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Notes -
I would push back on therapy being grouped with the other things. Therapy, broadly speaking, covers an extreme range of practices and modalities. I mean sure, if you're going to stick with DSM-V definitions (which insurance surely requires), those are meant to be more clinical and cleanly defined. This is dysfunctional; that isn't dysfunctional.
But people seek therapy for lots of reasons. Do you consider a life coach a therapist? How about someone to help you get over your fear of public speaking or someone to help you better organize tasks? I'd wager just about everyone has something they wish they were better at, some lack that they feel in their life. It can be hard to match up someone with the right therapist, the right intervention, but when it's successful it's absolutely worth seeking out.
So yes, I would bite the bullet and say that absolutely everyone could benefit from therapy, in the sense that we need someone outside ourselves to encourage, validate, motivate us and point to helpful tools and resources. For many people this is religion. For many people this need can be filled by a close network of friends or family. Those people have a natural, organic source that meets this need, but many other people do not. The need for validation and accountability is nevertheless, I would say, nearly universal.
Therapy in general has done a lot of damage as it’s become more “normalized”. A big problem is that as the mental health industry has pushed itself forward, it’s convinced society that pretty much everything negative that happens to you is traumatic in some way. This is a huge problem as it creates glass brains that simply cannot handle normal life. When you raise several successive generations in this way: teach them that life is traumatic and that they need to ruminate on their feeling, you end up creating an entire culture that simply cannot handle normal life. I believe honestly that Gen Z and Gen α are the first generations raised completely by a culture that’s bought into therapeutic models of living. They’re also a complete wreck, needing support at every turn, unable to handle negative emotions or thoughts.
This is not the fault of the "mental health industry." Ask any clinically practicing therapist, social worker, or psychiatrist what they think of "little t trauma" and they will BITCH.
The problem is some combination of wokeism/snowflakeism/safetyism/influencer culture etc.
You will find professionals supporting this kind of garbage but it is more often non-clinical/non-practicing people.
You will find that people in mental health find the current paradigms on these matters to be extremely deleterious to human development and flourishing.
Additionally, something that often gets missed when therapy is mentioned - the goal of therapy is to stop therapy. Competent therapists will emphasize this early and often and actually do it.
Just because the people who work in the industry think that these paradigms aren't conducive to human flourishing, doesn't mean the paradigms in question didn't ultimately arise within that industry. I'm sure there are Catholic priests who have misgivings about this or that component of Vatican doctrine, or people who work in the gambling industry who feel guilty about how they've been complicit in ruining so many lives.
Of course, but lots of therapists are incompetent and aren't weeded out quickly enough, if at all.
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Most people don’t need to be validated. People need to be told how to fix themselves. And that’s part of the problem with therapy culture, is that it discourages actually trying to solve object level problems instead pushing just feel better about it.
It’s really quite narcissistic; don’t worry about it, you’re perfect. Yeah, sorry, no you aren’t.
I'd even go so far as to say - if you're seeing a therapist in hopes of receiving validation, therapy is almost certainly going to make your life or the lives of people around you worse.
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The term "therapy" has its physiological parallel in "physical therapy." Physical therapy is universally understood to be a means getting part of the body back to a normally functioning state, or as close to possible. Something went real wrong, we gotta fix that.
Physical training is when the body is more or less functioning normally, but you want to improve performance in some dimension.
Your examples of public speaking, personal organization, etc. is much more in line with the "physical training" concept. You want to improve performance and you have a specific and measurable goal towards which to progress.
"Everyone should go to therapy", in my opinion, is literally implicitly stating "everyone has something mentally and/or emotionally wrong and not normal about them and, therefore, we should all commit to professional support for an indefinite period of time."
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Perhaps more clarity is called for. I'm using "therapy" to refer specifically to psychotherapy. At least in Ireland, "psychotherapist" is a protected term. Life coaches are hence definitionally not therapists, as no qualifications are required to call oneself a life coach. Nor are public speaking coaches.
"Everyone could benefit from guidance and mentoring from a third party" and "everyone could benefit from psychotherapy" are two very different claims.
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