Not a huge fan of the author, I think she plays it a bit shoddy with the facts but that isn't necessarily fatal to opening a discussion of a topic.
I would begin with this entertaining discussion/sort of debate that I stumbled upon in my YouTube feed for 'booktube' (basically people talking about books and reading).
Not a huge fan of the author, I think she plays it a bit shoddy with the facts but that isn't necessarily fatal to opening a discussion of a topic.
I would begin with this entertaining discussion/sort of debate that I stumbled upon in my YouTube feed for 'booktube' (basically people talking about books and reading).
The discussion begins with self-help books and the older book reviewer Steve Donoghue's assertion that they are all bad versus younger guy's assertion "sure there are bad self-help gurus but some of them are good?!" This then goes into a deep discussion about whether therapy is effective and trauma.
Two things about this discussion:
1. Trauma's proper place is addressed at the 35 minute mark. Actual real trauma is usually not treated by therapy...at least per Steve.
2. If you could mute Steve in this debate, I think this would be the only example I've seen where someone's eyebrow movement actually was as effective in winning a debate as the actual words they used.
So far there's a lot of alignment here. Therapy seems to have almost no objective ways to measure it's usefulness. Very suspect the one assertion made by therapy's defender here is that 'therapy seems effective regardless of what type is used'...this leads to a divergence in my mind with the position staked out in the book.
The deeper question to ask is why has the industry taken off so solidly? It can't really be because somehow salesmen conned nurses and doctors into asking leading questions to push everyone into therapy. There seems to be something many people are getting out of it and they seem to know the medicalization aspect is on shaky ground if strictly applied, but that also seems to be a feature more than a bug.
It appears part of the service is a formalized 'friend' who has a detachment from the patient and a legal confidentiality requirement. The 'medicalization' of therapy and the fact that you pay for it rather than just 'take it' as you might do with a role model, mentor, peer, etc. makes this work (see around the 25:30 mark)
So here is the departure point I have. I don't think this is new. I think all cultures find ways to alter mental coping, especially when there is 'surplus' time and resources. I think the US did a lot of this in the past, it just wasn't called therapy.
C: We have a long history with using drugs. Leave aside the usual prohibition narrative of 'refer madness' causing overreaction. The fact is it has been a search for mind altering chemicals that can be produced on an industrial scale for the last 150 years. All the drugs that were outlawed were first taken up by doctors, chemists, pharmacists and consumer products companies.
E: We have the psychotherapy field going hitting over a century old now. While Freud and Jung did work with confined mental patients, the entire field quickly caught on almost as fast as any recreational drug and it caught on not for kids or people with problems but the upper class.
What this is hinting to me is that as long as we live in a state of surplus, which we will continue to do if there isn't massive wars, catastrophe or something else reducing us to a survival only mode, we will need to consume services to manage and alter our mental approach to just living.
This might be our first warp drive! The warp drive in Star Trek lore is pretty interesting. In their take, every civilization stumbles upon it in a different way. As a result the technology is developed along a unique path and every civilization's starships look unique and different. No actual technology is quite like that. North Korea, US, Europe, Russia, China, SpaceX etc. All rockets look more or less the same. All cars look more or less the same. Different cultures find a technology pushes and pulls down the same path leaving little room for variation.
The problem of what to do with a mind when it only needs to run 15% of the day to keep you alive maybe that technology. France finds ponderous philosopher academic celebrities does the trick. Family/friends/religion works too. America wants a mass consumer product and therapy gets you there.
That means this is not likely to be a problem that can be solved.
An interesting Idea. I think you might be over-reaching, but also I think you might be too timid. We've had surpluses before, but I think I would argue that we've ended up in a situation where we've got a super surplus (similar to the idea of super stimuli) and in that sense I think we might be able to do something about the particular excess we're dealing with.
I would say we have had the surplus a long time. It was old when the Roman Empire was young. It was old when kids asked their parents if they could listen to the bard do Gilgamesh. The surplus is simply a large number of people who can spend a good portion of their lives with at least some leisure time each day and mostly not in fear for their lives.
While it maybe new that we might have gotten or are close to getting a majority of humans in that condition. There never really was any period in human recorded history when large numbers didn't have that, even if they were only 5% of the world. And from that time, the numbers who had it spent time and resources finding ways to burn off that time. Drinking and drugs have always been ways. So have various hobbies, arts, etc. Going to 'oracles', for example, wasn't just for Greek Kings about to engage in mythological adventure.
