It’s not even that it’s “bad” therapy exactly. It’s clearly well intentioned and thoughtful, with a lot of thought put into it, and that’s a lot more than some people get from therapy if stories are any indication (and better than some other experiences I’ve had with it). But the part that shows up over and over again in the background is how focused it is on the individual. It sounds like it sort of makes sense at first, you are there to address your own problems, after all. But the thing is that a therapist has no solutions for what is beyond that. And the solution they often do have, in my experience, is some form of rugged individualism; be better at being you in a vacuum because you can’t control others and most things are outside of your control.
Self-improvement can be a thing, I don’t think that’s somehow wrong. Healing from trauma can be a thing. But the most abled, neurotypical, “healthy” of individuals in western capitalist society are still dealing with a lot of bullshit from capitalism itself and its consequences. Maybe I just wish people in mental health would call attention to that. I don’t expect the existing society to casually teach people how to be revolutionaries. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you go to get help and feel like you’re being asked to either pretend a huge portion of what impacts you is not a factor, or take it like it’s some kind of inevitable stress of life and just cope.
It’s like this sort of “it doesn’t get better out there, so you have to make it better in here” is the best way I can think to put it. Like tacitly giving up on a fundamentally better world, even if that’s not the conscious intention.
Psych isn’t my field, but in dietetics and nutrition there’s a tendency to treat socioeconomic and societal issues (aka material conditions) as kind of a force of nature. This isn’t true for 100% of people in the field, but the ones that do catch on tend to end up in policy, advocacy, public health or other niches that actually try to work on systemic issues rather than in clinical settings. I wouldn’t be surprised if psych was similar; it’s not that those issues aren’t acknowledged by the field as a whole, but the individuals who end up in clinical settings don’t focus on them for whatever reason. There’s likely a lot more behind the scenes who are actually working for change, you just don’t see them because they’re not working with individuals.
Interesting, thanks for your perspective on it.
I had a couple hours free before work today and my cursed brain won’t let shit like this go without looking it up, so I went and did a quick scan of the literature. Like I said, it’s outside my field so I’m probably missing a lot of nuance (and I welcome any actual psychs to check in and correct me), but Psychiatric Epidemiology is a thing, and they’re well aware of the association between socioeconomic position and mental health. These seem to be the people working on policy, for example building an evidence base for UBI. Of course all that relies on governments that actually give a shit and are willing to listen to evidence, but yeah, class-conscious psychs are out there. They’re just not taking clients.