domain:betonit.substack.com
Therapyspeak is the language of the Anarchist. It is the language of those who do not believe in discipline and self control, who want to erase the line between good and evil.
Some of the terms I've heard quite a bit in the past 5 years that I highly distrust:
"Toxic". People and relationships are declared to be toxic, and it is understood that bad actions can then be taken against them. There is no standard for what makes something toxic. Rhetoric using this term often recommends the user to end relationships, and it generally does not look like sound wise advice. Using this term is a request for power and authority, rather than an assertion of meaning.
"Self Care". This is a synonym for self-indulgence, but with a good connotation instead of a bad one. Spending 8 hours watching netflix for example, in my grandfather's English, would be understood to be a moderately shameful act of vice. Now it can be referred to as "Self Care", in which case it is understood as a noble recognition of ones own weakness.
"Triggered". This word is used to blame others for ones own mental outbursts. A man who has internalized a value system of discipline and personal responsibility would never use such a word, but a member of the CPUSA would never question one who did.
"Codependency". Means nothing more than "relationship", but again, it goes from having what is, according to my values, a correct positive connotation, to having an incorrect negative connotation.
There are values which lead to a good stable society. These values were baked into the our culture, into our stories, into our language itself. Most respectable men have internalized these values- its quite hard to achieve anything in life without doing so.
When people use therapyspeak, they are signaling their opposition to these values. They may truly oppose them, or they may want to signify membership in the group of people who oppose them. But if you are still committed to those values, for whatever reason, you may find such speech uncomfortable.
One thing I have no explanation for, is why all of these terms seem to have originated in therapy. I cannot think of any other recently popularized terms like this- terms designed to assault traditional European values and signal membership in the revolution- which did not originate in therapy.
2rafa
7hr ago
The more you think about something bad that happened to you, the more upset, traumatized and poorly functioning you will be. It is that simple.
Therapy and therapy culture doesn’t work because it dredges up trauma and negative experiences. Repression does work, this is what stuff like ‘playing Tetris after a traumatic event reduces trauma’ does, it represses. Distract yourself, forget about it, and you can have a lifetime of happiness with a few bad occasional recollections.
It is so banal that it is barely worth saying: the less you think about something, the less you stew in it, the less it will affect you.
laxam
7hr ago
'Moving on' is how you deal with trauma and distracting yourself helps with that.
My wife just had an uncle she was close with die suddenly and this is really the first big family death she's experienced. I and her took some time off, she's playing lots of a game she likes, I'm taking her out to eat. She's still dealing with moments of intense sadness but, in general, is dealing with it really well, essentially entirely because I'm not letting her dwell on it.
I've had an inordinate number of deaths in my family, starting from pretty young, and the hard truth is that you never really 'get over it' but you absolutely move on. I still have moments of sadness to do with my mother's death decades ago but they're few and far between and it otherwise doesn't effect my life. Picking up and keeping going is how to deal with hard spots in your life. Real mental illness is different but, to be honest, most people going to therapists don't have real mental illnesses.
I recently heard of yaslighting, which is where instead of convincing someone their true beliefs are delusional, you affirm their delusional beliefs and convince them they're true.
Seems to apply to a lot of things (especially transgenderism) but what I have in mind is college degree choice. Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.
I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter. If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.
My mother is one of these women. The way she describes it, she finished her Psychology bachelors and only then realized it would take another couple years to make a career out of it. She's extremely smart, conscientious, and logical. I can't imagine her as someone who would just forget to look into these things. During that time she married a man who would go on to become very successful, and I think that (marrying a good man, that is, not necessarily a rich one) must have been the ultimate goal all along, whatever she told herself in the process.
I'm starting to see a similar phenomenon among my siblings. My brothers have laid out step-by-step plans for college and their eventual careers. My sister just wants to study Psychology because it's interesting. None of them would breathe a word about the different expectations between the genders--the topic is somewhat taboo--but they nevertheless have Gotten the Message and are all pursuing seemingly effective strategies optimized for their gender.
