Therapists can't help the people who really need it: questioning therapy.

so you know what good is therapy
to the people who to the people who need it to the people who need it that's that's the question i'm asking i think a lot of people need to be confronted on their [ __ ] i do but i see the therapist as being quite uh hamstrung quite disabled quite unable to confront them on their [ __ ] that way even compared to someone who say a co-worker someone who's worked in the same office with you for years and knows you even on that shallow level like look i know the excuses you make i know you know i know what's going on in your life um if what you need is to have someone who talks to you about your problems and confront you on your [ __ ] and give you a new perspective i think the disadvantages of the therapist's position are much much more important to appreciate than the advantages now i think just going to add this i think it's really important to argue against your own position in these conversations to point out the limits of requisition so just say very briefly i think there are some problems that are of such a technical nature that the sciences actually have given us uh you know some expertise that therapists have and that non-specialists don't have i read a detailed account once of a guy who would become addicted to the feeling of sandpaper and like in all of the united states there are like five people who specialize in this sorry that's a made up number but there's an incredibly small number of people with expertise in this type of tactile addiction and he was taken through a series of steps of like training where he moved from sandpaper to finer grades of sandpaper to using some kind of rough cloth to using velvet and like you know they weaned him off his addiction to abrading his skin with sandpaper and i've read a detailed account of a woman who was terrified of spiders and she went to see a specialist in arachnophobia and to give an example of what her terror used to entail she would completely spray the interior of her car with insecticide every time before getting into it there was no reason to think there was a spider inside but just because the possibility of there being a spider inside her car was so terrifying then she'd drive her car inhaling insecticide as she as she drove around so this is really crazy and you know apparently there was some technical knowledge and the guy took her through step by step and got her to the point where she could actually hold a spider in her hand and not freak out so to argue against my own position i think there probably are some areas where and look i'm being jejune here i'm assuming those articles weren't lying i haven't taken one moment to look at what percentage of people who get treatment for arachnophobia improve and what percent of people don't improve or get no significant benefit you know that that may you know it may be when you look into it that actually treatment for arachnophobia and this type of uh tactile abrasion addiction that actually the success rates are shockingly poor it would not surprise me given the research i've done on antidepressants and many other things maybe in reality these are cherry-picked success stories from a field that is paralyzed by its inability to actually cure anything seems to be the case with therapy or broadly speaking however i can imagine that your argument specifically that you can't rely on your friends to address these things that could be true of arachnophobia like your grandfather or your brother or your coworker they just don't want to deal with the fact that you're terrified of spiders and they don't like this is sort of technical enough they don't want to deal with it or they don't want to deal with the fact that you're addicted to rubbing yourself with sandpaper um yes so to argue against my position i think my perspective has limits and it's only valid within those limits unfortunately that does not mean that treatment or therapy is successful outside of those limits henia mania doesn't have rare problems let's name her youtube channel first name henya last name mania her problems are not rare they're not extraordinary and she now has decades of going in and asking for professional help and nobody can help her and sooner or later they just admit that that there's nothing they can do to help her with her psychological problems i think that is a damning portrait of where this science and this uh this province of the performing arts has progressed to in the year 2020 they might have underlying borderline personality disorder and you can spend hours and hours trying to talk to them about it but not really get anywhere because what they actually need is genuine therapy and so i guess and then another people in the chat are making a couple points that i also think are valid which is like some a lot of the things people want to talk to a therapist about are very private you don't want to reveal it to a friend so in any event it sounds like after talking to you your my perception of your stance which was sort of just pure anti-therapy maybe it was a little hyperbolic maybe you do see some potential value but it sounds like oh yeah in my video that has in the title uh get professional help there is no professional help it concludes by saying go ahead and knock on every door go ahead go to the psychiatric hospital go to wherever it is you can get help go and ask for help find out what they can do for you but sadly be prepared for the possibility that there is no help because that's happened to me i went i knocked on every door here this is victoria british columbia canada this is the capital city of this province right and there was no help for me under any heading including employment help including counseling for what my major should be at university like some of my problems are very mainstream it's like oh including the the internship program but yeah including i went and knocked on the doors for therapy or whatever and it's like look this is a really hard time in my life can anyone help me and the answer is no so this is another thing i mean i think your own position has has a very clear limit in this which is that you know if you think there's there's help out there sometimes you have to take no for an answer um sometimes you will knock on that door and you will ask for help and you're going to be disappointed when you're just told no you're on your own there's absolutely nobody's going to help you and here sorry in vancouver or victoria or los angeles you may also be told no all we do is help drug addicts get on methadone because that's what the entire service is devoted to it's completely overrun with drug addicts and that's the only form of social service that can include everything from the unemployment services to the psychiatric services that's that's all they're dealing with so nobody's going to help you i've i've knocked on the doors for legal aid i just mentioned i have a divorce tried to get legal assistance i've tried to get every kind of help i can get i live in a the capital city of my province in a first world country and my experience is there's nothing henya's experience is there's nothing we matter we're witnesses to this this period of history so for anyone who has a kind of um you know just a best case scenario optimistic view of what these institutions are doing with their billions of dollars of taxpayers money i've got to tell you my role is to be a canary in the coal mine and warren if you go and ask for professional help be prepared be prepared for that worst case scenario [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] i think that's valid i'm not gonna i have no pushback on that one um but look maybe maybe you do know people whose lives have really improved because of therapy i don't but if you do um you know that matters too you know well i do but i also know people who have been completely abandoned by the system and betrayed by this tried every avenue and received no help so i've kind of seen both sides of it money is clearly a factor the people that have gotten help were not you know destitute yes i knew i knew a guy was a millionaire but he was just kind of creepy his mannerisms his face like he wasn't somebody people want to talk to sorry it is it is part of the story he had like he didn't have a hundred million dollars he had a couple million dollars he was a multi-millionaire and um uh he looked old he looked like he was in his late 70s i forget maybe he was in his 60s uh just just a creepy disturbing guy to be where most people didn't want to talk to him i was i'm a very self-confident person but i can understand like if you talk to people about his problems and i remember that guy he went through the therapy olympics you know remember that guy and to me he was like this great example of you're the most privileged person in the world you know you're this multi-millionaire living and living in toronto canada he was and you know he needed a friend he needed help he needed a gre he was too old to have a grandfather but he need he needed help he needed love um you know he he needed meaning and guidance he needed a lot of things for people he needed a lot of things he wasn't getting and uh sadly i don't i don't think he got it out of the psychiatric establishment but i i have a human heart i sympathize with all sides like i sympathize with that dude taking his millions of dollars and trying to get help and i sympathize with the therapist who's probably sitting there like oh christ i gotta sit here and listen to this creepy old man talk about his creepy old man and just they probably just didn't sympathize i just didn't care get out of here with your millions of dollars you they probably you know i don't know keeping it all the way real