13 ms·

I hesitate to comment on these threads, because no one wants to take the risk of saying anything adverse. "What if I say something bad about therapy? would this

I hesitate to comment on these threads, because no one wants to take the risk of saying anything adverse. "What if I say something bad about therapy? would this cause someone else not to see a therapist and end up dying?" But I will say this. As people are becoming more lonely in a crowd, as they can't silence the noise in an empty home, as they can't find someone to listen to them even when they surrender, therapy will be the only outlet. You often see the cases in japan where people rent friends. It's not that therapy is bad (it's pure luck if you find the right therapist), it's that there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it.

zephyrthenoble 3y ago
Why can't you have a therapist and friends?
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  Having friends is an expensive hobby in money and time.
  - sfpotter 3y ago
    This is a horrible framing, and in fact, not even true.
  - haswell 3y ago
    Eating healthy food is an expensive hobby in money and time. Do it because it is important. Spending time with friends is only as expensive as you choose to make it. Most of the time, I’m riding the bike I already paid for to a public park or to a restaurant I would have eaten at anyway. Human social connection is a pretty critical component of a psychologically healthy life.
  - more_corn 3y ago
    None of my friends charge me $200/hr. Maybe you have therapy and friends mixed up? Or are your friends perhaps ladies of the night? Not that there’s anything wrong with visiting ladies if the night. I often wonder if that might be cheaper than therapy. I just worry that if they’re charging you, they might not be the most genuine of friends.
    - ReactiveJelly 3y ago
      I didn't mean to imply that one substitutes for the other. I meant literally that having friends, with or without therapy, is expensive
    - watwut 3y ago
      I think it is that you need to pay money to be with friends - food, drinks or activities you do together. While some groups socialize for free sitting in parks and chatting, many people do not like that. They get bored. The situation can get pretty bad if you are outlier earning less money then friends. Friends groups centered around activity cost money to participate - whether materials for crafting, sports equipment, entrance fees, whatever. Friends groups centered around partying cost money too.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    Equating everything with money is a downward spiral. Given time, I would spend it all with the right friends, instead of working to earn money.
  - ReactiveJelly 3y ago
    My point is that the payoff for friendships is dubious to me. 5 people answered with a belittling tone, and I certainly don't feel any more inspired to befriend them. It makes you think.
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      You don't sound like a great friend either. Doesn't make you a bad person. We don't need to be surrounded by people all the time. Maybe you are introverted like me. Just one or two people in the background is enough. Any more and it starts being a net negative.
  - svnt 3y ago
    People are being really hard on you, but there is truth and probably painful experience in this statement. 1) Your friends may have begun to make and spend more money than you, and you cannot participate in their activities. Many people here will say “just find new friends” not realizing how different their ages, lives and skillsets may be from yours. You only have to say no a few times before you are left out. You might even feel bad every time you turn them down. 2) You may be overburdened with work to the point where your most meaningful social connections are at work. Especially if this is a startup, if you take the night off to go drinking you might not deliver on a critical contract which may cause your work friends, who may have in the interim become your only friends, as well as you, to no longer have a place of employment. Whatever it is I’m sorry you are going through this.
    - CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago
      Yes. For me personally, I found the framing that “building and maintaining friendships takes time, energy, and sacrifice, but is so totally worth it for our healthy wellbeing,” very helpful to inspire me to focus on the kinds of relationships I want and justify the investment to be a better friend. GP’s comment is a wry (“hobby”) and pithy and provocative take that’s not wrong. IMO, friends are the nutritious meal that’s more expensive than friend substitutes. GP seems to have a different conclusion on cost/benefit. But nobody can deny there is a cost!
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    I don't think you appreciate the meaning of "expensive". You know what's expensive? Marriage, kids, mortgages, illness.
    - slumberlust 3y ago
      I don't think you appreciate the meaning of "expensive." You know what's expensive? Starting your own business.
      - SanderNL 3y ago
        That too can be expensive.
cbsks 3y ago
I can pay money and see a therapist. It’s a lot harder to find a community.
- xyzzy4747 3y ago
  It's hard but the #1 way in my opinion is to create a family, and then live near relatives. Like people used to do for thousands of years.
  - cbsks 3y ago
    Joining a religion is another solution that has been used for thousands of years.
  - Mezzie 3y ago
    Given a lot of people in therapy are there due to abusive families of origin, this is kind of difficult. I was neglected to the point of near-death and abused. My relatives are not trustworthy supports.
totetsu 3y ago
It’s hard to access talk therapy in Japan because drugs can be prescribed evenly to all people and the results can be measured soon after, where as therapy could take many months before there is any results and is more person specific. I’ve seen so many people I know who could have benefited greatly from a little bit of CBT but were completely unable to access it.
eyelidlessness 3y ago
> there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it. People who have strong community and friendships seek and benefit from therapy. Having community and friendship certainly can help navigate many of the myriad reasons that people might see a therapist for, but having them doesn’t necessarily solve those things. And the expectation that they would, or could, can be an acute burden and even sometimes a terminal strain on those relationships.
- ungamedplayer 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "If your relationship can't survive the talk you would have with your therapist, you have not developed the quality of friends that you should have." Therapists are disposable. Friendships are not. I would rather not risk finding out if a friendship can handle some temporary, dark sh*t. You usually won't know until it is too late...
- FreshStart 3y ago
  But the therapy actively attacks community by turning everyone into a sociopathic island? Its basically the digestive juices of a highly individualistic society?
  - camillomiller 3y ago
    What!? LOL.
aschearer 3y ago
If only life were that easy.
crickey 3y ago
Freud stated this in his future of an illusion. The (righfull in his opinion) decline of chritian church institutions would lead to higher untreated mental illness. Though he also predicted the regression of the subconscious into a more supressed state. Leading to a society unable to deal with it in any meaningful way.
oidar 3y ago
"Life Coaching" is another service that's trying to fill this hole. It's completely unregulated, it attracts shysters, scam artists, and lots of unsavory MLM looking businesses.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  I like to refer to these as "paid friends". Although I do feel like in some friendships I'm an "unpaid life coach". hah
  - haliskerbas 3y ago
    Exactly this. A lot of the friends I grew up with have no interest in what I find interesting. And I don’t care much for their lifestyle of going to the same kind of club for a 100th time. Sometimes I talk shit on here, sometimes I just talk to the AI bot. Otherwise no one wants to talk to me or cares so I am the target fool to rent a life coach or whatever just to be able to rant to another person.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      Me, myself, and AI
    - mahathu 3y ago
      It sounds like you resent your friends
- Eumenes 3y ago
  The number of HR shills I use to work with are all becoming life or executive coaches. And the insane thing is ... they're getting work! You can book 45 mins for $200 so they can tell you to channel your empath or take a Myers Briggs test.
rayiner 3y ago
Or, to put it in softer terms, as people become more isolated, common mental ups and downs can become more serious problems requiring medical intervention. It’s interesting to go back to TV shows and movies from even the 1980s and 1990s and see how much bigger people’s social networks were. Like people would have regularly scheduled bridge nights with neighbors and shit like that.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "It’s interesting to go back to TV shows and movies from even the 1980s and 1990s and see how much bigger people’s social networks were. Like people would have regularly scheduled bridge nights with neighbors and shit like that." To be fair, those are TV shows and movies...not real life.
  - wincy 3y ago
    My grandma and grandpa had… regularly scheduled bridge night with the neighbors and shit like that.
    - JimtheCoder 3y ago
      I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying that using TV and movies as a reference for what real life was like in those times (or any time) may not be the best idea.
      - rayiner 3y ago
        I take your point. But remember that TV shows and movies are highlighted at contemporaneous audiences. Unless they’re trying to draw attention to something out of the ordinary, the depictions of day to day life are probably going to be close enough so that at least the audience of the time doesn’t view it as unusual.
        watwut 3y ago
        This is not true? Neither Friends nor Big Bang Theory are drawing attention to their protagonists living in massively unusual or even impossible setup. And they are as popular as it gets.
the_only_law 3y ago
> it's pure luck if you find the right therapist A while back I caved and asked some people I know about finding a therapist. Though, I was still very half assed about the whole idea. I ended up giving up, because when I was looking, every therapist I could find that looked like a good fit was “not taking new clients” and the ones that were available seemed to specialize in things that were just not me.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  when you call a therapist and express that you are having trouble, if they are not taking new patients they will generally refer you to someone else, and they will check in advance that the referral does have an opening. It would be highly unusual to leave somebody adrift.
  - mahathu 3y ago
    It's different in Germany where you have to call around for weeks or even months to find a licensed therapist. The alternative would be to pay for one out of pocket but i don't see paying 90+€/hour as a good foundation for lasting mental change
    - krisoft 3y ago
      > i don't see paying 90+€/hour as a good foundation for lasting mental change That is such a currious thing to say. Why is that?
      - mahathu 3y ago
        I have only experienced it for a few sessions last summer so my judgement may not be that accurate. I didn't mean to sound so "authoritative" in my last comment. Anyway, i felt like it was putting me under a lot of extra stress, even though fortunately i was relatively well off at the time - i couldn't imagine not feeling extremely stressed out paying 90€/$ for therapy when youre already struggling to make ends meet. Seeing a regular therapist that I don't pay for (except indirectly through my health insurance, as a student around 140€ currently although it keeps getting more expensive every year) really gives me peace of mind that I'll be able to continue seeing her for the next 40-50 sessions and slowly work on lasting change. Becoming a licensed therapist is a long and strenuous process in Germany. As a client, it gives me some peace of mind, although before my current therapist I also had some "bad" ones in the past (ones i didnt match with). As a result of this, getting into therapy in Germany is a availability issue, not a financial one, usually. Clients have to write dozens of emails/phone calls to therapists, which can be a big struggle especially considering the population we're talking about. The process definitely needs a huge overhaul. There are a lot of willing and able prospective therapists, who can't, for example because they didn't have the perfect high school grades requored to study psychology here (unless you go to Austria, which the Austrian students understandably are a bit unhappy about), or because they can't years of expensive, badly paid training required to become a licensed therapist.
SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
I really disagree that therapy is trying to solve a lack of community. This may work for eg depression or social anxiety. But it’s much less clear if we’re talking about trauma recovery, psychosis management, etc. a community is very rarely well equipped enough to manage all manner of disordered eating, psychosis, compulsive disorders, etc. It’s important to recognize that it can be traumatizing for an undereducated person to be thrust into dealing with someone else’s mental illness crisis!
- civilitty 3y ago
  It’s important to recognize that community is the cause of many problems like eating disorders and couldn’t possibly be the solution. Therapy helps integrate the way we view ourselves into the rest of our community.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "It’s important to recognize that community is the cause of many problems like eating disorders and couldn’t possibly be the solution." Except, when it is a healthy community. Bad habits spread, like good habits do.
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  A community member trying to play therapist doesn’t usually go well. At the same time, being part of a community seems to be correlated with significantly better well-being for people with mental illness.
  - winternewt 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - axioms_End 3y ago
      Maybe, but having a friend and a bad therapist may end in dumping therapist and looking for another one, having friend as therapist for serious issues may end up in having no friend and being lonely.
flatline 3y ago