My wife and I have broached the subject of Psychology careers a couple of times with my sister, and she seems actively disinterested in thinking it through. I expect she, like my mother, will get married sometime during or just after her Bachelor's degree, and claim she was unaware she needed a Master's to turn the major into a career.
This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions. The problem arises when someone doesn't get the message and thinks the social reality is the reality, that men can "study what you enjoy" for 4 years in college with no lasting impact to career prospects or marriagability, or that women can do the same without searching for husbands and things will work out for them.
My wife is a teacher. Most of her coworkers fall into these categories. Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aides. Others (the school's speech pathologists, behavioral interventionists, psychologists, etc.) are women who didn't end up getting married during their Bachelor's, and now are working very slowly towards Master's degrees while working.
American culture gets a lot of things wrong, but imo nothing so badly as gender roles. We encourage women to overeducate, in the process aging themselves out of the possibility of having children, and depriving the next generation of those who could have been their smartest and most capable mothers. It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.
Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
Telling women to not look for husbands in college, and focus on education, is similar, though its results manifest in different ways. Such women will (as they get more educated) grow increasingly unable to find comparably "impressive" partners. Many will remain single, sleeping around but never committing, while a few will "settle" many years down the road. Neither situation is great for raising a family.
Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.
American tfr fell to 1.62 in 2023, its lowest rate ever, and is even lower among our most intelligent and conscientious. Financial incentives meant to correct this in places like Finland and Turkey have accomplished very little overall. The problem is not financial, it is cultural and legal. People need to think of advice like "study your hobby and things will work out" as a malicious lie meant to signal a luxury belief. Motherhood needs to be far more prestigious than any career. Couples need to be allowed to mutually agree to contracts incentivizing them to stick together.
The truth is and always has been the truth, but more people need to be made more consciously aware of it. If women want large families, they need to start before finishing their Master's. I burned a lot of credibility with my immediate family getting married as young as I did, and sacrificing my social life and physical health to be financially ready for children quickly. This was the right decision, but it pains me to say I probably won't be able to convince them to do the same until after the crucial window has passed. I hope to convince you, though, or if you are already convinced, to offer you some ammunition convincing those you care about.
For the vast majority of people, the quality and quantity of their children will have far more of an effect on the future than anything else they could do. If you like being alive, and/or find it meaningful, it is likely your kids will too, and bringing them into the world to experience the joy of existence is an enormous gift you have the power to offer them. Less important, but still significant, 71% of Americans are happy with their decision to have children, or wish they had more, while only 10% wish they had less.
Whether for selfish or selfless reasons, having children early is the right call for most people, but our culture has conducted an enormous yaslighting campaign to prevent this from happening until it's too late.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
16hr ago
I went to the trouble of writing an effort post somewhere that was read by like 8 people, so I'll just reproduce the primary bit, and tack on additional commentary at the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy
Large-scale international reviews of scientific studies have concluded that psychotherapy is effective for numerous conditions.[8][22]
One line of research consistently finds that supposedly different forms of psychotherapy show similar effectiveness. According to The Handbook of Counseling Psychology: "Meta-analyses of psychotherapy studies have consistently demonstrated that there are no substantial differences in outcomes among treatments". The handbook states that there is "little evidence to suggest that any one psychological therapy consistently outperforms any other for any specific psychological disorders. This is sometimes called the Dodo bird verdict after a scene/section in Alice in Wonderland where every competitor in a race was called a winner and is given prizes".[151]
Further analyses seek to identify the factors that the psychotherapies have in common that seem to account for this, known as common factors theory; for example the quality of the therapeutic relationship, interpretation of problem, and the confrontation of painful emotions.[152][153][page needed][154][155]
Outcome studies have been critiqued for being too removed from real-world practice in that they use carefully selected therapists who have been extensively trained and monitored, and patients who may be non-representative of typical patients by virtue of strict inclusionary/exclusionary criteria. Such concerns impact the replication of research results and the ability to generalize from them to practicing therapists.[153][156]
However, specific therapies have been tested for use with specific disorders,[157] and regulatory organizations in both the UK and US make recommendations for different conditions.[158][159][160]
The Helsinki Psychotherapy Study was one of several large long-term clinical trials of psychotherapies that have taken place. Anxious and depressed patients in two short-term therapies (solution-focused and brief psychodynamic) improved faster, but five years long-term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis gave greater benefits. Several patient and therapist factors appear to predict suitability for different psychotherapies.[161]
Meta-analyses have established that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic psychotherapy are equally effective in treating depression.[162]
The bolded section is the one I can't easily verify, at least not when it's 9 am and I've been up all night studying.
