely of alienation under liberal society, including the demand to separate the personal from the public, and other structural problems, even while it remains powerless to change experience as comprehensively as would be possible only by resolving their structural antecedents.
In addition often to shifting responsibility to the individual for social problems, therapy is often framed as a panacea, rather than being recognized merely as helping some individuals with certain problems under particular circumstances.
Therapy works best for someone who is burdened minimally by genuine hardship, but still feeling distressed.
Unfortunately, most living currently are burdened by various kinds of material and social hardship.