Comment on Money doesn't solve everything, but it helps.
raze2012@lemmy.world 1 day agowe have no way to deal with suffering other than to pay a separately trained and certified and regulated professional to deal with it, one-on-one.
There are plenty of ways. The issue is that some are individualistic and some are systematic. A therapist cannot fix a systematic issue; it cannot get you a better job, but maybe it can get you in a mindset to try and improve youself to get a better job (despite the job market being shit). It can’t build third places but it can prod you to look for the little pockets where some still remain.
It’s not a magic bullet. But sometimes a little perspective can help you improve your life.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
This is an interesting example of therapists try to fit their practice into solving every problem there is.
If you can’t get a better job, maybe your money and time would be better spent with a job coach or resume services than a therapist?
Instead, a therapist can make some vague promise of some emotional or mental shift that will somehow make a difference when months or years of job searching have not? Doesn’t that seem kind of bogus to you?
I mean, I get it, I can see how it MIGHT work, but I also see it being a much more lucrative vector for absolute fraud.
raze2012@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I have considered it, yes. In a better market, if I was struggling it may in fact be worth it just to get a few weeks of guidance on how to redirect my career. It’s also less ambiguous because many people’s goals are met when they can get a job or get that promotion or whatever.
However, reality can set in very quickly when I go to a temp job service and even they (which can generally find an odd job for you in a few weeks ) just outright say “yeah, there’s not much out there right now”. That’s the judement between “you need professional help” and “this didn’t work. job coaches are a scam!”. Job coaches aren’t magicians that pull labor out of a hat.
Not a surprise to me. a job is pretty obvious. your mind isn’t. And it’s biased towards yourself as well. I’d hope we’d advanced enough to start to take aspects of the mind like stress seriously. But at the same time we still have a lot to learn and a lot of old prejudice to overcome.
The main goal of a mental health coach is to at least help you look outside yourself. Sometimes the job market is bad and it’s not your fault even if you blame yourself for some random decision years ago. Sometimes it is in fact all your fault and they help you realize you’ve been actively cock-blocking yourself out of success over several opportunities you had to get a job. Because you’re depressed.
The goal of a job coach doesn’t care how you feel as long as you got your goal done. The goal of a mental health coach is to remove those bigger blockers. And that doesn’t always feel good. Confronting your demons rarely does.
That’s why therapists need to be licensed, while a job coach doesn’t. Licensed don’t guarantee competency, let alone compatibility. But it mitigates the risk of someone pretending to be a voice of authority and telling you to kill yourself for the greater good.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
The job of any professional is to convince you to give them money. There are valid and invalid way to do that. In my experience, a lot of therapists are more than willing to overpromise results.
I’ll give you an example: one therapist said she was CONVINCED she could fix me in a limited time frame; but before we got to the end of that time frame, she said she might have to discontinue therapy with me because she didn´t like my teasing. She brought up with her supervisor and everything and they decided that she’d had enough and she had to tell me: the teasing HAS to stop, or she would be discontinuing the therapy. The thing is, though, that when I teased her she would always LAUGH and say, “Oh, stop! You’re killing me here!” I would have immediately stopped if I’d known she wasn’t enjoying it. And the first time she seriously brings it up, it came with a threat of termination and this was the best course of action she came up with another professional. I quit the next session because I did not feel safe with her anymore.
And I know what you’re going to say (well, one thing you MIGHT say): that’s obviously a bad therapist and that does not represent every therapist! Yes, those things are true, but it’s kind of like an ACAB situation. What does it say about therapy as a profession that obviously bad therapist like her continue to practice, year after year after year?
She’s not alone. I’ve run into much worse therapists than her, people that showed their true colors almost immediately. One made me feel like I´d walked onto the Dr. Phil show in my first session! These people are licensed professionals who are bad at their jobs and making a living seeing clients every day for years and years and years.
Go look up your state’s licensing cases. See how many licenses are sanctioned for being “obviously bad therapists.” No, what you’re much more likely to find is people who has sex with their clients, or who had dual relationships with clients. Short of that, you can be as terrible a therapist as long as you can keep getting clients.
That tells me that professionalization of therapy isn’t being done to help and protect clients, but to help and protect therapists.
raze2012@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Cops are unionized and work as a team. Ultimately, most therapists work by themselves. Not to mention that systematic abuse of power gives cops that reputation. Which is a hard argument to make for therapists.
So I don’t really think the comparison applies here. If you feel you were wronged: since it’s a licensed profession, there is a board you can report to. It varies by state, though. If what they did was especially egrigious in terms of the rules in your state, you can get their license revoked.
A license is to make sure they follow the laws and regulations of their state. Not to make sure they are “a good therapist”. The license is to meet a minimum bar of quality and from there make sure they stay in good standing with laws. Just like how a driver’s license can be given to people of varying skill levels.
The closest aspect to your scenario is a therapist’s rating and testimony. Most services (if not, a 3rd party website) will have a review board for such thigs to read and a scathing review can be a softer way to damage their reputation than the licensing board.
If you look at any job cynically enough, you can apply this to anything, and anyone. A firefighter doesn’t want to put out fires, they want to protect their job. An athlete doesn’t care about the game, they just want to be famous and get sponsors. [insert literally any job ever] is only doing it for the paycheck.
At the end of the day, it come down to trust. if you can’t trust your professional, you shouldn’t hire them. That’s for all of life. But your lack of trust alone isn’t enough to invalidate an entire field.