Specifically regarding CBT, I found the following metanalysis-
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23870719/
Results: A total of 115 studies met inclusion criteria. The mean effect size (ES) of 94 comparisons from 75 studies of CBT and control groups was Hedges g = 0.71 (95% CI 0.62 to 0.79), which corresponds with a number needed to treat of 2.6. However, this may be an overestimation of the true ES as we found strong indications for publication bias (ES after adjustment for bias was g = 0.53), and because the ES of higher-quality studies was significantly lower (g = 0.53) than for lower-quality studies (g = 0.90). The difference between high- and low-quality studies remained significant after adjustment for other study characteristics in a multivariate meta-regression analysis. We did not find any indication that CBT was more or less effective than other psychotherapies or pharmacotherapy. Combined treatment was significantly more effective than pharmacotherapy alone (g = 0.49).
Conclusions: There is no doubt that CBT is an effective treatment for adult depression, although the effects may have been overestimated until now. CBT is also the most studied psychotherapy for depression, and thus has the greatest weight of evidence. However, other treatments approach its overall efficacy.
And when speaking of CBT as applied to more psychiatric conditions:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/
We identified 269 meta-analytic studies and reviewed of those a representative sample of 106 meta-analyses examining CBT for the following problems: substance use disorder, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, depression and dysthymia, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, eating disorders, insomnia, personality disorders, anger and aggression, criminal behaviors, general stress, distress due to general medical conditions, chronic pain and fatigue, distress related to pregnancy complications and female hormonal conditions. Additional meta-analytic reviews examined the efficacy of CBT for various problems in children and elderly adults. The strongest support exists for CBT of anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, bulimia, anger control problems, and general stress. Eleven studies compared response rates between CBT and other treatments or control conditions. CBT showed higher response rates than the comparison conditions in 7 of these reviews and only one review reported that CBT had lower response rates than comparison treatments. In general, the evidence-base of CBT is very strong. However, additional research is needed to examine the efficacy of CBT for randomized-controlled studies. Moreover, except for children and elderly populations, no meta-analytic studies of CBT have been reported on specific subgroups, such as ethnic minorities and low income samples.
Addressing the specific claims of similar efficacy to the forms of therapy based on pseudoscientific principles:
CBT for depression was more effective than control conditions such as waiting list or no treatment, with a medium effect size (van Straten, Geraedts, Verdonck-de Leeuw, Andersson, & Cuijpers, 2010; Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010). However, studies that compared CBT to other active treatments, such as psychodynamic treatment, problem-solving therapy, and interpersonal psychotherapy, found mixed results. Specifically, meta-analyses found CBT to be equally effective in comparison to other psychological treatments (e.g., Beltman, Oude Voshaar, & Speckens, 2010; Cuijpers, Smit, Bohlmeijer, Hollon, & Andersson, 2010; Pfeiffer, Heisler, Piette, Rogers, & Valenstein, 2011). Other studies, however, found favorable results for CBT (e.g. Di Giulio, 2010; Jorm, Morgan, & Hetrick, 2008; Tolin, 2010). For example, Jorm and colleagues (2008) found CBT to be superior to relaxation techniques at post-treatment. Additionally, Tolin (2010) showed CBT to be superior to psychodynamic therapy at both post-treatment and at six months follow-up, although this occurred when depression and anxiety symptoms were examined together.
