Another op-ed sample: on mental health

from my op-ed series. Don't crucify me, it's just an opinion~ love y'all ;)

HOT TAKE: Wanna talk about it?


Therapy is bullshit. I know that any therapist reading this is probably mad right now, and I would be too if someone just dismissed my entire profession, but hear me out.

When I say “therapy,” I’m really referring to talk therapy. There are tons of options, so I want to clarify: I mean the typical one that people recreationally use where they have an hour to unload on a professional who sits and gives minimal feedback. Think of it as Therapy Lite. Trademarked. No calories - mostly air.

I’ve been on psychiatric medication for Bipolar I since 2020, but it’s been a struggle throughout my life. At the end of 2019, I took a grippy-sock vacation to the mental hospital largely because I completely ignored my mental health up until that point. Well, that was a wake up call that caused me to seek out every therapeutic option. Talk, cognitive behavioral, EMDR - if they offered it, I’d try it. I wouldn’t say that I know everything about mental health, but I’ve seen the system for sure. And I’m not completely against it.

For sure, definitely, most people will struggle with some aspect of their mental health at some point in their life. Me included (obviously). Before you start that journey, though, just know - talk therapy is garbage.

I think we have a misconception about what the goal of therapy is. Take a second and think about it - what are you trying to accomplish in those sessions? When I ask people that question, the huge array of answers I get can boil down into two general categories: happiness and healing.

That’s where I start to disagree. And I think this fundamental misunderstanding of therapy’s purpose is why most people think their mental health is “bad.” Trust me, until you’re locked up, it’s probably not rock bottom. Even when I hit rock bottom, I looked around during group therapy in the hospital and thought to myself “wow, I’m really not going through jack shit.”

Not to play in the trauma olympics. But think about those goals I just listed: Happiness. Wow, that’s lofty. And unsustainable. You can’t seriously expect to walk through your entire life happy. Healing. Okay, so we’re starting our mental health journey labeling ourselves as “broken.” Sounds counterproductive to me.

So we feel unhappy. We call ourselves broken because we aren’t shitting rainbows. And we head to talk therapy missing the entire point. We think we’re going to find and diagnose some elusive “problem” and “heal” to find “happiness” or at the very least be “happier” than we were before.

Talk therapy is branching off of Freud’s psychoanalysis. The quintessential image of laying on some black leather couch while some therapist just continually asks “and how does that make you feel?”

We sit with our therapist while they prompt us: what do you feel, why do you feel that way? And we give answers that feel sincere and truthful, tie up the hour with a pretty bow, and leave not realizing how the exercise didn’t go anywhere.

I think most people who feel like talk therapy helps them actually just like the dopamine of feeling like they’re doing something. That the real triumph is putting on pants and going, because at least then you have tangible proof that you’re trying. They enjoy shooting the shit and walking out as if progress is happening. Spoiler: it isn’t.

Talk therapists help you feel better. That’s it. We can call it “unpacking,” but let’s be real: we know our issues. This isn’t some kind of vacation home where we put our clothes into the correct drawers. We don’t need to tell the story of dad leaving as if we’ve never explored our traumas. It isn’t necessary to rehash stuff to feel accomplished. Those truths don’t go anywhere just because you said them aloud.

I read somewhere about the difference between the experiencing self and the narrating self. Basically, the experiencing self is the soul in the moment. What we see, hear, and feel. But afterward, we struggle with those memories because human beings are wired for storytelling. We want to know the bigger pictures, the connections, and where we are in the story. So we shift into the narrating self: the narrating self goes back into your experiences and fills in the blanks.

So the experiencing self is upset. After the fact, our narrating self takes over to make sense of what we felt: we’re upset that our friend canceled. It hurt our feelings that she’d do that again - she doesn’t seem to care much lately. And what if we aren’t friends in the future? It’s natural to want to put everything in context.

But talk therapy is like crack for the narrating self. You start out having a bad day and leave with a villain origin story.

We go haywire: we’re upset. And not just because of the friend, but because of our ex. And the time our mom forgot us at a Walmart when we were seven. Speaking of our mom, she gave us trust issues, and maybe that also ties into why I’m upset.

And it’s not that all of those things can’t be working in tandem, but we slippery slope our way into a web of narration to the point where some of it is more fiction than nonfiction.

We didn’t blow up on Rachel because grandpa played favorites. We were angry and bitchy at that moment because of that moment. But talk therapy makes it easier and easier to narrate. We basically get trained on exactly how to do it, and that narration starts to sound a lot like excuses over time.

