The Therapy-Industrial Complex
When "help" doesn’t help
Therapists control your life whether or not you use therapy because their model of mental health controls your institutions. Education, human resources, law enforcement, the media, and of course healthcare are now rooted in the “disease model” of mental health. It asserts that good feelings come effortlessly to “normal” people, so bad feelings are evidence of a disease. You can cure the disease by “accepting help,” according to the therapy-industrial complex.
This paradigm does more harm than good, in my opinion.
Therapists may be well-intentioned individuals, just doing what it takes to keep their jobs. But the greater good is not served by a theory that trains people to believe they are broken and must be fixed by an expert like a tooth or a car. The theory benefits the therapy-industrial complex, of course, and those benefits are rapidly growing.
If you question the disease model of mental health, you are condemned as a hater, a stigmatizer, and an anti-science nut. So most people just accept it. In fact, most people don’t notice it the way a fish doesn’t notice water.
What alternative is there, you may say. Here is an alternative:
Recognize that good feelings are hard to get from this brain we’ve inherited.
Recognize that feeling good is a learned skill.
If you didn’t learn yesterday, you can learn today.
You are not likely to learn if you are trained to believe that others get happy chemicals easily and that “treatment” can give you what you’re unjustly deprived of.
Help
Getting help is good if it actually helps you build emotion-regulation skills. If you don’t build skills, then “help” doesn’t help.
Treatment has a low success rate. When it fails, the only solution you hear from the therapy-industrial complex is that more treatment is necessary. The only problem is “access” to treatment, they say.
Now that our institutions are all controlled by the therapeutic world view, the complex is growing faster. It says that a huge percentage of the population is in urgent need of “access” to “help.” It produces “data” to “prove” the urgent need to buy what they are selling.
Your choices are limited.
Your tax money is being poured into the disease model of mental health. Your media are constantly selling the belief that you are broken but access to treatment can fix you. Your school psychologist controls the definition of mental health in your classroom, and your human resource department controls it in your workplace. The therapy-industrial complex controls the definition of mental health in the institutions of law and healthcare.
But you still have a choice in the privacy of your own mind. You could choose to constantly remind yourself of the facts:
Your brain is not designed to release good feelings all the time.
Happy chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin) are only released in short spurts that are soon metabolized, so you always have to do more to get more.
Your brain saves the happy chemicals for moments when they are needed to motivate survival action.
You define survival with neural pathways build by past happy chemical spurts and with a mammal brain that prioritizes the survival of your genes.
We all end up with neural pathways for seeking happy chemicals in ways that worked before, despite any unfortunate long-term consequences.
Unhappy chemicals (like cortisol) are released when you see potential obstacles to your survival.
Cortisol makes you feel like your survival is threatened even if you don’t consciously think that.
Cortisols tell your higher brain to find evidence of threat, which can lead to a cortisol spiral.
Cortisol evolved to motivate action to relieve the bad feeling, so each brain is eager to repeat behaviors that relieved it in its past.
You can learn new ways to stimulate happy chemicals instead of rushing into old happy habits, but it takes a lot of repetition.
You can stimulate dopamine by taking a small step toward meeting your needs.
You can stimulate oxytocin by taking a small step toward building mutual trust.
You can stimulate serotonin by taking a small step toward pride in your own strength.
Each step builds a pathway that makes the next step slightly easier.
Imagine a world in which people were taught this instead of the disease model. Imagine “help” that helps you do this instead of training you to see yourself as a victim of a disorder.
Here is a free pdf of my book that shows how: 14 Days to Sustainable Happiness. You can buy the paper, audio, or ebook here, and the Spanish here. The full story is on the book’s webpage. Please share!