Compared to pharmacological approaches, CBT and medication treatments had similar effects on chronic depressive symptoms, with effect sizes in the medium-large range (Vos, Haby, Barendregt, Kruijshaar, Corry, & Andrews, 2004). Other studies indicated that pharmacotherapy could be a useful addition to CBT; specifically, combination therapy of CBT with pharmacotherapy was more effective in comparison to CBT alone (Chan, 2006).
In the particular case of BPD, after talking to @Throwaway05 I looked into the actual benefit of DBT, and was surprised to see that it was genuinely far more effective than I expected. Somewhere around the ballpark of 50% success rates in curbing symptoms and letting quite a few of them lead entirely unremarkable and functional lives. If 50% sounds underwhelming, wait till you hear the typical cure rates I'm used to.
So:
Is therapy and therapy speak actually harmful to people that have mental illness?
A clear no. The evidence base is nigh unimpeachable, even if, as discussed above, the most bullshit insanity inducing forms like Freudian or Lacanian psychotherapy still beat placebo.
My personal working hypothesis is that therapy acts as a decent substitute for a friend, a non-judgemental and understanding one who has seemingly endless time to listen to your problems, and is forbidden, on the pain of losing the way they make a living, from disclosing your troubles. Unfortunately, quite a few people genuinely lack actual good friends, so even such as ersatz substitute has notable effects.
This is an entirely different question from the fad we've been having for quite a few years of "therapy culture", or the insistence of people to co-opt/misuse therapy speak to lend their bullshit legitimacy. Then again, there are practising Freudian and Lacanian therapists, and few other people seem to have the same burning urge I have to burn their houses down. Even then, I must concede they beat placebo, as well as the dead horse that is repressed penis envy.
Anyway, therapy seems to beat placebo, and works synergistically with drugs, even if you cynically notice that therapy based off nonsense does much the same thing as more considered approaches, but it's not in dispute that it works. At least I have the consolation of being able to throw drugs at people instead of just talking at them as a licensed shrink in training, for all the quibbling about if SSRIs work, ain't nobody claiming their ADHD isn't being helped when they're zooted up on stimulants.
To conclude, is therapy helpful when administered by someone who knows what the fuck they're doing? Yes.
Are they/us responsible for random idiots using it as an obfuscation technique? Not really, though the upper echelons of HR are often staffed by people with degrees in psychology where I'm at.
Is it possibly a net negative for the set of {all people subjected to mealy mouthed terminology}? No clue, but you asked about the actually mentally ill, and you have my answer. No surprise that a few of them pick up on the lingo.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16hr ago
I would consider a different possibility. These people may or may not be in therapy, I don’t know. But the normalization of therapy, and the normalization of therapy speak is that people are less likely to shame or punish bad behavior when the person doing it is suffering from mental illness. So a lot of people use this to their advantage just like people use minority status or being the son of an executive. Being seen that way is used to engage in bad behavior without having to pay a real price for it.
I do think therapy in wider society and therapy when the person isn’t severely mentally ill can be a problem, but I don’t see that as what is happening here. These people seem to know exactly what they’re doing, and they use therapy as a protection against people calling them out on their behavior.
Goodguy
17hr ago
Harrison Smith of Infowars, in appropriately conspiratorial fashion, said that policies of “infinite immigration forever” are meant to make opposition to technocratic power impossible. He suggested, for example, that one reason no one tries to impose “refugees” or antipollution measures on China — the world’s biggest polluter — is that the Chinese are already under effective control and threaten neither their own regime nor the ambitions of the World Economic Forum.
