Reddit reviews The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn't Work

RD Laing did some great work, but he’s maybe a little out of date at this point. Are you familiar with newer work in this area: movements like Critical Psychiatry and Mad in America, or authors like Joanna Moncrieff, David Healy, and Paul Moloney?

I often meet Leftists (and plenty of normies, too) who are perfectly fine with being somewhere on the anti-psychiatry spectrum, as this generally comes from a principled anti-corporatism that makes it easy to believe we’re taking too many psych meds because Big Pharma wants us to. However, they are less likely to follow anti-psychiatry arguments to their logical conclusion: That the DSM and psychology in general have not provided an adequate justification for the diagnostic creep which has lead to an increasing statistical prevalence of various mental disorders, and that talk therapy’s benefits may be largely overstated. I like to recommend Paul Moloney’s The Therapy Industry: The Irresistible Rise of the Talking Cure, and Why It Doesn't Work on this subject. Here’s what I wrote about it the other day.

Also, healthism totally exists outside of clinical psychology, as I pointed out three days ago. Examples off the top of my head: The newly restrictive criteria to define normal-weightedness in the ’90s (not to mention whether the obesity epidemic is entirely justified by present scientific evidence); the creation of the pointless prediabetes category in the early ’00s; and the sloppy mess that is our current hypertension guidelines (i.e., so many unnecessary categories, so much unnecessary and potentially harmful advice like salt reduction). The increasing classification of many formerly well people as patients can lead to many potentially harmful consequences, and honestly may be bad for a host of other reasons.

If your Leftist friends are anything like the people I know, they’re happy to criticize Western medicine, but they really just want to replace some of its newer, more invasive aspects with lifestylism and woo—they don’t actually want to eliminate the constant, unnecessary health anxiety that permeates our modern neoliberal lives.

Sorry so long. I’m always trying to get comrades to go from a vague question of our present medical institutions to an awareness of the harmfulness of neoliberal healthism whenever I can. Maybe check out the books I’ve mentioned if you’re interested.

There are many scientists who believe therapy is basically a scam and doesn't help in the majority of cases.

https://www.amazon.com/Therapy-Industry-Irresistible-Talking-Doesnt/dp/074532987X