Josh has the right take on psychology and I have to let him know it. Very rough crash course on the history of mental illness.
He doesn’t know how right he is. For all the kiwis here talking about ‘muh mental illness is a symptom of being super smurt and successful.’ Wrong.
The treatment of the mentally ill started in the 16th century along with industrialization. The idea being that the busy life of living in a city and working in a factory was so unnatural that it would create behavioral problems. It then followed that the people most adapted to city living, the rich of the time, would have the most mental illness. They were fucking wrong, and they had their noses rubbed in this for the next 400 years. It turns out truly intelligent individuals can adapt to novel scenarios. I.e., the most rich and successful in the modern industrialized world had fewer numbers of mentally ill. You know who had a lot of mentally ill people? The fucking poors who couldn’t adapt and couldn’t pay for fucking treatment. And so, it was for 300ish years. Being a ‘mad doctor’ (originally not even doctors but business men) was a hard profession where you were constantly trying to keep your bank balance out of the red.
It wasn’t until Charcot came onto the scene that things started to change. I often compare Josh to Charcot. Charcot was a father of modern neuroscience, and he ran an ancient form of the kiwifarms. He’d take insane patients and strut them out on the stage. Not unlike josh with his lolcows, for the public to observe and laugh at. It was this business which accounted for a lot of Charcot’s profits. Something which one of his students, Freud, noticed. When Freud, famed father of psychology, started his practice, he noted the lack of money in treating the actually insane. In Freud’s time, the insane were largely treated in asylums. It’s interesting that Freud never stepped foot in one of these hospitals. Instead, he learned from Charcot that it’s far more profitable convincing rich bored house wives that they are mentally ill and in need of his treatment by comparing their lives to their favorite books and plays of the time. That’s where Freud’s psychoanalysis would have died if it wasn’t for Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays. A big shot in the emerging advertising industry. He saw the potential for using Freud’s work to manipulate women into buying cigarettes, something which women didn’t really do at the time, and kept his field alive until the pharmaceutical industry came around and repurposed psychology to sell drugs and now everything.
TLDR, Psychology isn’t about treating the truly insane. It’s about manipulating people. In particular, affluent bored women. First just to keep Freud employed, then to sell tobacco, then to sell drugs, now to advertise everything. Do people still get better in treatment, yes but it’s not because of therapy, it’s because of their own will power. Therapy can’t heal shit, it’s more like life coaching. and this post is long enough so I’ll end my mati-style rant here. But there's so much more to talk about, how the treatment of mental illness has been following trends to hilarious ends. Like purposefully infecting people with malaria to have their immune system clear the crazy toxins from the body, removing the uterus of crazy bitches, literally centrifuging people. Seriously, the history is fascinating and scary. The recent reproducibility crisis and how every other decade of the field thinks the last decade was the ignorant dummies but they have it figured out now fr fr because [insert new pop-sci fad which broke into the mainstream and psychologist misinterpret in hilarious ways].