And it’s worse when we involve a therapist honestly, because they encourage it without knowing all of the facts. They think they’re helping us “uncover” these connections when they don’t know everything they’d need to even stretch their way into those conclusions in the first place.

My friend who regularly does talk therapy says she likes getting an “expert” opinion. But in my eyes, that person is the farthest from expert: they’ve talked to you about your childhood or relationships or traumas in hour-long weekly spurts for God knows how long with zero stakes in your wellbeing. Not that they don’t care, but they don't HAVE to care. And the fact that you pay them means that they otherwise wouldn’t.

The expert is first and foremost YOU. Followed closely by people who are around you, the people who know you, and the people you’ve impacted. But we don’t talk to them, do we? God forbid we practice actual vulnerability with people we couldn’t ghost without a second thought. And we wouldn’t want to talk to those we’ve hurt and face the problems head-on without abstract thought puzzles and hypothetical questions.

We’d rather discuss with a therapist who asks “why do you think your sister resents you?” rather than talk to our sister about her resentments. Because that would be hard. Uncomfortable. It wouldn’t feel good. And if we think the point of mental health is to feel better, we run the other direction.

My friend likes talking about her ex with the therapist, but she hates talking to me about it despite the fact that I lived with both of them as roommates while they were in a relationship. Why? Because I can actually give her real insights and observations, and she hates hearing them. I have specific examples of her toxicity or mistakes - stuff that she doesn’t tell her therapist because she would rather sit in an echo chamber. Not that the therapist is purposefully doing this - it’s by design. The therapist only knows what you choose to share.

In that way, the therapist is not only uninformed but misinformed. You went in for insight: why do I harbor resentment for my mother? But you spent the whole time telling the therapist your past from YOUR point of view. Where is the insight in that?

Not to mention, I think it takes away our agency when it comes to mental health. My friend says she loves it when her therapist tells her to “dig deeper.” My response: why the fuck are you paying someone to tell you that when you could just challenge yourself to do the same thing on your own time?

We go there for confirmation: am I crazy? Did I overreact? Instead of taking a self-inventory and showing some initiative to do the work on our own.

It’s like when I teach literature to high schoolers. I literally have to restrain myself from filling in blanks for the students.

What does the green light symbolize in The Great Gatsby?

Crickets.

When they’re uncomfortable with my stare, they start to throw out answers. So many wrong answers. So much confusion.

But I resist temptation. It would be easier to help them. Talk them through it. Ask leading questions. Give hints.

But they’re building a muscle. They’re growing as critical thinkers, and they need to do it on their own. Otherwise, I’m limiting them. If I help with the heavy lifting, they don’t get any stronger.

And the more answers I give, the more they’re content waiting for them to be dropped into their laps. All I did was breadcrumb them, and they feel like they found the path all by themselves. They’re happy, and they even feel smart at the end of the day. They know things now! But it’s not about knowledge. It’s about learning how to learn.

Asking the right questions on your own, not being provided prompts.

Side rant: I think it’s the same way with teaching. I remember back in the day when I went to school, our essay prompt would say “Write about a symbol in The Great Gatsby.” Now, the prompts the curriculum assigns are: “Analyze the symbol of the green light in The Great Gatsby and how it connects to Gatsby’s hope.” Well, that’s over half the answer right out of the gate, isn’t it? We’re afraid to let them be wrong. So I think it’s a larger societal issue. We don’t want to think anymore. Or no one really asks us to.

There’s an educational theory called the Zone of Proximal Development. It’s basically the growth that a student can make outside of where they already are - it’s a small circle of where they are inside a larger circle of where they could be. But it takes pushing. And it’s uncomfortable because it relies on what we educators call “productive struggle.” Making them work for it, and letting them fail when they fail. To fail forward.

Somewhere along the line, educators - and I guess therapists too - got it in our heads that if we break little Billy’s confidence, he’ll never learn. But the thing is: if it isn’t challenging, it’s guaranteed that he won’t. Discouragement isn’t the enemy, honestly. The illusion of success is worse than the reality of failure.

One of the most detrimental things you can do to a human being is tear down their ability to grapple with hard topics. To be wrong until they’re right. Or at least until their new answer is less dumb than their really stupid previous guess. Every time we help too much, we dismantle their own processes and replace them with our own. And anytime a therapist isn’t there coaxing out a conclusion, they’re lost.