This means then I suspect super stimuli doesn't really exist. You could overload easier on Big Macs, whiskey, and porn perhaps a bit easier today...but people could and did in the past as well.
Note from the video the younger man defies your sketch. He doesn't seem like someone whose been conned by a slick therapist into believing he must get therapy. He seems very smart and knows he likes therapy and knows how to make it sound like a medical necessity to others. I also noted when he said research seems to show therapy does something but it doesn't matter which therapy, that kind of sounds like what some have said about religion.
This makes me suspect we are seeing a consumption product and like most consumption products, we're going to get it and if you mess around too much with that you may just create poor substitutions rather than extinguish the actual demand for it.
But to make it condensed, I would say there's a very real chance all the rise of therapy, esp. in the US, really is shifting our need to burn off our surplus. We have shifted into making a very formal product out of the 'objective friend who will hold confidences'.
This increased consumption has probably been a net positive as it's come at the expense of less positive consumption products (i.e. getting drunk with the buds every Friday night at the pub) but also some things that we could do well to try to add more back into our lives (i.e. actually going out with the buds every Friday night).
I don't think we are being fooled into this. It's a purposeful decision mostly coming from the consumers rather than the producers who know exactly how to ask for it in ways that make it hard for insurance companies and other gatekeepers to deny them.
But remember, the reason you can read something like The Odyssey and say "I can relate to many of these emotions even though I've never been a king and butchered dozens of men who were flirting with my wife when I got home" is because back then there were people with plenty of 'surplus' and they spent the time mulling over a lot of things we mull over today. Today we have interns at HBO serve me Game of Thrones and Sopranos, back then it might have been slaves and bards but between keeping ourselves alive and eventually running out of life we had a lot of time to kill.
Not a huge fan of the author, I think she plays it a bit shoddy with the facts but that isn't necessarily fatal to opening a discussion of a topic.
I would begin with this entertaining discussion/sort of debate that I stumbled upon in my YouTube feed for 'booktube' (basically people talking about books and reading).
https://youtu.be/FeoDcZoZSgE?si=I-YjOoAtNYsNsF5X
The discussion begins with self-help books and the older book reviewer Steve Donoghue's assertion that they are all bad versus younger guy's assertion "sure there are bad self-help gurus but some of them are good?!" This then goes into a deep discussion about whether therapy is effective and trauma.
Two things about this discussion:
1. Trauma's proper place is addressed at the 35 minute mark. Actual real trauma is usually not treated by therapy...at least per Steve.
2. If you could mute Steve in this debate, I think this would be the only example I've seen where someone's eyebrow movement actually was as effective in winning a debate as the actual words they used.
So far there's a lot of alignment here. Therapy seems to have almost no objective ways to measure it's usefulness. Very suspect the one assertion made by therapy's defender here is that 'therapy seems effective regardless of what type is used'...this leads to a divergence in my mind with the position staked out in the book.
The deeper question to ask is why has the industry taken off so solidly? It can't really be because somehow salesmen conned nurses and doctors into asking leading questions to push everyone into therapy. There seems to be something many people are getting out of it and they seem to know the medicalization aspect is on shaky ground if strictly applied, but that also seems to be a feature more than a bug.
It appears part of the service is a formalized 'friend' who has a detachment from the patient and a legal confidentiality requirement. The 'medicalization' of therapy and the fact that you pay for it rather than just 'take it' as you might do with a role model, mentor, peer, etc. makes this work (see around the 25:30 mark)
So here is the departure point I have. I don't think this is new. I think all cultures find ways to alter mental coping, especially when there is 'surplus' time and resources. I think the US did a lot of this in the past, it just wasn't called therapy.
A: US cigarette consumption per capita rose from 1,000 or so at the turn of the last century to nearly 4000 at its peak in 1960. (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Adult-age18-years-per-capita-cigarette-consumption-and-major-smoking-and-health-events_fig1_11080330). That is basically half a pack a day for every American at the end of the 'respectable family friendly 50's'.
