Does Psychotherapy Work?

Does psychotherapy work?

Millions of Americans engage in psychotherapy, women receiving treatment at approximately twice the rate of men. At Aporia, Bo and Ben Winegard discuss whether psychotherapy really works. They are extremely skeptical, based on a detailed analysis of the topic in search of reliable metrics. Their article is titled: "The Psychotherapy Myth: Contrary to the claims of the psychotherapy myth, humans can be resilient and tough-minded; they can suffer the slings and arrows of life without expensive interventions from “experts.”

Here is an excerpt from their conclusions:

Contrary to the claims of the psychotherapy myth, humans can be resilient and tough-minded; they can suffer the slings and arrows of life without expensive interventions from “experts.” . . .

Thus, a healthy culture should teach that life is often full of misery, dashed hopes, and thwarted desires; it should teach that agony, anguish, and despair are ineradicable parts of the human experience, not aberrant or fleeting intrusions; it should encourage more stoicism, more discipline, more sacrifice; and it should discourage cossetting, indulgence, and morbid contemplation. Reflecting obsessively upon grievances and hardships, like constantly fiddling with a wound, is unwholesome.

Furthermore, the idea that understanding the cause of one’s suffering is the key to curing it is dubious ...Often, the disease is not in the head, but in the society. And thus, even if psychotherapy were highly effective, it might be a dangerous distraction.

The idea that the good therapist is a highly skilled mental engineer who knows how to manipulate the complicated machinery of the human psyche has been memorably promoted in movies such as “Ordinary People,” and, if it were true, it might justify the exorbitant salary some therapists command. But alas, it is no truer than the Freudianism that spawned it; and despite its veneer of sophistication and scientism, psychotherapy ultimately remains a human interaction, purchased at great expense to the patient and perhaps to society.

People will always want to talk to other people about their miseries and insecurities, flaws and failures, hopes and dreams; and counselors and therapists will remain employed into the foreseeable future. Some may even do considerable good. But we hope they will drop the pernicious mythology, the exorbitant prices, and the complicated and often unnecessary licensing system and recognize the simple but tragic fact that many people are desperate for sympathetic social partners and will pay a lot of money for them. What is needed is not more expensively trained experts, but more real social relationships.

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Democrats Increasingly Embrace Censorship to Maintain Unearned Power in the Class Warfare they are Waging

Leighton Woodhouse has articulated the connections between self-proclaimed Democrats, their love affair with censorship, authoritarianism and class-warfare in the latest post at Public:

Pew has a poll out showing that Americans have become far less committed to free speech over the last five years. From 2018 to today, the percentage of Americans who favor tech companies and the US government “restricting false information online” has risen from 39% to 55%.

The 16-point increase is almost entirely attributable to Democrats: while Republicans’ support for online speech restrictions has barely budged, Democrats’ support has gone from 40% to 70% in the span of half a decade. That’s a thirty-point shift against the First Amendment.

Since 2016, Democrats have heard almost nothing from their pundits and party leaders but constant fear-mongering about the wicked souls of their fellow citizens and how the internet is a weapon to spread their evil beliefs like the zombie fungus in The Last Of Us. Through Russiagate, Covid, and the aftermath of the January 6 “insurrection,” they have been terrorized by dark warnings of rising fascism, and told again and again and again that mere exposure to bad ideas is enough for unsuspecting persons to be transformed overnight, into deranged extremists and white supremacists capable of political violence.

Concurrent with that barrage of paranoid propaganda, the party’s base has shifted radically away from working class voters and toward college-educated white liberals. As the party has become beholden to urban, credentialed professionals, it has come to adopt the prejudices of that class. When today’s diehard Democrats cast their gazes upon the vast majority of the country, two-thirds of which does not have a bachelor’s degree, they see a nation of parochial bigots, each of them one Facebook post away from being brainwashed by QAnon.

These party loyalists believe they’re resisting fascism, but they’re courting it. Every authoritarian movement has started by persuading one faction of the population that another faction, be it a minority or a majority, is a malignant threat within the body politic. In the name of neutralizing that threat, the authoritarian party demands the abridgment of rights and liberties, beginning with political pluralism. And that starts with policing the opposition’s speech.

The Democratic Party is in a dark place. Still suffering under the illusion that it’s the party of workers, it is unable to see that its leaders and activists are waging a class war from above. Every time a Democratic leader intones gravely about “fascism,” they’re expressing the anxiety of a cloistered elite terrified of the resentments of the unwashed masses. Every time they invoke a crisis of democracy, they’re borrowing from the playbook of dictators, who always contrive a national emergency to justify their power grabs.

From this reactionary paranoia springs the Democratic rank-and-file’s turn against free speech and its leadership’s constant calls for online censorship. Capitulating to them is the road to ruin.