Talk therapy does that. Because even if you make an epiphany about a single, isolated situation in your life with your therapist, you didn’t learn how to make epiphanies on your own. You went back and retroactively worked it through with assistance. And that pretty much guarantees that you haven’t learned the skills to work your way through your next problem when it occurs in real time. You’ll just be back in therapy talking about it after the fact.

And bottom line: mental health isn’t about being happy. Everything in the DSMR-15 is about diagnosing disorders. A “disorder” is something that causes significant distress and impairs your ability to live normally - specifically, they state: “This dysfunction must be associated with significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning, and it should not be simply a response to common stressors or losses.”

It’s not because you’re overwhelmed at work. It’s not due to a death in the family. It’s not because it gets darker earlier in the wintertime. It’s not the general ups and downs of life, the emotions we all oscillate through as we be-bop our way through existence.

I’m not gatekeeping mental illness here. I’m not un-diagnosing you. This should be good news. If you’re mad that this definition excludes you, I ask…why are you trying to be mentally ill? And if you still fall under this definition: rejoice! Because it tells us exactly what we’re trying to accomplish with mental health services.

If we use this definition, the goal is clear: we are trying to improve our functioning. Not chasing happiness, not fixing something broken. Instead, we are essentially boomers learning Microsoft Word so that we can live and work in our daily lives. Metaphorically speaking, of course. We are adding to our skill arsenal so that next time mania pops up, I won’t drain my bank account because I bought $2,000 worth of aquarium equipment on a whim.

We’re learning how to process. How to think and react next time, in real time. It’s not ruminating on trauma or dissecting our pasts to understand why we feel things (if those connections are even halfway accurate). In theory, if your therapy is working, you should have LESS to talk about next session, right? But narrating our past feelings and experiences through the present lens is pointless. Especially if we have Dr. Whoever chiming in and crafting brilliant fanfiction alongside us.

So yeah. Talk therapy is a crock of horse shit. Cancel me for this if therapy makes you feel warm inside afterward. I guess that’s your equivalent of me taking a shot of vodka. I don’t want to be a hypocrite: if I can drink hard liquor, you’re free to pointlessly yap to your heart’s content. Do whatever makes you feel good, I suppose.

But if I were your friend (and I WAS that friend) I’d tell you to get it together and do it yourself.

Also - sort of on topic: there are so few instances where you really need to lock yourself up in a mental hospital. I’m serious: as someone who was voluntarily admitted then locked in for days, I am dying on the hill that most people do not need inpatient facilities. If at all possible, stay in outpatient care.

My therapist at the psych hospital basically told me that the mental ward isn’t a cure-all. It isn’t rocket science: they make you sleep, get out of bed, shower, take your meds, and eat regularly. You know, the stuff necessary for sustaining life. Spoiler alert: you can do that yourself on the outside in most cases.

If you are not a million percent sure that you’re beyond doing those things on your own, don’t go into the hospital. Because when you leave their round-the-clock supervision, you’ll figure out that you skipped learning those skills. They did it for you. You didn’t gain your own routine, and you didn’t practice the discipline needed to maintain it, especially if you have debilitating depression levels that require you to actively fight to shower or even get out of bed every day.

In the hospital, someone else holds you accountable. They force you. You’ll get out of the program and go right back to sleeping 24/7 because no one is looming over you to take your blood pressure every morning. So yeah, this rant connects, fuck off, because basically what I’m telling you is you need to do the work.

Like I said, some people really go beyond being able to do it on their own, and in that case, fine, we need to intervene. Check yourself in. But if you can do anything at all, start doing it. Even if it’s small stuff.

I used to have horrific, long-term depressive episodes. Completely debilitating. My friends used to make fun of me for using 3-in-1 shampoo during those times (I know…assholes…), and yeah, my hair was a frizzy nightmare, but I wasn’t capable of taking extensive showers yet. So I started small. Surely, I could handle the 2-and-a-half minutes it took me to use my all-purpose product. I’m sure that shit could clean the drain while it was at it. And once I started having those small wins, I realized that I could slowly challenge myself. Bought actual conditioner. It was a whole thing.

Think feasible and achievable. Don’t set yourself up for failure. Start making doable routines and hold yourself accountable, because that’s really all they do for you in a hospital. And you’ll be so proud of yourself when you do it on your own.

It’s not magical. It’s what we all know we’re supposed to be doing when we take a depression nap instead. Me included. So wake up. I’m not fuckin playing with y’all anymore.

I consider you a friend and I’d tell my friend the same thing.