Simpler and less conspiratorial explanation: "infinite immigration forever" is in place because a large fraction of white people genuinely feel bad for third-worlders and/or want to make up for colonialism and/or simply don't grasp the possible negative consequences of immigration and/or want to use third-worlders for cheap labor. People don't try to impose pro-refugee measures on China because the Chinese would laugh at it and ignore it. People don't try to impose anti-pollution measures on China because the main reason China pollutes a lot is that it makes a lot of the rest of the world' stuff, so trying to push anti-pollution measures there has a real cost for the world economy, whereas pushing anti-pollution measures in the developed world is relatively cheap.
stav
20hr ago
I live in Texas and a lot (maybe even the majority) of Texans of Mexican descent support deporting illegals. One of my best friend's dads was an illegal from 50 years ago but became a firefighter and is now a huge Tucker fan. His kids call him racist for his beliefs. He considers himself a white person. My parents live in a conservative suburb of Austin and a lot of the people there are Hispanic (probably 20%). Their Hispanic neighbors are Army vets who wave the American flag and all the deployments he did as a badge of honor. The wife of the governor (considered a white supremacist) is a woman of Mexican descent and supports deporting these people. She is also a trad Cath and converted the governor. Texas couldn't be a Red state without the support of right wing Hispanics. It's just a fact.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
10hr ago
Yeah. Google, several times, tried to recruit heavily from HBCUs and when that didn't work tried to improve the educational program (the CS program, anyway) at HBCUs so it would work. There was resistance from some of the people at the HBCUs of course, but I doubt that was the only problem. The top HBCUs just have a lower quality of student (e.g. as measured by standardized test scores) than median state flagships.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
It seems pretty clear that the actually mentally ill benefit from therapy.
It seems much more clear that most people who are in therapy do not, in fact, need to be there. Is therapy actually harmful for people who don't need it? That's a much more interesting and better supported question, and I think you're actually describing that. I'm someone who's benefited from therapy; I think I benefited more from religion(which is also much cheaper) but that therapy definitely helped and didn't lead me to make insane claims. But most people in therapy should just make friends instead, and there's lots of anecdata indicating that therapy hurts them in ways beyond just costing money.
BahRamYou
10hr ago
I'm curious, has Google or any other company ever tried recruiting directly from Africa? It seems like there are some talented people in Africa, like Igbo Nigerians, who might be overlooked by the US.
Spookykou
6hr ago
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
hydroacetylene
9hr ago
Governor Abbott ran for election on being married to a Hispanic woman. He was actually the moderate pro-integration candidate; the accusations of him being a white supremacist mostly come from deranged blue tribers who would say that about anyone with an R next to their name.
And although he's definitely a conservative Catholic who converted because of his wife, he's not religiously orthodox enough to be a tradcath. My sources in the Austin Latin mass community note having seen his wife frequently at religious events, but never him, and he does things like visiting the wailing wall and defending plan b(the birth control) which are very not tradcath. That's not to say his wife's religious beliefs have no influence over his policies; they do; but Abbott is a politician at heart and willing to make the kinds of compromises with Catholic doctrine for political reasons that keep him from fully sharing them.
Agreed that right wing Hispanics are key to Texas' redness and that the idea of an emerging demographic majority turning Texas blue is fantasia, especially when the local democrats exist mostly to waste out of state donations on far-left vanity runs.
ZeroPipeline
10hr ago
Why does the US need 300 million people? Why does England need millions more people on its tiny landmass? Is it necessary to destroy the ethnic makeup of these countries to ensure the line always goes up?
I think the problem is that most of our economic systems are now predicated on growth occurring over time. The easiest way to keep the economy growing is to increase the population. The growth can't last forever, especially within the confines of a single planet, but no one seems terribly interested in moving to a sustainable model.
ZeroPipeline
10hr ago
One thing I have no explanation for, is why all of these terms seem to have originated in therapy.
A lot of these terms center around blaming other people for your problems. Individual therapy that blames your problems not on yourself but on various things in your environment are going to be more successful in retaining clients than therapy that just tells you to get your shit together. New terminology had to be invented to recast what would otherwise be considered as selfish behavior as being good and theraputic.
Crowstep
11hr ago
The Open Society Foundation isn't a 'Jewish' organisation, it was just founded by a Jew. George Soros may love multiculturalism, but that doesn't mean that Jews love it.
'Every mainstream Jewish organisation in Europe' - The fact that you haven't been able to name a single organisation here suggests that you don't actually have any examples.
Barbra Spectre is an individual, not an organisation.
The JIDF is, as far as I can tell, an Israeli nationalist group. I can't see any examples of them promoting multiculturalism outside of Israel.
As far as I can tell, the ADL is the only thing you've listed that is a Jewish organisation and promotes multiculturalism.
Look, there is a world outside America. American Jews may be left wing, but that doesn't make global jewry left wing. One of the most influential French anti-immigrationist is Eric Zemmour, an Algerian Jew. Britain's only Jewish Prime Minister was a proud British imperial nationalist. I could go on. This idea that western countries invited millions of third worlders because the Jews made us do it is a cope. Our own political class did it to us, not the semitic enemy within that you're imagining.
Goodguy
17hr ago
Mental illness is an extremely broad category. Therapy can help some kinds of it a lot and some other kinds of it likely not at all, as far as I can tell. People who both know a lot about therapy speak and also are predisposed to lie a lot obviously will often use therapy speak as part of their lying. However, that does not necessarily mean that therapy speak is in general a bad thing.
I see a similarity to business-speak ("corporate jargon", if you prefer). Business-speak can be a good thing, a jargon to quickly and effectively express complex specific ideas. But it can also be, and often is, used to lie. So often that the idea of bullshit business-speak is a widely recognized trope. Yet business-speak is not useless for honest communication, and indeed often is used in a helpful way.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
23hr ago
This is like the unscissor statement. Whether you're unvaccinated or still masking, you can agree on the above.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.
This is often reinforced by the meme that as a woman you should not be dependent on a man. In my experience this does a disservice to those who believe it. My wife and I are mutually dependent on each-other, in our complimentary domains. She's been a full-time homemaker the past 8 years. One of her friends from uni, who is now literally a witch, was shocked to hear that she is dependent on me financially.
I see it as the value she provides to our home and our four children far exceeds the value of her working for an employer. We'd be unable to pay a person of equivalent caliber to perform the work she does for our family.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards.
Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more? That there have never been so few women per capita becoming mothers, to me is evidence against this.
Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.
functor
2hr ago
Counterpoint: Say something about someone's mom who is from a traditionalist culture and if you survive the reaction you should reevaluate women not being valued. Mothers and matriarchal figures are highly respected.
Inferior is a relative term, it simply depends on what we are measuring. With that said, the standard deviation for achievement is limited for women. Becoming a king is a greater achievement than motherhood. Alexander the Great clearly beat all mother's throughout history in achievement. However, few men live up to that level. The mother's aren't valued aspect is dependent on a culture where people think they can be whatever they want and they are comparing house wife to astronaut. Not average job of a man to mother of 2-3
Bad Therapy is largely about that kind of thing. The premise is that there are always risks to any intervention, and when the target audience isn't suffering from debilitating mental illness, the risks outweigh the benefits.
My father experienced something similar with his sister, due to a "repressed memories" therapist.
The identity preference ratchet is something else, though, from what I've heard. Something more like Marxist class warfare, but for identity groups. Cain and Able, Kulaks, misdirected Leviathan, that kind of thing.
There might sometimes be a steel man for people to use HR scary words about discrimination and toxic environments when they really just have kind of a shitty manager who's bad at managing or something. As far as I can tell, unless it's absurdly obvious and well documented, if an employee complains that their manager is bad at their managing job, they will be met with disinterest, possibly irritation towards them, rather than the manager. Perhaps they will get in trouble for wanting clear directives or trying to enforce their own boundaries in the face of the shitty manager at some point. They will probably not get a better manager. If they go on about HR scare words, on the other hand, the company will go out of its way to protect them from reprisal, and they might actually get put under someone else. That's a win for the employee! So that's what they're incentivized to do.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 For more information please reread this post
7hr ago
"Self Care". This is a synonym for self-indulgence, but with a good connotation instead of a bad one. Spending 8 hours watching netflix for example, in my grandfather's English, would be understood to be a moderately shameful act of vice. Now it can be referred to as "Self Care", in which case it is understood as a noble recognition of ones own weakness.
