What I Like and Dislike About Therapy

Today, I saw a really arrogant post from a therapist telling other therapists that they can charge two hundred and fifty dollars an hour, and she was offering guides on how to make that much or more. People, firefighters, who will run into a burning building for you, don’t make $250 an hour. You listen to people talk for 45 minutes. These things are not equal in value.

I don’t want to devalue therapy. Therapists are usually very trained and educated. I have been in therapy before, as somebody with bipolar, and some therapists are very helpful. But therapists need to be real. What they are offering is considered a medical service, but it is a luxury medical service. No one’s heart will stop beating without it. Until around a bit more than a century ago, therapy did not even exist. And honestly, people were more resilient back then than they are now. While individual therapists can be helpful to individual people, I’m not sure that therapy on the whole pushed on such a wide scale has been good for society. Sometimes you don’t need to talk it out and be validated. You need to toughen up.

$250 dollars an hour is insane. Many of her reasons were just stupid, such as I’m the main breadwinner at my house. That’s my problem why? Get a man. A few of her reasons were reasons to be concerned, such as the cost of continuing education, most of which I think is unnecessary, and we could free therapists from doing it. So I see her point there. But talking about her savings account and retirement and all that just didn’t exactly make my heart sing. Her clients have all those same problems. Does she think having rent or a mortgage makes her special? Having bills to pay does not make your service more valuable than it actually is. When I book with a therapist or hire a hairdresser (another group with out of control prices) it isn’t an act of charity. I’m looking for a service and 1. Will only pay what it is worth and 2. Will only pay what I can afford. It is common in therapy to see your therapist weekly. So this woman wants between eight hundred and a thousand dollars a month from her clients. Presumably she has many.

Depending on where she lives, there may be a market for luxury therapists to help the rich with their problems. If that’s what she wants to do, there’s nothing wrong with it. Rich people are people too and need help.And if that’s her clientele, that’s okay. But to sell this theory to therapists at large is absolutely ridiculous.Many people going to therapy are in the throes of poverty from mental illness or divorce or generational violence and abuse. People struggling to care for their kids don’t really care about your 401 k. It’s not wrong to want to make a lot of money. But you should accept that helping other people and making a lot of money don’t usually go together. If this woman wants to be wealthy, she’s obviously smart and ambitious and can go for it, but therapy is not the field to do that in.

The whole thing was predatory, and I saw people in the comments saying that now they won’t even think of going to therapy because they feel like their therapist is just out to take advantage of them basically. And someone wanting to charge you two hundred dollars plus to listen to you for forty five minutes is taking advantage of you. This woman thinks she’s helping therapists make more money, and for all I know, she is, but she’s also turning a lot of people off to getting help. Some therapists are vultures.