“Therapy” provides many modalities, and generally they are based on pathology, which I feel is very limiting when you look at the broad scope of psychological wellness. One niche which it can end up filling is that of the (paid) friend. If that is missing in your life, you now have an ill-fitting surrogate for genuine companionship. It’s really not the purpose of therapy, but it is often the reality. While I think that close friendships are important, I feel like that still falls well short of community.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  therapists are not paid friends, that would be like saying that your lawyer is a paid friend.
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    Lawyers aren’t trying to do something like “make you mentally well::make you feel better.” An attorney is hired to provide a legal service. The difference is an entire level of abstraction.
safety1st 3y ago
I saw a therapist for several years and it was very valuable, so I'm not knocking therapy. Specifically I chose to see a psychiatrist who was well versed in talk therapy, not just drugs, because I think this stuff should be approached as evidence based, medical in nature, and administered by a doctor. However, one takeaway for me was that when it comes to talk therapy, some of it is evidence-based, scientific, and backed by high quality studies, however most of what's out there is not. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has good evidence of efficacy and so do maybe a few other techniques - Googling "evidence based therapy" is a good way to start going down the rabbit hole. It's not that hard to learn how to do CBT, at first with a professional, and eventually on your own. Once you progress past the evidence-based stuff, IMHO you're basically just talking to a (hopefully) wise friend who you trust, which is great and might work similar to placebo, but also $200/hr and has the potential to medicalize stuff that doesn't need to be medicalized, so your time and money may be better spent building connections with other people (support groups, plain ol' friends etc). So my point here is I think as long as you understand its limitations therapy is great. If someone is unambiguously suicidal they should probably be put on drugs plus talk therapy and then weaned off the drugs as it becomes clear they are no longer a risk to themselves, since the alternative is they die.
- zealtrace 3y ago
  I used to have the same opinion and found my model has shifted quite a bit. There are a surprising lack of high quality studies on a lot of this. However, there’s really good data on a couple points: Therapy is likely to create significant, lasting improvements compared to placebo, and the more significant factor is therapeutic relationship, not modality. There’s a lot of evidence for CBT because it’s a modality that is relatively easy to study, and so it’s studied a lot. It’s very structured and designed to produce results quickly. This doesn’t mean it’s superior in general. Chronic psychological disorders are strongly correlated with early attachment issues and adverse childhood experiences. There are many ways to address this, but I would view a successful long term therapy as reprogramming a nervous system rather than talking to a friend or building new habits. In my experience, even many therapists fail to understand this distinction. Like hiring any skilled professional, finding the right match can be a time consuming process.
ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
> it's pure luck if you find the right therapist I won't say what I truly think about "therapy" as an industry, but this fact is always something that sticks out to me. Sure there are bad surgeons, but I wouldn't go into heart surgery expecting to have to try a few surgeons before they performed a double bypass successfully. There are no objective standards in the industry. In an industry with even basic standards you shouldn't have to keep trying to find a therapist that "helps".
- fsckboy 3y ago
  therapy is about emotions; there are no objective standards for emotion.
watwut 3y ago
> It's not that therapy is bad (it's pure luck if you find the right therapist), it's that there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it. Pretty common problem people are trying to solve is "why do I always pick friends/partners that get me into trouble or abuse me" or "how do I stop repeating to others what my family done to me". Otherwise said, for healthy person that does not need therapy, yep community solves loneliness. For people who do need it, if dont.
camillomiller 3y ago
I think you start from a misconception of what therapy is. Also, there is not ONE therapy. CBT, which is an insufficient band-aid invented to give us practical tricks to cope with the contradictions of a capitalistic society in order to get back to being productive and “functional”, may very well fit your description. In fact it gives you tricks and homeworks you would not need if you had a community or good and deep relationships. Psychoanalysis on the other hand is something else completely. It does not solve you, judge you, nor offer answer. It’s a language method for you to rearrange your internal warehouse, not by removing or adding items, but rather by rearranging what’s in there for it to make more sense.
asimovfan 3y ago
One can also look into Buddhism and meditation.. a lot of stuff about what is really causing loneliness and depression
- mcshicks 3y ago
  20 year zen practitioner here. Don't expect meditation or buddhism to make your problems go away. If you have an acute mental problem like depression, bipolar syndrome or are suicidal get professional help first. Then go study buddhism. Some teachers will even ask you to sign a waiver acknowledging this.
  - Mezzie 3y ago
    Also it can be a really, really bad idea if you're dissociative. Detaching myself from my body is Not Good.
pizza234 3y ago
> it's that there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it. Very wrong. I have some familiarity with therapy, and in a way, community is actually detrimental when it comes to mental disorders. Depression is a typical example. When somebody suffers from therapy, friends (community) will give all sort of cheesy advice like "relax, go out, do sports". This is detrimental because it's frustrating, but especially, because it triviliazes a serious problem (people not going to therapy because of stigma, when they should, is a real problem). No amount of community can address a problem like depression, and this should be crystal clear. Mental disorders, like serious illnesses, require a knowledgeable and systematic approach in order to be addressed. Surely, modern isolation is causing mental health problems in the population, but community may be the solution to those specific problems, not to disorders in general. > it's pure luck if you find the right therapist It's not pure luck; it takes attempts.
- hrnnnnnn 3y ago
  > friends (community) will give all sort of cheesy advice like "relax, go out, do sports" I get your point here, it's hard to get going with these things when you're depressed, but physical exercise is one of the only things that uncontroversially helps prevent depression. Maybe a better way to deliver that advice would be to ask someone to come for a walk with you, or invite them to join your sports team.
  - pizza234 3y ago
    > physical exercise is one of the only things that uncontroversially helps prevent depression. You clearly never had to deal with a case of clinical depression.
    - pizza234 3y ago