On the other hand, never taking any time for oneself can be somewhat corrosive to one's sanity....
I think this might be an instance of All Debates Are Bravery Debates.
sliders1234
7hr ago
Disclaimer: That avoids doing anything for ADOS.
But that gets the right ratios and avoids negative selection bias. Even if I believed HBD was smaller but we still had affirmative action then Google recruiting at HBCUs is bound to fail. A 1400 SAT black high school student is going to select into Harvard and not go to the HBCU. I could almost say this is true even if HBD did not exists. New England private liberal arts schools have collapsed and can not compete with the big boys. If HBD was not true then the best HBCU would be like Amherst. And what does everyone at Amherst have a rejection letter from Harvard. Once you add in affirmative action and hbd the gap gets much larger.
Is therapy and therapy speak actually harmful to people that have mental illness? As a programmer, I have ended up in multiple projects with people that have BPD or bipolar disorder because it seems to attract these kinds of people.
The first time I noticed this was when I was in college and a good friend of mine who is bipolar asked me to be his partner on a final project together for an operating systems class to use Markov chains for predictive paging. We had it almost done and I had generated a bunch of data to use and my algorithm was slightly off. He took the data and code I sent him that I hadn't yet submitted to our GitHub and took it as his own and just submitted it so it looked like I didn't do anything. When I confronted him about it, he started using a bunch of therapy speak like I understand you think this is what happened etc. and all this other bullshit that he learned from therapists. The thing was that it obviously wasn't true what he was saying but he had all these tools from a therapist to disregard me being annoyed about what actually happened (and I had literal proof). It turned out he had taken a bunch of adderal that made him borderline insane and used that therapy speak to deny reality. He eventually apologized to me and just said he was stressed and took too much adderal and it made him insane for a few weeks before he graduated. This is not the first time I have seen this.
I have also seen this in my family where my grandpa sexually molested his daughter (my dad's sister). When my grandpa died, she started accusing my dad of bizarre stuff like sniffing and stealing her panties. The thing is, this is literally impossible because my dad is 10 years younger than her so he would have been a toddler when this sexual molestation she claimed my dad did happened. Plus she was in college and away for some of this stuff that she claimed happened. Yet her therapist encouraged her to accuse my dad of this publicly and ruin his reputation in our family. Other than her kids, everyone realized it was literally impossible, but half of our family don't talk now because a therapist encouraged her to make insane claims. I'm not some right wing extremist saying don't believe women, but the idea that a 5 year old was sexually harassing a 15 year old is literally insane. Yet she found a therapist that told her this is true. This clearly isn't a scientific field.
I currently work at a big company that is woke as hell (possibly top 10% woke) and because I am an executive director and have admin privileges, I get involved in similar disputes with our legal and HR team. I don't read these people's emails and chats, but from talking to our HR and legal team when I have to pull this data there are so many insane people making these claims of sexual harassment or bigotry.
The funniest part is despite how absurdly woke this company is and all the identity politics groups we have, almost none of them claim the company is discriminating against them. My executive admin is a young Black woman who runs the Black company group. From what I have seen, they don't claim that the company is necessarily racist but instead they advocate expanding our recruitment to things like HBCUs or removing degree requirements for jobs. I'm sure they deep down want quotas and they massively get supported by management, but I haven't seen any explicit calls for this.
This brings me back to therapy speak. All these people that have sued our company for "discrimination" have used bullshit therapy speak to justify their insane claims. This company bends over backwards to hire blacks and hispanics (and by the way, there are a lot of hispanics in the company regardless they don't need affirmative action) and anything claimed otherwise is nonsense. Therapy speak justifies people who are bad at their job and allows them to think they are victims. And all the woke women and blacks in HR have agreed with this! Bottom line, a lot of people are being enabled by therapists to be toxic and blame whites or patriarchy instead of their own behavior, and even the woke HR people agree with this. Sorry for the rant.
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