Has Therapy Culture Worked

0:03 >> We have therapists that act as sounding boards. People go in and vent and they feel better in the moment and they just are spinning their wheels for endlessly and they're not getting better. >> Over the past few decades, therapy-speak has become commonplace in American pop culture, but is the pervasiveness of therapy actually making us happier and healthier? >> In today's episode, we speak to an author and psychotherapist about the issues in the therapy industry that are creating forever patients and failing to ever make them better. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley and this is a weekend episode of Morning Wire.

0:40 >> The following is a previously recorded interview with the author of Therapy Nation, Jonathan Alpert. >> Joining us to discuss these disturbing trends and his new book, Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It's Left Us More Anxious and Divided, is psychotherapist and author Jonathan Alpert. Jonathan, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, Georgia. I appreciate it. >> Tell us a little bit about your background and then how it led to this book.

1:06 >> Sure. So, Therapy Nation, to understand how the book came to be, we have to go back to 2012 and at the time I'd been practicing for probably a dozen years as a psychotherapist and I wrote a New York Times op-ed piece called In Therapy Forever, Enough Already. And in the piece, I talked about how people were going to therapy forever. They were going for 5, 10, 15, 20, or even more years. They were in it for life. And I started to look around and I saw that these people were not improving. They were going in, they were venting, so in the moment they would feel better, but this was costing them a fortune and they weren't getting any better. And in my book, I argue that it's actually making people worse. And since that op-ed piece came out in 2012, the problem of therapy culture has just permeated every aspect of our society and I think it's a real serious problem.

2:02 So, I'm here to sound the alarm bells on my profession that I think is actually making people weaker, sicker, and also dividing our culture. We see therapists that are acting as social justice warriors. They won't treat someone who voted for Trump, for example. They're helping to divide up families instead of uniting families. >> So, presumably you make a distinction between effective therapy and ineffective therapy. What would you say is the distinction between the two and what do you think are the the main important things that an effective therapist has to do?

2:36 >> Yeah, and that's a great question. And my my brand of therapy and the one that I think is most beneficial to patients, of course, is to help them actually get better. So, that would be therapy that's focused on the patient gaining some insight, maybe learning some tools, getting some skills on how to challenge themselves and make improvements. So, if someone's presented to therapy for depression or anxiety, like actually giving them tips and tools on how to conquer those issues. If it's work stress or relationship stress, much the same.

3:09 Instead though, we have therapists that act as sounding boards. People go in and vent and they feel better in the moment and they just are spinning their wheels for endlessly and they're not getting better. >> Now, do you find that your colleagues are also troubled by this or I mean, I understand there's also the perverse incentive that they get paid more if people continue coming back. So, is this something that people in the therapy industry are discussing and concerned about or is it kind of something that people don't want to talk about?

3:38 >> Yeah, and I'm not so sure it's intentional. I think people a lot of therapists just think, well, this is the way therapy is. People come in, they tell me their problems, I listen, I give them some a little bit of feedback, allow them to vent and they feel better. but I'm arguing that that's not how therapy should be. you wouldn't continue to go to a hairdresser if you weren't pleased with the with the style that you were getting. Or most likely, you wouldn't continue with a fitness trainer if you weren't getting results.

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6:30 Trustandwill.com/wire. >> Now, you've recently penned an opinion piece for Daily Wire about how conversations are becoming potential danger zones, and you even mentioned that for some people, they feel that way even in the therapist's office. So, elaborate on that. why are conversations becoming danger zones for people and making them feel anxious? >> Yeah, absolutely. And the article really talked about how a lot of people feel like they need to censor themselves or even prepare the person they're speaking to about what they're about to say.

