That’s one of those things about CBT that makes me so sceptical of it. Psychologists just feel like I’m being gaslighted into accepting the world wholesale. When COVID started taking off and I had a good sense of how bad the pandemic was going to be, one tried to push delusional optimism and institutional trust to the point that they were functionally indistinguishable from plague rats. It wouldn’t get worse and if it did it wouldn’t be bad and if it was I’d be fine so it’s not a big deal. Purely teaching me to bury my head in the sand.
That’s been my experience too. One of my CBT therapists said my disappointment with how covid was being handled was a “thinking error” because I wasn’t considering how things could get better. They all recommended a kind of permanent optimism and avoidance of any negative thoughts or conclusions. It felt like a weird Sunday school.
That one thought that everything would be okay just because things always turn out okay :wholesome:
Because of the uneven power dynamic I didn’t want to point out that they work from home making $100k+ while I’m a student who rents. Ultimately whatever their personal ideology is will dictate their whole sense of ontology and I can’t unfuck a liberal’s brain enough to understand structural relationships. If things are only getting better because they’re a bourgeois hippie who believes in nonsense, that’s an insufferable conversation that just feels like a doctor lying to a patient. I can all but guarantee that one is an antivaxxer by now and they’re the authority on the human psyche.
That was my experience with psychiatry as well. Take the pills, think happy thoughts and then you’re good. I’m not saying none of it works, the pills works wonders and getting a theoretically founded explanation for some destructive ways of thinking has really been a help. — But it’s all introspective, it’s all about what you think and feel. At no point does it lead you to think about broader social factors, let alone encourage you to organise with others to change them.
I have a nice anecdotal example of the “social blindness” of psychiatry. I was in a group therapy session. One of the people there told about how they were depressed about being poor and in debt. The psychiatrist leading the group who had been perfectly nice, empathetic and professional up until that point simply didn’t understand why they were complaining. After all they took on the loans themselves and they should be grateful for the meagre pittances the government gave them while they were sick and unable to work. It marked the moment where I lost trust in that psychiatrist and by extension psychiatry itself. A wealthy psychiatrist in a fancy office can be as smart and educated as you want but they’ll never be able to understand how life is for those who are struggling.
Ain’t this the problem with mental health in capitalism? I straight up confronted my psychologist about this because I didn’t know why I was even showing up. He told me: “I’m providing a service and you have paid for that service. That service is to make you feel better.”
You’re paying for a doctor to get you back in working order (literally). Solving the philosophical dilemmas of 21st century capitalism is beyond their pay grade.
This is what’s so nefarious about all the mental health stuff the neoliberal order has embraced. It’s about teaching you to cope with the existing order so that you’re neutralized. Sure we destroyed all of the communities that could identify common problems and work to fix those issues, but now you can pay for a therapist who will forget about your issues the second you leave the room. Human beings can’t work this much in these conditions at jobs that are utterly pointless if not disgustingly unnecessary, so you can use your sick days for mental health now. We can’t possibly change the world, but we can change the chemical balance of your brain so that you don’t care anymore.
The capitalist order does not like people preaching on the streets, it does not like people breaking down at work, and it does not like the spontaneous rebellion generated by the excessive stresses it places on the working classes, and so we get mental health treatments - the opiate of the masses in secular society.
The upside of the Cassandra effect
I think about this concept when it comes to left-wing talking points in media. I recently started Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys and it makes interesting points on celebrity culture, politics, and the police, but if nobody watching it starts their own terror cell, why would Bezos care? The jester is just here to keep people entertained, and he’s doing a great job
Inverse totalitarianism would work for this too.
