Well, my nonprofessional opinion about those is, that no amount of therapy can help here, when their problem is isolation and the cure living close to people they like.
(But therapy might help them getting there again. True eremits by heart are rare)
I also spend what feels to me like a lot of time here. I like it, despite its problems. But HN isn't good enough to deserve to be 70% of anyone's life. :(
Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine?
Oh … never mind.
I have always worked remote and been hermitting recently on a difficult set of (work) challenges.
I don’t know what I would do without HN.
I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN.
> Have you tried tobacco, indoor firearms and cocaine?
I don't do alcohol, drugs, et cetera, because I saw other people who did, and found them disgusting. I don't want to be like that. Though if I could easily get my hands on a weapon, I would have probably shot myself already.
> I read a lot of science, math and tech news, but am only aware of one place where the discourse around topics that interest me has the quality of HN, which is HN.
I used to think that therapists were ridiculous. But after having one for six or seven years now, I realize that it’s literally just someone you pay to help you be the happiest and best version of yourself. Maybe everyone doesn’t need that, but I don’t think anyone is inherently always the best version of themselves. What’s the point of not trying to be a little better?
I feel like the world would be a much better place if literally everyone did have a therapist. Having a neutral, trained professional you talk you for 45 minutes twice a month about things that are tough in your life is not something that should alarm people, but being vehemently against it honestly kind of is...
The main issue is that therapy is expensive, and it's very middle-class to have the money to afford one long-term like that. Working class people have had to suck it up, or (preferably) have a good support network themselves.
While I am inclined to agree that most people would benefit from having a professional to talk to, it'd need to be economically viable as well.
But we're seeing this happening in real time; on the one side there's lower cost online councelling available (but whether that's actually certified professionals is debatable), and on the other ChatGPT became the biggest and most popular therapist almost overnight. But again, not sure if it has the necessary certifications, I suppose it's believable enough. I also want to believe OpenAI and all the other AI suppliers have hired professionals to direct the "chatbot as therapist" AI persona, especially now that the lawsuits for people losing their sanity or life after talking to AI are gaining traction.
You are definitely right about the financial barriers. I’ve struggled to find one every time I have switched or lost a certain insurance coverage too so there is a shortage even if you can afford them.
I’m inclined to think chatGPT would probably be good enough for therapy basics and could help people that have never encountered them, but would probably become much worse after needing any specialized help. Online platforms like BetterHelp are complete trash and just make the therapist and the person feel hopeless.
I have been in therapy on and off through most of my life. There are parts of the process and the profession that are helpful. There are also parts that are paternalistic bordering on abusive. “Literally just someone you pay to the be happiest…” is a small part of the picture. I take issue with this view of therapy, and the idea that it is somehow a universal force for good that will benefit everyone.
I have met some pretty unhinged therapists - both as a client and socially. I won’t even go into the history of psychiatry and clinical care.
One of the questions I like to pose is, what are we doing as a society by sending so many people to therapy? What do these practices do at a large scale? And to all those who decry things like gun violence: if you think our current mental health system would somehow be able to address the larger ills of society if only they had more funding, I have some serious questions about your view of its overarching effectiveness, and the specific effects of these practices.
Oh I was oversimplifying for sure and like most things in life it is very dependent on who you are and what type of therapist you have(lcsw,psychiatrist,psychologist,practicing RN, etc), also just the views and opinions of the people involved will vary greatly on the outcome.
I’ve had plenty of bad experiences which exacerbated my hopelessness but overall I feel I’ve found help when I most needed it.
I think the introductory things in almost any form of therapy will help people, after that it gets much more complicated and it’s up to the individual to find something that fits or decide it’s not for them.
Do you mean therapy is designed to teach outcasts how to fit better into the machine? I would agree with that, and while I hate that it is partly true and reject anything like this for myself in general, individual happiness sometimes correlates with greasing your wheels to be a better subject.
In theory, at one point people will be done with therapy. I think a better analogy is a physical therapist; you go to one because of an injury.
A personal trainer is for boosting your physical health / performance. For mental health, you'd get a coach, training, or read one of many self-help books, not a therapist.
There are multiple kinds of psychological counseling. Some "supportive therapy" really is more of an ongoing thing, like having a personal trainer. Some kinds of psychological therapy always aim to have a terminus, like physical therapy.
Having a personal trainer for your physical fitness is something I'd expect a very low percentage of very wealthy individuals to have access to. Therapy appears to be more prevalent.
By "personal trainer" I just mean someone that you pay for a training session 1-3x per week. It's a comparable expense to therapy (depending on qualifications etc...).
I mean, that’s what they meant too. They’re expensive! Kinda a stereotypical rich thing to have, more so than therapy. One distinction that you might be thinking of without saying between individual sessions and group workouts which are cheaper.
Personal training sessions with experienced staff at my David Lloyds in London are around £50-60 for 45 minutes. That's entry-level cost for therapy, which can easily go north of £100 per hour around here.
I reckon the reason people use therapy is not because it's cheaper, but because they're less confident about how to do "mental exercise" than they are physical exercise.
What do you mean by “has a therapist”? Do they just mention it in passing, or do they bring up takeaways from their sessions in everyday conversation?
If it’s the latter, I’m not sure that’s really about mental-health openness. It feels more like a broader social habit, the need to present yourself as someone who’s constantly working on every aspect of your life. That’s a different modern-society quirk altogether.
Seems like we both agree that psychological language can be common in everyday offline life, such as at work for a large company. I don't have a problem with it, not sure where you got that from.
You're ignoring the subtext of the comment above yours.
> Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately...
Their problem isn't with the language itself, but how it is handled in public. That point doesn't really translate if you pivot to creating an environment conductive to mental health.
Probably not what the parent is referring to, but there is 'therapy speak' and similar phenomena where a pop-sci bowdlerisation of professional practices or scientific theories become absorbed into the culture and change the way we express ourselves.
There is pathologisation which can be whimsical e.g. tidying/organising becomes OCD, studying becomes autistic or exaggerative e.g. sadness becoming depression, a bad experience becoming trauma or in order condemn e.g a political policy becomes sociopathic.
There is the way 'therapy speak' spills over into daily life e.g. your use of the work-kitchen must respect boundaries, leaving the milk out is triggering, the biscuits are my self-care etc.
There is also 'neuroscience speak' where people express their emotions in terms of neurotransmitters e.g. motivation and stimulation becomes 'dopamine', happiness and love become 'serotonin', stress becomes 'cortisol' etc.
It's just the way language and culture works and it now pulls more from science than myth and religion. New language might just be replacing older bowdlerisations e.g. hysteria. In the 'therapy-speak' cases, it's interesting how it often replaces more moralistic language and assertions about values that used be described in terms of manners, civility, respectability etc.
I'm curious to hear how often do you hear it in every day life outside of the internet.