      And just to clarify: prevention is different from treatment (the context was treatment). But most importantly, for clinical cases, physical exercise and similar won't do anything; just imagine a typical case of child abuse.
wvh 3y ago
You've got a point, but depression often leads to isolation. One clear benefit to therapy is that – if the therapist is any good – you will get a relatively neutral, objective opinion reflected back at you. Friends, community and religious or other support systems rarely give sufficiently objective advice or a bird's eye view of the problem. It's not so much about renting a friend as it is to pay an outside professional who can hopefully give you more insight into why things are not going as well as you were hoping for. It is notoriously hard to analyse your own issues, even if you are knowledgeable about psychology or feel you have good self-knowledge. I want to pay for neutral insight from somebody not vested in me personally.
jdietrich 3y ago
Nearly all of the clinical benefits of psychotherapy are delivered in the first few sessions. Some studies suggest an inverse correlation between duration and effect size - people in long-term therapy may have worse outcomes than people who complete a short course of therapy. Psychotherapy is an effective treatment for most common mental health problems, but if you're going to therapy for more than 12-18 weeks, you're doing something other than treating a mental illness. You're likely getting something out of it otherwise you'd stop going, but that thing isn't improving your mental health in any meaningful way and may be actively causing harm. I'd strongly encourage people to try psychotherapy if they're experiencing psychological distress, but I'd also strongly advise them to go in with a clear sense of what they'd like to achieve. If a therapist isn't willing to work with you in the first couple of sessions to create a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound plan for your therapy, you should be very wary. Therapists who advocate an open-ended approach that eschews goal-setting and objective outcomes in favour of a nebulous sense of "insight" or "growth" aren't delivering evidence-based care and aren't acting in the interests of their clients. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/duration-of-psychotherapy-has-little-association-with-outcome/CD51BB442A15328952834A5B1FCE7DD0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
- nequo 3y ago
  The source that you linked points out that there is no experimental data to study this because experiments are designed with a fixed duration. This seems like a serious limitation. Someone who stays in therapy longer might have a more complex issue that they seek to address, resulting in the negative association (that is, correlation) that you mention. But I do agree that having a clear goal is a good idea.
  - jdietrich 3y ago
    We have randomised trials comparing long-term with short-term therapy; they show no significant difference in outcomes. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272735811001863?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
- 3y ago
screye 3y ago
When dealing with a difficult situation, people need a combination of faith, discretion, empathy, and consistency. Therapy is ideal for those who need all 4. Note that confessions and visits to the local astrologer also provide all 4. Communities are essential. They provide empathy and have faith in you. Discretion can be harder to find, and consistency can be even harder....especially with the ungrounded nature of modern society. To that degree, Therapists serve a distinct purpose for the community. The long term therapist is replacing community, but even more often, it is replacing spiritual gurus as a consistent & general purpose life guide.
Eumenes 3y ago
> therapy will be the only outlet Its not good to speak in absolutes. Therapy, and more broadly psychology, is a somewhat new invention that reflects whatever the academics at the top want it to be at the moment. Its current focus is to validate the self. The centralization and top down approach to categorizing behavior and wellness, imo, is dangerous.
pierat 3y ago
Having actually done the therapy thing, and summarily discontinued it; here's my observations. 1. There's no endpoint. There's always some "deeper seated something" that necessitates further sessions. 2. The goal seems to change to the current deep-seated-something. 3. Sometimes, you need drugs. Psychologists have to use techniques and talk, and psychiatrists administer drugs. However, the field has yet to combine both into effective treatment.
siva7 3y ago
At least we can solve this problem as tech entrepreneurs to society by making renting friends as a service possible.
dkarl 3y ago
Community doesn't cut it. Communities judge you, they gossip about you, and they contain people who rightly or wrongly feel a sense of rivalry with you, feeling ambiguous or even opposed to you thriving. Even among your friends, some will unwisely share information in ways that turn out to hurt you, despite their best intentions. A therapist is more like a grandparent, in a way that most grandparents can't be any longer. Once upon a time, your grandparents understood the world you lived in, or at least understood how people in your world related to each other. They understood how survival and respect and love worked for you and the people you dealt with. Virtually none of my friends could say that about their grandparents now, or even their aunts and uncles. None of my aunts, uncles, or grandparents ever lived in a world resembling mine. Everything about my life, including my emotional concerns, is alien to them. Now, instead of talking to a relative who can't relate to your life and your concerns, or talking to friends who can't be trusted with secrets or aren't comfortable discussing the topics that are upsetting you, you can pick a therapist who understands the place and social milieu you inhabit, is bound to confidentiality, and on top of that has professional training and experience.
- somehowlinux 3y ago
  Sounds like you'd be a good grandparent. Maybe consider being the one to build that community, family, of understanding and acceptance first above all else.
aredox 3y ago
Community is also creating its problems. The past wasn't better in terms of mental health, as the evolution in alcohol consumption between now and then demonstrate.
solatic 3y ago
> A community. And the friends that come with it. You make it sound like a therapist doesn't do any work, they just get paid to sit there and socialize. There's a huge amount of emotional labor for therapists, like building trust with people whose stories they can't naturally empathize with. A lot of people need someone to just unload on (which, incidentally, is part of trauma recovery). If you do that to your friends, time after time, you lose your friends pretty quickly. That's (among other reasons) why therapists deserve to be paid for their work. You're right that a community and friends (really, social connections) are key to good long-term mental health. But a lot of people get into a place where they no longer have that, or the community and friends they have are detrimental to their mental health (consider: LGBT people in ultra-conservative religious communities). No therapist can replace a community and friends, but they can be that "I'm not going to give up on you" (because payment) level of "friend" (airquotes because payment) to help you find those social connections.
steve_adams_86 3y ago
I think we need both.

