Somebody from Canada replied in this thread about their experience with Indian families... my experience with people in my life is if there is a groundswell need among the population something will develop that at least claims to meet that need. Just look at "The Secret" a massively bestselling book premised on the idea that everything that happens to you--good or bad--is your fault. People want to believe it, someone will sell it.

I think we have therapy now and not in the past because society and the human spirit wasn´t as thoroughly broken as it is today. Before, people would live and die in the same village, have their funeral in the same church that baptized them, do the same job their entire lives, be married to the same person from a young age, have a defined role in various sectors of their society. Modernity is not like that, so we had to develop a "science" of wellness to deal with the new misery generated by the various crises of modernity. I doubt people suffered the way they do today with no response.

systems and science

I find this is an interesting way of looking at things, and I think I really did sincerely share it. But if you want to look at a critical look from inside the profession, I´d recommend the book "The Heart and Soul of Change" which really goes into depth about the very many flaws of the research of therapy, starting with the bedrock argument (I think it's in this book) that therapy, for all the research that has been done, is no more effective today than it was 50 years ago.

There's a lot of little data points along the way, but I find that sometimes it's helpful to have a very clarifying fact. Like you can get into the weeds on AI is successful or not, but all anyone needs to do is show a general LLM business that is making a profit to establish the possibility that LLMs are the future. If no general LLM business is making a profit, or even on track to make a profit, then perhaps the entire project is flawed. Likewise, if therapeautic outcomes have not improved, then perhaps the "systems and science" of therapy are flawed.

Other fun data points: there is no type or amount of training that demonstrably reliably improves client outcomes. There is no training any therapist can take that will make them demonstrably a better therapist. Instead we see a pretty reliable rise in outcomes for all therapists over time that plateaus after a short time (maybe 2 years), maybe goes up a bit, but then actually often starts to DECLINE after several years. (This does contradict what you're saying about training; I don´t know if you have a source for your claim?) (Also, please show me where passing a standardized exam improves client outcomes.)

After reading all of this and more, I came to the conclusion that therapy is effective for probably a multitude of reasons that are hard to predict, but that ultimately, the "systems and science" is largely there to entertain the therapists, give their brains something to do, and to give the profession a corpus of knowledge that can be taught, tested, and regularized so that is can be a respectable profession; as I pointed above, all this research has not increased in improved client outcomes, so what good is it?

I don´t know how you feel about Chinese Medicine, but I take a lot of inspiration from it that example. Basically the theory is that there is energy that flows throughout the body. It is total and absolute nonsense. Practitioners that supposedly work with this energy can't tell the difference between a body under a sheet and a heater under a sheet. There is no scientific validation of any of this energy. Has this prevented Chinese Medicine from amassing a MASSIVE library of books and learning and diagrams? Nope! It takes years to get a certification in Chinese medicine, even though the theory itself is based on bullshit. There is a TON to learn! But it's all based on total garbage, though it might contain some effective treatments.

I'm not saying that therapy is based on total garbage, I am saying that research has not led to better outcomes, and that we shouldn´t be dazzled by an enormous library into thinking we're making definite progress.

I think, fundamentally, therapy can NEVER be a science. Not that you can´t measure outcomes and inputs, etc., but there is such a WILD variation of how to even define a problem that therapy is ultimately an extremely subjective enterprise.

That said, I do think therapy can be helpful, but I honestly think the "systems and science" perspective actually makes therapists worse practitioners, encouraging people to lose contact with their client and consider them as an abstract puzzle to be solved instead of another human being to relate to. And, of course, it CAN also help a therapist gain insight into the issue which can also be shared with a client. I'm just saying everything about therapy is very messy and it's much more complex than just, "read this and you'll have better outcomes."

I mean, one of the dominant theories about why therapy works is the relationship between the therapist and the client, and if you ask around for "how to be a better therapist", you're more likely to find a set of skills you want to be monitoring when you're talking with people than a list of books you should be reading. Not that you shouldn´t be reading, of course, just that it might not have anywhere near as much impact as being keenly aware of how you are interacting with your client. That's why I think the "system and science" business has to be taken with a grain of salt and that ultimately maybe therapy is more about two people meeting each other than an educated professional applying a knowledge base to cure someone. But such a belief is extremely threatening to the professionalization of therapy, a professionalization which, not surprisingly, serves the people who can afford to go to school and who can be trained to excel in testing (btw, testing requirements for licensing have not been shown to improve client outcomes, but they have been very effective in keeping out minorities).

I legitimately think that this is a situation where you can follow the science into becoming an unbeliever, the same way studying the bible will make you an atheist. You don´t have to believe me, just follow the research closely. If you don't want to read the a whole book, ("Heart and Soul of Change"), then at least familiarize yourself with the parameters of the "Dodo Bird Theory" debate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict), and if you just want to listen to a podcast about it, Very Bad Therapy is two student therapists struggling with the research.

Sorry for the fire hose of information.

Edit: this came up this morning, from Alice Miller's obit

Long-term suffering could be avoided only, in her opinion, if the child had an adult in his or her life who could acknowledge the reality of their experience. She called these adults "empathic witnesses" and this acknowledgment, she said, not interpretation, should be the role of psychotherapists with their clients. She attacked psychotherapy, especially psychoanalysis, because she saw it as a system of thought that denied the reality of those treated.

That's Alice Miller; celebrated author of Drama of the Gifted child talking about a tension the has been existing in therapy forever, between being a doctor (where therapists derive their social legitimacy and largely statps) and being a human being (where they derive their effectiveness). Also see Daniel Mackler on youtube, on why he stopped being a therapist.

Your sophistry does not interest me.