3:08am December 23, 2011

➸ Wow. Stuff about the anti-political nature of therapy.

youneedacat:

Or, specifically, of therapy culture. I am writing a response to someone and ended up finding this old blog post of mine and quoting from one of the people quoted in it. And I got caught up reading all the old quotes again. They’re mostly from radical feminists, which is something I’m not. But the stuff they say has a lot of points that get into the way therapy culture has invaded — and perverted — activism in general. So I thought if throw it out there for people to read. Be aware the links probably don’t work, but last I checked I could find most of the articles by googling parts of the quotes. I think this shift towards therapy culture that happened ages ago (I know someone who lived through it) can explain a lot about many of the ineffectual and downright twisted parts of modern activism. And lots of people my age and younger have never known a time when it wasn’t like this, and don’t even realize the origin of some of these problems. A lot of this is discussed in terms of class but lots of other factors (race, disability, etc.) can cause similar rifts.

oh, shit yeah

I think I read some of these articles back in the day but I didn’t have the necessary organising experience to put them in context. I was just really upset that the article was (in my view) stigmatising people who need or benefit from psychological therapy. with a bit more experience under my belt, I am now totally positive that there’s a connection between an excessive faith in talk therapy and some of the toxic, narcissistic, individualistic, precious behaviours and attitudes I see in most feminist communities (& others, but this is something I particularly associate with feminism). If this upsets you too then I urge you to consider a) that lots of people with their own mental illnesses have a problem with what’s here termed “therapy culture” and b) the term “therapy” refers to a fairly specific and culturally/historically situated set of ways to deal with mental illness, and a critique of the influence of therapy on a community should not be identified with a rejection of all possible mental health treatment.

Oh yeah definitely. I’ve never been helped by therapy but it helped my brother a good deal. This is more about a specific culture around therapy. (And often, at that, a kind of therapy more associated with the “worried well” than with people diagnosable with something, which is one reason it’s so incredibly widespread.) And also specifically what happens when you apply the principles of that kind of therapy to political activism – a context it doesn’t even belong in.

Notes: