The stigma against therapy is pretty dumb.

But therapy does also cost a ton of money, and not everyone can afford it.

honestly i think pretty much everyone can benefit from therapy. and so long as the therapist is halfway decent at the job it certainly won't hurt anything. the social stigma against therapy is dumb and bad

I think the stigma against therapy comes from at least two places. I'd guess there's probably more, but I don't recall at the moment having clearly encountered more than these two:

1. Some therapists aren't very good, and even those who are aren't very good for every patient. Even if they *can* be good for a particular patient, they're of no use until the patient has decided that they want to be helped. As a result, a lot of people who go to therapy get ineffective treatment.

2. When someone who has been abused returns from an effective therapy session, they frequently have a much better idea about who has caused their problems. Their abusers are pretty much never happy about this.

But it's worse than that, because most abusers know they're abusers, and know that their victims going to therapy threatens them. As a result, they act with the tools they're most familiar with to try to prevent that from happening in the first place.

In my experience, abusers will often try to dissuade anyone from going to therapy, not just their victim(s), because if other people get helped by therapy, they may recommend it to the abuser's victims.

I doubt that everyone who disses psychotherapy is either an abuser or has had poor results from going to a psychotherapist. It feels like there should at *least* be some people who are just passing on what they learned of psychotherapy second hand. But everyone I've gotten to know well enough to understand why they complain about psychotherapy that I'm recalling right now falls into one or both of those categories.

I feel like I've known far more people in the second category, though. There are so many people out there who abuse others. I get that there's a lot of context that one misses when one sees people interacting on the street, but I'm not really talking about that. Most of my family is abusive. Most of my friends' families have a lot of abusive people, too.

Not all of that is deliberate. As a society, we haven't figured out how to train new parents how to raise their children without abusing them. There are certainly classes on that subject, but some of those classes actually teach parents *to* abuse their children. I haven't seen a lot of that coursework, as I didn't expect I'd ever be raising a family, and I haven't ever raised a family. But I did have a couple that I was just signed up for, and both of those taught abuse, though not the same abuse.

Prbly 'cause ppl don't realise that there's stages between "Normal" and insane asylum patient when it comes to mental health.

I think our society as a whole just hasn't taken mental health seriously (or is just starting to). On one hand you got the over the top work ethic that tells people to keep pushing through unless there is something significantly and visibly wrong. On the other hand you got the perceived divide between body and mind, which means physical health is a problem with your body while mental health is a problem with you.

So that's my reason 3 & 4.