Therapy isn't for everyone. Or to put it more pointedly, *therapists* aren't for everyone. Most therapists are white, well-off cis women trained to work with people very much like themselves. If you have little in common with them, some may even do you harm rather than good.

I've taught therapists-in-training, I've sat next to them in graduate-level clinical classes, and I've had a few therapists myself, and so I know better than most just how system-justifying and oblivious to their own privilege many mental health practicioners can be.

I've heard clinicians-in-training say some of the most bigoted things imaginable when they believe no one neurodiverse is around. Mocking patients for having tangled hair or not wearing makeup, insulting peers who had to drop out of their PhD program due to depression...

...Claiming that anyone who self-diagnoses is delusional, misunderstanding the family norms of patients who come from different cultures than their own, assuming mental health always looks like productivity and increasing wealth... on and on.

At one program where I taught, clincians were trained explicitly to view patients with BPD as exhausting and hopeless, were told to never have more than one BPD patient at a time, and were cautioned to never befriend anyone with the disorder

From Black, diasporic, & immigrant friends I have heard many horror stories of therapists telling them their families were toxic or had bad boundaries, simply because their home culture was not ruggedly individualistic and based on the nuclear family structure

I am also friends with a lot of mental health practicioners who have made it their life's work to swim against this tide. It's often worth looking for a good therapist because they do exist! But the system recruits and produces so many incurious, oppressive ones

the refrain that everyone should be in therapy, cops should be replaced with licensed social workers, etc ignores the fact that if you're not the kind of person most therapists are inclined to like and can comprehend easily, mental health providers can be dangerous to you

The first few times I sought out therapy, I was met with smiling white cis ladies who didn't understand how I communicated or emoted, and were visibly put off by everything trans and Autistic about me. Threw a lot of Midwestern nice my way and made me feel like an angry freak.

To this day I don't know of any practicioner in all of Chicago who is well trained in working with Autistic adults. People ask me for reccommendations all the time and I have to tell them sorry, therapists aren't usually taught anything about you or how to respectfully help you

And all of these problems are an outgrowth of psychology's very foundation, which was to treat suffering and non-conformity as both baffling individual-level forms of brokenness, with the goal being to make the brokenness disappear from anyone else's eyes

Also like... You can't exert power over people's autonomy and access to family and needed resources on behalf of the state and treat their mental health at the same time like what