zephyrthenoble 3y ago

Why can't you have a therapist and friends?

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
Having friends is an expensive hobby in money and time.
- sfpotter 3y ago
  This is a horrible framing, and in fact, not even true.
- haswell 3y ago
  Eating healthy food is an expensive hobby in money and time. Do it because it is important. Spending time with friends is only as expensive as you choose to make it. Most of the time, I’m riding the bike I already paid for to a public park or to a restaurant I would have eaten at anyway. Human social connection is a pretty critical component of a psychologically healthy life.
- more_corn 3y ago
  None of my friends charge me $200/hr. Maybe you have therapy and friends mixed up? Or are your friends perhaps ladies of the night? Not that there’s anything wrong with visiting ladies if the night. I often wonder if that might be cheaper than therapy. I just worry that if they’re charging you, they might not be the most genuine of friends.
  - ReactiveJelly 3y ago
    I didn't mean to imply that one substitutes for the other. I meant literally that having friends, with or without therapy, is expensive
  - watwut 3y ago
    I think it is that you need to pay money to be with friends - food, drinks or activities you do together. While some groups socialize for free sitting in parks and chatting, many people do not like that. They get bored. The situation can get pretty bad if you are outlier earning less money then friends. Friends groups centered around activity cost money to participate - whether materials for crafting, sports equipment, entrance fees, whatever. Friends groups centered around partying cost money too.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  Equating everything with money is a downward spiral. Given time, I would spend it all with the right friends, instead of working to earn money.
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  My point is that the payoff for friendships is dubious to me. 5 people answered with a belittling tone, and I certainly don't feel any more inspired to befriend them. It makes you think.
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    You don't sound like a great friend either. Doesn't make you a bad person. We don't need to be surrounded by people all the time. Maybe you are introverted like me. Just one or two people in the background is enough. Any more and it starts being a net negative.
- svnt 3y ago
  People are being really hard on you, but there is truth and probably painful experience in this statement. 1) Your friends may have begun to make and spend more money than you, and you cannot participate in their activities. Many people here will say “just find new friends” not realizing how different their ages, lives and skillsets may be from yours. You only have to say no a few times before you are left out. You might even feel bad every time you turn them down. 2) You may be overburdened with work to the point where your most meaningful social connections are at work. Especially if this is a startup, if you take the night off to go drinking you might not deliver on a critical contract which may cause your work friends, who may have in the interim become your only friends, as well as you, to no longer have a place of employment. Whatever it is I’m sorry you are going through this.
  - CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago
    Yes. For me personally, I found the framing that “building and maintaining friendships takes time, energy, and sacrifice, but is so totally worth it for our healthy wellbeing,” very helpful to inspire me to focus on the kinds of relationships I want and justify the investment to be a better friend. GP’s comment is a wry (“hobby”) and pithy and provocative take that’s not wrong. IMO, friends are the nutritious meal that’s more expensive than friend substitutes. GP seems to have a different conclusion on cost/benefit. But nobody can deny there is a cost!
- SanderNL 3y ago
  I don't think you appreciate the meaning of "expensive". You know what's expensive? Marriage, kids, mortgages, illness.
  - slumberlust 3y ago
    I don't think you appreciate the meaning of "expensive." You know what's expensive? Starting your own business.
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      That too can be expensive.

cbsks 3y ago

I can pay money and see a therapist. It’s a lot harder to find a community.

xyzzy4747 3y ago
It's hard but the #1 way in my opinion is to create a family, and then live near relatives. Like people used to do for thousands of years.
- cbsks 3y ago
  Joining a religion is another solution that has been used for thousands of years.
- Mezzie 3y ago
  Given a lot of people in therapy are there due to abusive families of origin, this is kind of difficult. I was neglected to the point of near-death and abused. My relatives are not trustworthy supports.

totetsu 3y ago

It’s hard to access talk therapy in Japan because drugs can be prescribed evenly to all people and the results can be measured soon after, where as therapy could take many months before there is any results and is more person specific. I’ve seen so many people I know who could have benefited greatly from a little bit of CBT but were completely unable to access it.

eyelidlessness 3y ago

> there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it. People who have strong community and friendships seek and benefit from therapy. Having community and friendship certainly can help navigate many of the myriad reasons that people might see a therapist for, but having them doesn’t necessarily solve those things. And the expectation that they would, or could, can be an acute burden and even sometimes a terminal strain on those relationships.

ungamedplayer 3y ago
[flagged]
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "If your relationship can't survive the talk you would have with your therapist, you have not developed the quality of friends that you should have." Therapists are disposable. Friendships are not. I would rather not risk finding out if a friendship can handle some temporary, dark sh*t. You usually won't know until it is too late...
FreshStart 3y ago
But the therapy actively attacks community by turning everyone into a sociopathic island? Its basically the digestive juices of a highly individualistic society?
- camillomiller 3y ago
  What!? LOL.

aschearer 3y ago

If only life were that easy.

crickey 3y ago

Freud stated this in his future of an illusion. The (righfull in his opinion) decline of chritian church institutions would lead to higher untreated mental illness. Though he also predicted the regression of the subconscious into a more supressed state. Leading to a society unable to deal with it in any meaningful way.

oidar 3y ago

"Life Coaching" is another service that's trying to fill this hole. It's completely unregulated, it attracts shysters, scam artists, and lots of unsavory MLM looking businesses.

hackernewds 3y ago
I like to refer to these as "paid friends". Although I do feel like in some friendships I'm an "unpaid life coach". hah
- haliskerbas 3y ago
  Exactly this. A lot of the friends I grew up with have no interest in what I find interesting. And I don’t care much for their lifestyle of going to the same kind of club for a 100th time. Sometimes I talk shit on here, sometimes I just talk to the AI bot. Otherwise no one wants to talk to me or cares so I am the target fool to rent a life coach or whatever just to be able to rant to another person.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Me, myself, and AI
  - mahathu 3y ago
    It sounds like you resent your friends
Eumenes 3y ago
The number of HR shills I use to work with are all becoming life or executive coaches. And the insane thing is ... they're getting work! You can book 45 mins for $200 so they can tell you to channel your empath or take a Myers Briggs test.

rayiner 3y ago

Or, to put it in softer terms, as people become more isolated, common mental ups and downs can become more serious problems requiring medical intervention. It’s interesting to go back to TV shows and movies from even the 1980s and 1990s and see how much bigger people’s social networks were. Like people would have regularly scheduled bridge nights with neighbors and shit like that.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
"It’s interesting to go back to TV shows and movies from even the 1980s and 1990s and see how much bigger people’s social networks were. Like people would have regularly scheduled bridge nights with neighbors and shit like that." To be fair, those are TV shows and movies...not real life.
- wincy 3y ago
  My grandma and grandpa had… regularly scheduled bridge night with the neighbors and shit like that.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying that using TV and movies as a reference for what real life was like in those times (or any time) may not be the best idea.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      I take your point. But remember that TV shows and movies are highlighted at contemporaneous audiences. Unless they’re trying to draw attention to something out of the ordinary, the depictions of day to day life are probably going to be close enough so that at least the audience of the time doesn’t view it as unusual.
      - watwut 3y ago
        This is not true? Neither Friends nor Big Bang Theory are drawing attention to their protagonists living in massively unusual or even impossible setup. And they are as popular as it gets.

the_only_law 3y ago

> it's pure luck if you find the right therapist A while back I caved and asked some people I know about finding a therapist. Though, I was still very half assed about the whole idea. I ended up giving up, because when I was looking, every therapist I could find that looked like a good fit was “not taking new clients” and the ones that were available seemed to specialize in things that were just not me.

fsckboy 3y ago
when you call a therapist and express that you are having trouble, if they are not taking new patients they will generally refer you to someone else, and they will check in advance that the referral does have an opening. It would be highly unusual to leave somebody adrift.
- mahathu 3y ago
  It's different in Germany where you have to call around for weeks or even months to find a licensed therapist. The alternative would be to pay for one out of pocket but i don't see paying 90+€/hour as a good foundation for lasting mental change
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > i don't see paying 90+€/hour as a good foundation for lasting mental change That is such a currious thing to say. Why is that?
    - mahathu 3y ago
      I have only experienced it for a few sessions last summer so my judgement may not be that accurate. I didn't mean to sound so "authoritative" in my last comment. Anyway, i felt like it was putting me under a lot of extra stress, even though fortunately i was relatively well off at the time - i couldn't imagine not feeling extremely stressed out paying 90€/$ for therapy when youre already struggling to make ends meet. Seeing a regular therapist that I don't pay for (except indirectly through my health insurance, as a student around 140€ currently although it keeps getting more expensive every year) really gives me peace of mind that I'll be able to continue seeing her for the next 40-50 sessions and slowly work on lasting change. Becoming a licensed therapist is a long and strenuous process in Germany. As a client, it gives me some peace of mind, although before my current therapist I also had some "bad" ones in the past (ones i didnt match with). As a result of this, getting into therapy in Germany is a availability issue, not a financial one, usually. Clients have to write dozens of emails/phone calls to therapists, which can be a big struggle especially considering the population we're talking about. The process definitely needs a huge overhaul. There are a lot of willing and able prospective therapists, who can't, for example because they didn't have the perfect high school grades requored to study psychology here (unless you go to Austria, which the Austrian students understandably are a bit unhappy about), or because they can't years of expensive, badly paid training required to become a licensed therapist.

SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago

I really disagree that therapy is trying to solve a lack of community. This may work for eg depression or social anxiety. But it’s much less clear if we’re talking about trauma recovery, psychosis management, etc. a community is very rarely well equipped enough to manage all manner of disordered eating, psychosis, compulsive disorders, etc. It’s important to recognize that it can be traumatizing for an undereducated person to be thrust into dealing with someone else’s mental illness crisis!

civilitty 3y ago
It’s important to recognize that community is the cause of many problems like eating disorders and couldn’t possibly be the solution. Therapy helps integrate the way we view ourselves into the rest of our community.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "It’s important to recognize that community is the cause of many problems like eating disorders and couldn’t possibly be the solution." Except, when it is a healthy community. Bad habits spread, like good habits do.
travisjungroth 3y ago
A community member trying to play therapist doesn’t usually go well. At the same time, being part of a community seems to be correlated with significantly better well-being for people with mental illness.
- winternewt 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - axioms_End 3y ago
    Maybe, but having a friend and a bad therapist may end in dumping therapist and looking for another one, having friend as therapist for serious issues may end up in having no friend and being lonely.

flatline 3y ago

“Therapy” provides many modalities, and generally they are based on pathology, which I feel is very limiting when you look at the broad scope of psychological wellness. One niche which it can end up filling is that of the (paid) friend. If that is missing in your life, you now have an ill-fitting surrogate for genuine companionship. It’s really not the purpose of therapy, but it is often the reality. While I think that close friendships are important, I feel like that still falls well short of community.