B: Throughout our history we've consumed a lot of alcohol (https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxbusiness.com/foxbusiness.com/content/uploads/2020/01/720/405/prohibition-2-AP.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
C: We have a long history with using drugs. Leave aside the usual prohibition narrative of 'refer madness' causing overreaction. The fact is it has been a search for mind altering chemicals that can be produced on an industrial scale for the last 150 years. All the drugs that were outlawed were first taken up by doctors, chemists, pharmacists and consumer products companies.
D: We used to drink 46 gallons of coffee per person per year, we still drink a solid 20+. Leave aside whether soda is just a different caffeine delivery mechanism. (https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2007/june/coffee-consumption-over-the-last-century/)
E: We have the psychotherapy field going hitting over a century old now. While Freud and Jung did work with confined mental patients, the entire field quickly caught on almost as fast as any recreational drug and it caught on not for kids or people with problems but the upper class.
What this is hinting to me is that as long as we live in a state of surplus, which we will continue to do if there isn't massive wars, catastrophe or something else reducing us to a survival only mode, we will need to consume services to manage and alter our mental approach to just living.
This might be our first warp drive! The warp drive in Star Trek lore is pretty interesting. In their take, every civilization stumbles upon it in a different way. As a result the technology is developed along a unique path and every civilization's starships look unique and different. No actual technology is quite like that. North Korea, US, Europe, Russia, China, SpaceX etc. All rockets look more or less the same. All cars look more or less the same. Different cultures find a technology pushes and pulls down the same path leaving little room for variation.
The problem of what to do with a mind when it only needs to run 15% of the day to keep you alive maybe that technology. France finds ponderous philosopher academic celebrities does the trick. Family/friends/religion works too. America wants a mass consumer product and therapy gets you there.
That means this is not likely to be a problem that can be solved.
An interesting Idea. I think you might be over-reaching, but also I think you might be too timid. We've had surpluses before, but I think I would argue that we've ended up in a situation where we've got a super surplus (similar to the idea of super stimuli) and in that sense I think we might be able to do something about the particular excess we're dealing with.
I would say we have had the surplus a long time. It was old when the Roman Empire was young. It was old when kids asked their parents if they could listen to the bard do Gilgamesh. The surplus is simply a large number of people who can spend a good portion of their lives with at least some leisure time each day and mostly not in fear for their lives.
While it maybe new that we might have gotten or are close to getting a majority of humans in that condition. There never really was any period in human recorded history when large numbers didn't have that, even if they were only 5% of the world. And from that time, the numbers who had it spent time and resources finding ways to burn off that time. Drinking and drugs have always been ways. So have various hobbies, arts, etc. Going to 'oracles', for example, wasn't just for Greek Kings about to engage in mythological adventure.
This means then I suspect super stimuli doesn't really exist. You could overload easier on Big Macs, whiskey, and porn perhaps a bit easier today...but people could and did in the past as well.
Note from the video the younger man defies your sketch. He doesn't seem like someone whose been conned by a slick therapist into believing he must get therapy. He seems very smart and knows he likes therapy and knows how to make it sound like a medical necessity to others. I also noted when he said research seems to show therapy does something but it doesn't matter which therapy, that kind of sounds like what some have said about religion.
This makes me suspect we are seeing a consumption product and like most consumption products, we're going to get it and if you mess around too much with that you may just create poor substitutions rather than extinguish the actual demand for it.
This may be the most deluded thing you've ever contributed as a comment to something I've posted.
Remember, dogs never need therapists :)
But to make it condensed, I would say there's a very real chance all the rise of therapy, esp. in the US, really is shifting our need to burn off our surplus. We have shifted into making a very formal product out of the 'objective friend who will hold confidences'.
This increased consumption has probably been a net positive as it's come at the expense of less positive consumption products (i.e. getting drunk with the buds every Friday night at the pub) but also some things that we could do well to try to add more back into our lives (i.e. actually going out with the buds every Friday night).
I don't think we are being fooled into this. It's a purposeful decision mostly coming from the consumers rather than the producers who know exactly how to ask for it in ways that make it hard for insurance companies and other gatekeepers to deny them.
But remember, the reason you can read something like The Odyssey and say "I can relate to many of these emotions even though I've never been a king and butchered dozens of men who were flirting with my wife when I got home" is because back then there were people with plenty of 'surplus' and they spent the time mulling over a lot of things we mull over today. Today we have interns at HBO serve me Game of Thrones and Sopranos, back then it might have been slaves and bards but between keeping ourselves alive and eventually running out of life we had a lot of time to kill.