How desperate are things getting? Many of of our most sense-making institutions are substantially corrupted. Not only are they failing to do the work they were created to do, but their prime directive has become "Not Trump," all else being a matter of reverse engineering. If facts get in the way, fuck the facts.

Look at the pattern: in every major societal institution, from the news media and the universities to the FBI and DoD, powerful individuals are committing crimes, covering them up, and spreading disinformation.

As soon as whistleblowers, journalists, or anyone else blows the whistle, the people in power cry “Conspiracy theory!” and demand their opponents be censored.

Which scandal are we referring to? Practically all of them.

I sometimes feel like I'm in the crow's nest of the Titanic. I don't know whether to keep watching in horror or whether I should excuse myself to go down to the main deck to seek the distraction of the music.

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Responds to Attempt by 102 Democrats to Censor Him at Congressional Hearing Concerning Censorship by the Federal Government

102 Democrats attempt to censor Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy responds.

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Newly Released Slack and Emails of Top U.S. Scientists Reveal Highly Coordinated Misinformation Campaign Aimed at Americans Regarding the Origins of COVID Pandemic

A coordinated corruption and coverup by numerous top U.S. scientists is now clear, based on reporting you will find today in Public and Racquet. The article is titled: "Top Scientists Misled Congress About Covid Origins, Newly Released Emails And Messages ShowTop advisor to Anthony Fauci still thought a lab leak was possible in April 2020, one month after claiming publicly that it wasn’t."

Simultaneously, you will not find any information about these numerous newly-leaked documents at NYT, WaPo, NPR, MSNBC or CNN. Why are these "news" outlets not interested in this dramatic and disturbing new evidence that top U.S. scientists have been lying to the American Public about the cause of the pandemic?

Here is an excerpt from today's article in Public (from a much longer article that contains numerous excerpts from the Slack and email messages of the scientists):

For months, Fauci, Andersen, and their allies have been pushing the message that ”we may never know” what caused the Covid-19 pandemic. In truth, we are getting closer to understanding what happened with every new batch of emails and Slack messages.

Previously released messages show that a top Fauci advisor who boasted of evading FOIA with his Gmail, and hiding Fauci’s role.

“Tony [Fauci] doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories,” wrote Fauci advisor David M. Morens. “As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly… Don’t worry...I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

The evidence now shows a clear pattern of Fauci’s top advisors behaving the way that people might if they were engaged in a cover-up. Fauci and Collins pressured Andersen and his colleagues to publish an article dismissing the lab leak even though they believed in it. Morens and Andersen both attempted to evade future FOIA and Subpoena requests using Gmail and Slack.

If it was really the case, as Garry and Andersen said, that Covid-19 did not leak from a lab and that the behaviors revealed by the emails and Slack messages are not a conspiracy theory, then what do they have to hide? Where is the Zoom recording of the February 3 meeting? What was said?

As a nation, we need to go from “we may never know” to “we must find out.” If the behavior by Fauci, Collins, Andersen, Garry, and the others was entirely above board, then they should have no objection to helping members of Congress, journalists, and the public understand what exactly happened between February 3 and February 6 for them to abandon “project-wuhan_engineering” for “project-wuhan_pangolin.”

Here is an excerpt from the Racquet (Matt Taibbi) titled: ""So Friggin' Likely": New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Media Deception: Newly released chats and emails between the authors of a crucial scientific paper leave no doubt: an unprecedented official disinformation campaign accompanied the arrival of Covid-19."

The core four also repeatedly pored over the problem posed by the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive feature of the Covid-19 genetic sequence. As is now known to the general public thanks again to the digging of the DRASTIC group, which leaked the material in the fall of 2021, researchers at the University of North Carolina led by Dr. Ralph Baric had sent a proposal to the Pentagon seeking to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” into bat coronaviruses, for a program called DEFUSE. Baric and Shi had worked together on more than one occasion, and even co-authored a paper in 2015 demonstrating that a coronavirus spike protein can infect human cells.

In any case, with these and other issues in mind, all five scientists express belief that escape from the Wuhan lab was at least possible, if not probable:

Andersen: “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work…

Garry: “The major hangup I have is the polybasic cleavahe [sic] site… it’s not really a natural process.”

Also: “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening.”

Lipkin: “[A draft of the paper] does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there… we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.”

Holmes (replying to Lipkin): “I agree… Seems to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get go. It’s the epidemiology that I find most worrying.”

Rambaut: “I am quite convinced it has been put there by evolution (whether natural selection or artificial).”

...

As detailed in Public, the Proximal Origin authors who initially discussed lab escape in such a casual manner appeared to have a change of heart after a February 3rd conference call that included the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-NIH Head Francis Collins, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust (and now the WHO).

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