fsckboy 3y ago
therapists are not paid friends, that would be like saying that your lawyer is a paid friend.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  Lawyers aren’t trying to do something like “make you mentally well::make you feel better.” An attorney is hired to provide a legal service. The difference is an entire level of abstraction.

safety1st 3y ago

I saw a therapist for several years and it was very valuable, so I'm not knocking therapy. Specifically I chose to see a psychiatrist who was well versed in talk therapy, not just drugs, because I think this stuff should be approached as evidence based, medical in nature, and administered by a doctor. However, one takeaway for me was that when it comes to talk therapy, some of it is evidence-based, scientific, and backed by high quality studies, however most of what's out there is not. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has good evidence of efficacy and so do maybe a few other techniques - Googling "evidence based therapy" is a good way to start going down the rabbit hole. It's not that hard to learn how to do CBT, at first with a professional, and eventually on your own. Once you progress past the evidence-based stuff, IMHO you're basically just talking to a (hopefully) wise friend who you trust, which is great and might work similar to placebo, but also $200/hr and has the potential to medicalize stuff that doesn't need to be medicalized, so your time and money may be better spent building connections with other people (support groups, plain ol' friends etc). So my point here is I think as long as you understand its limitations therapy is great. If someone is unambiguously suicidal they should probably be put on drugs plus talk therapy and then weaned off the drugs as it becomes clear they are no longer a risk to themselves, since the alternative is they die.

zealtrace 3y ago
I used to have the same opinion and found my model has shifted quite a bit. There are a surprising lack of high quality studies on a lot of this. However, there’s really good data on a couple points: Therapy is likely to create significant, lasting improvements compared to placebo, and the more significant factor is therapeutic relationship, not modality. There’s a lot of evidence for CBT because it’s a modality that is relatively easy to study, and so it’s studied a lot. It’s very structured and designed to produce results quickly. This doesn’t mean it’s superior in general. Chronic psychological disorders are strongly correlated with early attachment issues and adverse childhood experiences. There are many ways to address this, but I would view a successful long term therapy as reprogramming a nervous system rather than talking to a friend or building new habits. In my experience, even many therapists fail to understand this distinction. Like hiring any skilled professional, finding the right match can be a time consuming process.

ThrowAway1922A 3y ago

> it's pure luck if you find the right therapist I won't say what I truly think about "therapy" as an industry, but this fact is always something that sticks out to me. Sure there are bad surgeons, but I wouldn't go into heart surgery expecting to have to try a few surgeons before they performed a double bypass successfully. There are no objective standards in the industry. In an industry with even basic standards you shouldn't have to keep trying to find a therapist that "helps".

fsckboy 3y ago
therapy is about emotions; there are no objective standards for emotion.

watwut 3y ago

> It's not that therapy is bad (it's pure luck if you find the right therapist), it's that there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it. Pretty common problem people are trying to solve is "why do I always pick friends/partners that get me into trouble or abuse me" or "how do I stop repeating to others what my family done to me". Otherwise said, for healthy person that does not need therapy, yep community solves loneliness. For people who do need it, if dont.

camillomiller 3y ago

I think you start from a misconception of what therapy is. Also, there is not ONE therapy. CBT, which is an insufficient band-aid invented to give us practical tricks to cope with the contradictions of a capitalistic society in order to get back to being productive and “functional”, may very well fit your description. In fact it gives you tricks and homeworks you would not need if you had a community or good and deep relationships. Psychoanalysis on the other hand is something else completely. It does not solve you, judge you, nor offer answer. It’s a language method for you to rearrange your internal warehouse, not by removing or adding items, but rather by rearranging what’s in there for it to make more sense.

asimovfan 3y ago

One can also look into Buddhism and meditation.. a lot of stuff about what is really causing loneliness and depression

mcshicks 3y ago
20 year zen practitioner here. Don't expect meditation or buddhism to make your problems go away. If you have an acute mental problem like depression, bipolar syndrome or are suicidal get professional help first. Then go study buddhism. Some teachers will even ask you to sign a waiver acknowledging this.
- Mezzie 3y ago
  Also it can be a really, really bad idea if you're dissociative. Detaching myself from my body is Not Good.

pizza234 3y ago

> it's that there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it. Very wrong. I have some familiarity with therapy, and in a way, community is actually detrimental when it comes to mental disorders. Depression is a typical example. When somebody suffers from therapy, friends (community) will give all sort of cheesy advice like "relax, go out, do sports". This is detrimental because it's frustrating, but especially, because it triviliazes a serious problem (people not going to therapy because of stigma, when they should, is a real problem). No amount of community can address a problem like depression, and this should be crystal clear. Mental disorders, like serious illnesses, require a knowledgeable and systematic approach in order to be addressed. Surely, modern isolation is causing mental health problems in the population, but community may be the solution to those specific problems, not to disorders in general. > it's pure luck if you find the right therapist It's not pure luck; it takes attempts.

hrnnnnnn 3y ago
> friends (community) will give all sort of cheesy advice like "relax, go out, do sports" I get your point here, it's hard to get going with these things when you're depressed, but physical exercise is one of the only things that uncontroversially helps prevent depression. Maybe a better way to deliver that advice would be to ask someone to come for a walk with you, or invite them to join your sports team.
- pizza234 3y ago
  > physical exercise is one of the only things that uncontroversially helps prevent depression. You clearly never had to deal with a case of clinical depression.
  - pizza234 3y ago
    And just to clarify: prevention is different from treatment (the context was treatment). But most importantly, for clinical cases, physical exercise and similar won't do anything; just imagine a typical case of child abuse.

