Men Would Rather Write A Blog Post

    According to bf, my mental health has declined significantly since my last school year, and I think he might be right. I have been experiencing dramatic mood swings, pretty crippling anxiety, lack of motivation, etc. My phone addiction has gotten worse and I cry all the time. I am not able to bring myself to draw or to read or even to sit down and watch a movie or show. Everything is kinda boring to me right now and I live in a mess.

    He says I should look into therapy, which is a very harrowing idea to me. I have nothing against therapy. I think if you can and need it you probably do it. But there is a plethora of reasons I feel it is maybe not for me. I am very aware that most of these reasons are bullshit reasons. I am also aware that I am reacting the exact same way as my mom when me and my sister encouraged her to go to therapy ("therapy is cool and all it's just not for me"). I think it might help me think this through if I write them down in some kind of internet-friendly numbered list. Maybe I can bring these concerns up with the therapist when I do end up going; maybe by writing them down I can exorcise some of them. In any case, this is not an argument against therapy –– I think I will need to find a therapist some time in the future. Instead, this is an attempt to give a form to my many resistances to the idea of getting help. 

 

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1. Michel Foucault 

     This is not a real objection I think, because it is pretty easy to dispute. The objection is this: Foucault writes about institutions and body of knowledge like psychiatry, prisons, sexuality, etc. and discusses the way these relate to a modern form of power –– a power that, instead of working through an overt and visible imbalance of force between the sovereign and their subjects, opts to know the governed, to produce and distinguish different kind of persons, to discipline by penetrating deep into the subject in order to render their bodies docile and governable. I think this is just a smart sounding cover for my other, less radical and noble reasons to not go to therapy, and it is a flimsy one at that. Foucault not only writes about psychiatry and prisons, he also writes about schools and medicine. And I think the point of his intervention is not that you shouldn't go to the doctor when sick, that kids shouldn't go to schools, or, for our purposes, that people in distress should not get psychiatric help. We have the institutions that we have and we need to do what we got to do to live in a society. The point is rather to understand these institutions not as neutral and apolitical, but rather as organs of a larger logic of power. If you're starving and you only have black licorice, you'd have to eat the licorice while knowing you could be eating better things. 

 

2. Therapists on Tiktok

     Therapists are on tiktok and instagram making all kinds of content and I hate it. I do not want to see my therapist's snarky remark of my troubles on the internet, nor do I want other people to know what I am going through. It is not just the idea of potentially having the confidentiality breached that I am worried about - I think my becoming a material for content at all would be terrifying to me. I see many therapists posting about "common things clients are worried about" or "clients apologize after cursing when they don't need to." I do not want to see that if I just told them that I am worried about these things or if I apologized after cursing, I don't want to be a character on a learning material, it's invasive and scary and embarrassing. 

    Moreover, in my I research online, I repeatedly stumbled upon Kati Morton, the therapist in Shane Dawson's Jake Paul video. This does not boost my confidence for therapists as a profession.  If there's a possibility that I might walk into an office and be confronted by someone like Kati –– someone who feels  comfortable talking about sociopaths as "creepy" and "gross" and finds it appropriate to say that sociopaths do not "have a heart"–– that is very concerning to me. I do not want that. 

    On one hand, I understand that therapy is like any relationship, in that there are people you just don't hit off with and that is okay. But on the other hand I do not go around telling my secrets to people I meet on the streets. The therapists hold tremendous power over me and I think finding a bad therapist is a much scarier prospect then talking to some guy you decide not to be close friends with. 

 

3. If nothing is wrong with me, that would be very embarrassing 

     Pretty self-explanatory. If the therapist decides that I am depressed or something then all is good and we can deal with that problem. But if it turns out there is nothing wrong with me, I think that might say a few things about me, none of which are very good. 1) It could mean that I am in some unconscious way seeking attention, I feign sadness in order to talk about how special I am, to act out some kind of adolescent fetish about being the tragic and romantic melancholiac. 2) I am weak and lazy person that uses mental illness as an excuse to not do what I should be doing. Everyone else is doing it, but I, out of laziness and weakness, decide I should not do it. And as the only non-psychical reason of not doing it is mental illness, I mistake what I have as mental illness. 3) I am constitutively fucked up. The problem is not what I have but what I am. 4) All of the above. I really do not want to find out which it is. 

 

4. It's really not that bad

     I think there are many people that are dealing with much more serious problems than me, and there are many people that are in worse situations than I am but don't need therapy. This is of course not to say you have to be in the worst situation in the world to deserve help, but I kind of imagine it has to be a little worse than what I have. My life is at the end of the day okay. And to seek out therapy when everything is objectively speaking pretty good just feels like an over-reaction. 

 

5. All of the worst guys are in therapy

     I had a former friend that told me that they once ask their therapist why many people dislike them and why many of their friendships ended poorly. After discussing it with the therapist they came to the conclusion that they really don't care and don't need everyone to like them. Which is a fine thing to think I suppose, but I feel it ignores that the former friend is often is very antagonistic with people around them, and that might be the factor pushing people away. 

    I worry that therapy can be a way to excuse my flaws away. I don't really think I should sit in a room and blame everyone around me and my childhood for things I am ultimately responsible for. Now I have been told this is not really what therapy is like, but I feel that if so many people in the world are using therapy speak to evade responsibility, there must be some truth to my assessment, right? 

    Of course, many of these people are actively trying to shift responsibility, thus doing therapy in bad faith. And if I am not looking for resources to do that it might be different for me. But I'm not sure I am willing to place the blame solely on these "bad people." Even if people are willing to change, it is only normal for them to want to maintain a coherent and positive self image. Under this condition, isn't therapy a naturally seductive tool for you to unconsciously shield yourself from things that reflect poorly on yourself? 

 

6. What if the therapist uses AI? 

     Somewhat of a recent worry. It seems like outside of my very small milieu, AI is very much integrated into the lives and decision making of everyone on earth. It's people's go-to thing when they have a question, they use it to formulate every sentence, etc. In my perfect world, I would hope that therapists are better than using AI at all in their practices, but I worry that this might not be the case. I don't want my therapist to use AI because 1) I will feel very cheated. I don't want to pay real money to talk to someone assisted by ChatGPT, I can just do that at home for free (I won't). 2) Is that even allowed within client confidentiality? Are you allowed to just share my deepest insecurities with Sam Altman? It doesn't seem legal, right? 3) I hate AI on principle and don't want anything to do with it. 

 

7. I don't really want to talk to people that are paid to listen to me

    This one just doesn't make any sense because the fact that the therapist has no skin in my game is what makes the treatment effective (I assume). But I feel there is just something so perverse about talking to someone that is paid to care. I don't really want to be with people who are obligated to be with me, I would rather be with people that like me. I think this is so disorienting to me because I know how to act through other people's reaction to what I do, and if you are paid to stick around I just don't know if you like me or not and cannot act accordingly.

 

8. I might become a worse artist if I get well

    Probably not the case.

 

9.  Therapy is expensive

    It is. 

 

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    That is about it, or at least the ones I can currently summon from my brain. Once again, these are probably mostly bullshit reasons and I am will not argue for them that passionately if you disagree. (Although I continue to feel in my heart that these points make sense even if you attack them with sound and flawless logic.) Typing them out, these do seem like the ramblings of an unwell man, so that kinda settles that, but god are these points convincing in my head. THESE ARE LEGITIMATE WORRIES IDK WHAT TO TELL YOU!!!