7:04 Specifically, I talked about a white client who had to pre- felt like he needed to preface what he was about to say by saying, "I know as a white guy, I'm saying blah blah blah." So, he just felt the need to preface that, and this is part of the problem in our society, and it and if I were the type of therapist that bought into that, it would I would be contributing to division in our society. People don't need to censor themselves, and they don't need to sugarcoat. They can just speak as a human regardless of of their color, but too all too often, they're not. They're avoiding conversations because they feel like it's a psychological minefield. they're afraid of how the other person may react, so they're just avoiding altogether or they're they're sugarcoating or censoring themselves.

7:51 >> Now, in your practice in New York City, it's a pretty blue area. Is this a persistent pattern that you see of people even censoring themselves even in your office or is this like one in particular individual that you're thinking of when you kind of had this concept? >> it's it's been a pattern, but I think the bigger problem that we've seen play out over the past several years, maybe since Trump was first elected almost a decade ago, is just the polarization that's occurring in our country. People are so divided. We have therapists who refuse to treat someone who voted for Trump. And for me, I'll treat anyone. I don't care who you voted for. If someone's anxious or depressed, that's what the where the focus should be.

8:33 but it really begs the question, like are we in a position to really say we won't treat someone just because of their political beliefs? I don't think an doctor would turn someone away that was in a medical crisis because of the way they voted, and we shouldn't either. >> How common is that? I mean, is that something you've heard here and there or is that pretty widespread? >> It's very common. I belong to some networking groups, and I mean, the things that people post, how they're in they don't know how to handle it. They don't know how to handle someone who maybe voted for Trump.

9:07 the therapists themselves are in distress, and they probably need good therapy because they're just they're at a loss. They equate someone who voted for Trump as being a bad person or evil or their beliefs might be aligned with the extreme far right, and they're not able to look at the person as as a human who might be dealing with depression or anxiety or any host of issues that one might present to a therapist for. >> Now, you also mentioned that therapy is driving families apart instead of trying to bring them together. What are you seeing that makes you make that observation?

9:41 >> This goes back to to Trump and we had so-called mental health experts on national TV telling their audiences, if you don't like the way your relative or family member voted, cut them out of out of your life. you don't need to deal with that. And that's in my view, that's just horrific advice. You don't tell someone to cut a person out just because you don't like their political beliefs. And that was happening dozens of times.

10:09 And my advice is not to. We need to look above and beyond politics and any one political figure and we need to look at what connects us and not let four years or eight years define who we are as a person or who that other person is. So, in short, people need to get a life that's not consumed by politics. >> Sometimes you'll hear as the retort as they say, it's not us that are abnormal, it's Trump that is uniquely abnormal and he's the one who's driving people apart.

10:39 What would you say to that? Because that's usually what I would imagine some of these people would say in their own defense. >> Well, and I've heard that, too. And these people are looking at it through a very very narrow lens and perhaps they surround themselves in an echo chamber that just supports that narrow belief. I would see a lot of patients who thought that Trump was a Nazi, Trump was going to ship people off to a far away land who were US citizens, Trump hates the gays and and that sort of rhetoric. But then when I challenged these patients for evidence and proof of that, they were left short. They didn't know what to say. So, if you just surround yourself with an a certain echo chamber and that's all you hear, you know, Trump is bad, Trump is evil, then of course you're going to start to believe that.

11:31 >> Now, what can people expect to learn from your book? Is it going to help equip them to find a good therapist or what is your takeaway that you want people to have? >> Yeah, and the book Therapy Nation really looks at how we got to a place where therapy culture pretty much touches every corner of American life from politics to Hollywood, of course, to social media and more intimate relations that we might have with with a partner or a family member.

11:58 You know, we have therapy speak that is just omnipresent. It's everywhere and it's it's hard to avoid. So, really helping readers to understand how we got to that place and of course, how they can find a therapist that that can actually help them and how they can rid themselves of this cult of therapy. In some ways, that's actually what it is. >> Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on and telling us about your book. >> Yeah, thank you very much, Georgia.

12:23 >> That was psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, author of Therapy Nation, and this has been a weekend episode of MoneyWire. >>