wvh 3y ago

You've got a point, but depression often leads to isolation. One clear benefit to therapy is that – if the therapist is any good – you will get a relatively neutral, objective opinion reflected back at you. Friends, community and religious or other support systems rarely give sufficiently objective advice or a bird's eye view of the problem. It's not so much about renting a friend as it is to pay an outside professional who can hopefully give you more insight into why things are not going as well as you were hoping for. It is notoriously hard to analyse your own issues, even if you are knowledgeable about psychology or feel you have good self-knowledge. I want to pay for neutral insight from somebody not vested in me personally.

jdietrich 3y ago

Nearly all of the clinical benefits of psychotherapy are delivered in the first few sessions. Some studies suggest an inverse correlation between duration and effect size - people in long-term therapy may have worse outcomes than people who complete a short course of therapy. Psychotherapy is an effective treatment for most common mental health problems, but if you're going to therapy for more than 12-18 weeks, you're doing something other than treating a mental illness. You're likely getting something out of it otherwise you'd stop going, but that thing isn't improving your mental health in any meaningful way and may be actively causing harm. I'd strongly encourage people to try psychotherapy if they're experiencing psychological distress, but I'd also strongly advise them to go in with a clear sense of what they'd like to achieve. If a therapist isn't willing to work with you in the first couple of sessions to create a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound plan for your therapy, you should be very wary. Therapists who advocate an open-ended approach that eschews goal-setting and objective outcomes in favour of a nebulous sense of "insight" or "growth" aren't delivering evidence-based care and aren't acting in the interests of their clients. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/duration-of-psychotherapy-has-little-association-with-outcome/CD51BB442A15328952834A5B1FCE7DD0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...

nequo 3y ago
The source that you linked points out that there is no experimental data to study this because experiments are designed with a fixed duration. This seems like a serious limitation. Someone who stays in therapy longer might have a more complex issue that they seek to address, resulting in the negative association (that is, correlation) that you mention. But I do agree that having a clear goal is a good idea.
- jdietrich 3y ago
  We have randomised trials comparing long-term with short-term therapy; they show no significant difference in outcomes. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272735811001863?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
3y ago

screye 3y ago

When dealing with a difficult situation, people need a combination of faith, discretion, empathy, and consistency. Therapy is ideal for those who need all 4. Note that confessions and visits to the local astrologer also provide all 4. Communities are essential. They provide empathy and have faith in you. Discretion can be harder to find, and consistency can be even harder....especially with the ungrounded nature of modern society. To that degree, Therapists serve a distinct purpose for the community. The long term therapist is replacing community, but even more often, it is replacing spiritual gurus as a consistent & general purpose life guide.

Eumenes 3y ago

> therapy will be the only outlet Its not good to speak in absolutes. Therapy, and more broadly psychology, is a somewhat new invention that reflects whatever the academics at the top want it to be at the moment. Its current focus is to validate the self. The centralization and top down approach to categorizing behavior and wellness, imo, is dangerous.

pierat 3y ago

Having actually done the therapy thing, and summarily discontinued it; here's my observations. 1. There's no endpoint. There's always some "deeper seated something" that necessitates further sessions. 2. The goal seems to change to the current deep-seated-something. 3. Sometimes, you need drugs. Psychologists have to use techniques and talk, and psychiatrists administer drugs. However, the field has yet to combine both into effective treatment.

siva7 3y ago

At least we can solve this problem as tech entrepreneurs to society by making renting friends as a service possible.

dkarl 3y ago

Community doesn't cut it. Communities judge you, they gossip about you, and they contain people who rightly or wrongly feel a sense of rivalry with you, feeling ambiguous or even opposed to you thriving. Even among your friends, some will unwisely share information in ways that turn out to hurt you, despite their best intentions. A therapist is more like a grandparent, in a way that most grandparents can't be any longer. Once upon a time, your grandparents understood the world you lived in, or at least understood how people in your world related to each other. They understood how survival and respect and love worked for you and the people you dealt with. Virtually none of my friends could say that about their grandparents now, or even their aunts and uncles. None of my aunts, uncles, or grandparents ever lived in a world resembling mine. Everything about my life, including my emotional concerns, is alien to them. Now, instead of talking to a relative who can't relate to your life and your concerns, or talking to friends who can't be trusted with secrets or aren't comfortable discussing the topics that are upsetting you, you can pick a therapist who understands the place and social milieu you inhabit, is bound to confidentiality, and on top of that has professional training and experience.

somehowlinux 3y ago
Sounds like you'd be a good grandparent. Maybe consider being the one to build that community, family, of understanding and acceptance first above all else.

aredox 3y ago

Community is also creating its problems. The past wasn't better in terms of mental health, as the evolution in alcohol consumption between now and then demonstrate.

solatic 3y ago

> A community. And the friends that come with it. You make it sound like a therapist doesn't do any work, they just get paid to sit there and socialize. There's a huge amount of emotional labor for therapists, like building trust with people whose stories they can't naturally empathize with. A lot of people need someone to just unload on (which, incidentally, is part of trauma recovery). If you do that to your friends, time after time, you lose your friends pretty quickly. That's (among other reasons) why therapists deserve to be paid for their work. You're right that a community and friends (really, social connections) are key to good long-term mental health. But a lot of people get into a place where they no longer have that, or the community and friends they have are detrimental to their mental health (consider: LGBT people in ultra-conservative religious communities). No therapist can replace a community and friends, but they can be that "I'm not going to give up on you" (because payment) level of "friend" (airquotes because payment) to help you find those social connections.

steve_adams_86 3y ago

I think we need both.