Dan

Honestly you probably already know too much about me | M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling | M.A. in Forensic Psychology

[Jeremy the therapist @psychfox]

Therapeutic "love" is neither romance nor limitless accommodation. It is the disciplined refusal to reduce a person to symptoms, defenses, pathology, or inconvenience while still asking them to change. It is a deep respect for the patient's humanity, with all the responsibilities and dignities entailed therein.

“I believe it is love that endows the therapist with the emotional power to foster change and love that gives the patient the courage to pursue it.”
(McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, 2004, p. 150)

[jordan @jordanticus]

Want to improve your mental health?

1. Stop thinking of your mental health as something to be optimized or as a checklist detached from selfhood, relationships, and meaning.

2. Stop listening to influencers overstating already flawed studies by researchers who have zero understanding of point 1.

[jordan @jordanticus]

We need to stop calling this type of stuff science and start calling it what it is: bad and stupid. It's full of bias, limitations, and overstated conclusions. The people who do this research and the ones who spread it don't have the faintest clue about people or their minds.

[​𝐥𝐲𝐫𝐚 @sunnkssdseraph]

According to psychology, the urge to immediately fix a partner’s or friend’s distress instead of just sitting with them in it isn't empathy; it is your own low frustration tolerance. When someone you love is hurting, and you instantly jump into problem-solving mode, offering unsolicited advice or trying to find a silver lining, you are often trying to soothe your own secondary anxiety. You aren't rescuing them from their pain; you are rescuing yourself from the discomfort of witnessing a vulnerability you don't know how to hold.

[jordan @jordanticus]

@jesusrglez "CBT is the gold standard treatment for the therapist's anxiety"

might have to tweet this out later

[jordan @jordanticus]

The evidence people have an evidence problem.

There is no meaningful evidence that ERP is more effective at treating OCD than psychoanalysis. This is becoming more evident as more meta-analyses pile up.

The only evidence-based claim that ERP can make is that it's the 'most studied.' Hang it in the rafters I guess.

https://t.co/wHYhAy1ttE

[Apenas um rapaz lacano-americano @lacanoamericano]

O problema da psicanálise é que ela [coisa que freud, lacan e outros psicanalistas passaram os últimos 100 anos criticando incessantemente]

[MP Arizona☀️🏳️‍🌈💙🌵🐕🐕‍🦺🫂💦🏜🐟🌴🎙🌎🌻♍️🌊 @AzPetrich]

"What if a drug addict used your tax dollars to get SNAP benefits?"

The government uses my tax dollars to bomb villages, arm warlords, fund coups, and trafficks children through proxy states. If a "junkie" eats because of me, that's the most moral thing my taxes have done.

[jordan @jordanticus]

my thoughts are just noise
my feelings are just sensations
my anxiety is just my amygdala
my love for others is just oxytocin

etc etc etc

This logic is exhausting, reductive, and incoherent. You can't declare one part of you as noise and then make up meaning for yourself anymore than you can tell yourself you love the taste of dry chicken but that you find the taste of ice cream revolting.

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

For the record: the idea that trauma can cause mental, emotional, and physical symptoms originated with Freud in 1895.

Before Freud, people who had what we now call conversion symptoms or (more recently) “functional neurological disorders” were believed to have nervous system diseases that required medical treatment. These diseases were treated by neurologists.

Psychoanalysis, and ultimately the profession of psychotherapy, was born with the recognition that the physical symptoms had psychological meanings—and could be understood and resolved through talking and listening.

Freud’s insight changed everything. Before Freud, the prevailing view was that physical symptoms could be caused only by medical disease. After Freud, it became universally recognized that physical symptoms can be caused by *psychology.*

This was the birth of the psychotherapy professions: treatment grounded in psychological meaning rather than biological mechanism.

Talking and listening… imagine that.

Which is why all the trendy “therapy speak” of today—“nervous system” this and “nervous system” that—is so bizarrely anachronistic. It is turning away from psychological meaning and a return to the medical model of the of the 1800s.

[The Mel Jar @the_mel_jar]

An absolute fantasy. A hopeful fairy tale for children. “I have an undamaged and natural and pure Core Self.”

Guys, this stopped being true the moment you were born into the world within relationships to Others.

By the time you developed language, man oh man, was it truly over.

[Harry J Zeit MD @HarryZeitMD]

Patients in long term therapy "are given the unusual opportunity to relax in the care of another human being, unfreezing themselves from destructive and unsatisfying patterns and relationships, past and present, to arrive as more fully evolved people who are supple and more

[Scott Kominers @skominers]

Woah I just noticed this correlation 🤯. At some point, do we need to consider the possibility that RFK Jr. is causing autism?

...👇

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

Fact check: It is statistically impossible to predict school shooters without hundreds of thousands of false positives for every prediction.

(For the statistically minded, this is about Bayes theorem and low base rates)

[The Mel Jar @the_mel_jar]

We all have to learn to tolerate the different religions we encounter in order not to offend the believers, for example, the belief in the existence of academic and professional meritocracy, the belief in “evidence-based mental healthcare,” and astrology.

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

Cont’d

1️⃣4️⃣“Clinical supervision” no longer a training relationship with a skilled clinical teacher/mentor, but often reduced to administrative function by clinics and agencies

1️⃣5️⃣Runaway bureaucratization—inordinate time spent on forms/paperwork/documentation that neither benefits patients nor develops therapists’ clinical skills

1️⃣6️⃣In-depth personal psychotherapy no longer seen as essential part of psychotherapists’ training. Therapists then provide didactic “skills training” instead of psychotherapy because they’ve never experienced psychotherapy—or live out their own personal psychological issues with clients because they’ve never understood/worked through them in their own psychotherapy

1️⃣7️⃣Extreme gender imbalance in training programs (classes often >90% female) with resulting loss of balance and perspective. Male students routinely report feeling unwelcome/marginalized/silenced

1️⃣8️⃣Increased emphasis in training programs on paint-by-numbers “manualized” therapies in place of mastering fundamental psychological principles and core psychotherapy skills

1️⃣9️⃣Endless proliferation of “new” therapy brands/models/acronyms instead of emphasis on core psychotherapy skills. Virtually all are repackaging of well-established principles, endlessly reinvented/rediscovered by people who never learned them in the first place

2️⃣0️⃣Rampant denial of the role of unconscious mental life; therapy approaches that address only surface

let’s keep ‘em coming...

[matt bernstein @mattxiv]

any word from gay republicans on this one?

[Jonathan Shedler @JonathanShedler]

DBT has sucked up approx 80% of all research funding for borderline personality—and has never once shown greater effectiveness than any other legit form of psychotherapy

Reality vs PR

See chapter in this book by @klevyphd for up to date review

[The Mel Jar @the_mel_jar]

Look, it’s very simple: using the couch in psychoanalysis allows everyone to avoid the unbearable hell of sustained eye contact, which Freud and all right thinking people obviously concluded is garbage and totally sucktastic.