349 Photos and videos
Jonathan Alpert retweeted
Is too much therapy making us unhealthy? @bridgetphetasy sits down with @jonathanalpert to discuss why the therapy industry may be making people worse, not better. Watch the full episode of Walk-Ins Welcome now!
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Grievance culture kills people, jobs, etc.
Mamdani’s social media savvy has already cost him… Citadel CEO Ken Griffin is already making good on his promise to double down on Miami
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Jonathan Alpert retweeted
Therapy is looking more like re-education. Everyday struggles become studies in power, privilege and oppression until patients stop coming, writes Jonathan Alpert
on.wsj.com/4g1vnbl
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Something has gone wrong in therapist training.
Future therapists are taught to view human problems through the lens of power, privilege, oppression, and identity politics.
That's not therapy. It's ideology.
My latest @WSJopinion @WSJ
wsj.com/opinion/therapy-is-l…
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Jun 12
If Graham Platner were your daughter’s boyfriend instead of a Democratic Senate candidate, would the red flags suddenly seem easier to recognize? dailywire.com/news/would-dem… @grahamformaine @realDailyWire
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Jun 12
Great conversation @shellenberger about how many in my profession have lost their way. public.news/p/why-psychother…
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Thank you @shellenberger for an important conversation!
Psychotherapy is today one of the largest helping professions in the West. The American Psychological Association (APA) counts more than 172,000 members, and the US government counts 204,300 psychologists, 483,500 mental health counselors, and 77,800 marriage and family therapists at work. The share of adults who saw a mental health professional in the past year more than doubled since the beginning of the century, from 10% in 2001 to 24% today. One recent study put the number of adults in outpatient talk therapy at nearly 22 million a year, up from about 16.5 million only three years earlier. In 2012, the American Psychological Association declared psychotherapy “effective and highly cost-effective.”
And yet psychological problems and psychiatric disorders keep rising. Depression among Americans aged 12 and older rose 60 percent over the last decade, from 8.2 percent in 2013 and 2014 to 13.1 percent in 2021 to 2023. The share of adults ever diagnosed with depression is today an astonishing 30%, almost ten points above its 2015 reading.
A 2016 study in Pediatrics tracked the share of adolescents reporting a major depressive episode rising from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 11.3 percent in 2014. A 2024 study of 1.7 million young people found clinical depression up about 60 percent and anxiety up 31 percent in only four years.
“Endless psychotherapy is a waste of time and money at best, and harmful at worst,” writes psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert in a new book, Therapy Nation. I spoke to Alpert last week, and our conversation follows the video above.
Of course, mental distress was rising before the creation of psychotherapy, and psychotherapy can produce real benefits, particularly for specific conditions. In the late 19th Century, a neurologist chronicled an epidemic of nervous collapse he named neurasthenia, marked by fatigue, anxiety, and depressed mood in an 1881 book. The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot reported that anxious neurasthenics made up the bulk of his own private practice. And a skilled therapist can ease a particular patient’s anxiety and even lift an episode of depression. Millions of people say, and have shown, that psychotherapy has helped them.
But the fact remains that psychotherapy grew in popularity over the same periods of time that people have reported worsening mental health. This is true not just over the last 120 years but also over the last 20 to 35 years. The rate of depression among adults under 30 more than doubled, from 13% in 2017 to 28% in 2026. Anxiety disorders among people aged 10 to 24 rose 52 percent globally between 1990 and 2021. If psychotherapy is, as APA says, “effective,” it’s either, at best, not effective enough or, at worst, contributing to the problem.
And there is evidence that psychotherapy often makes things worse. A 2006 study of 1,868 individuals found that people who received less psychotherapy achieved greater “reliable and clinically significant improvement” than those who received more. While this could simply represent the reality that people with worse mental distress require less counseling than those who do, it could also mean that psychotherapy worsens mental health.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, recovered memory therapy persuaded thousands of patients, often young women, that they had survived childhood sexual abuse that never happened, resulting in false accusations. A Houston jury awarded one woman nearly $5.8 million in 1997 after therapists implanted false memories. By one estimate, more than 50,000 American therapists accepted the theory of repressed memory uncritically.
And large studies challenge the credibility of the entire field of psychotherapy. A 2018 review estimated that 5 to 20 percent of psychotherapy patients suffer adverse events, including new or worsening symptoms. A 2024 reanalysis of youth depression trials concluded that about one in five young patients got worse during active treatment. Across studies, 40 to 60 percent of psychotherapy patients never reach recovery.
What went wrong? Why has therapy failed to deliver on its promise? And why does it so often cause harm?...
x.com/shellenberger/status/2…
Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, watch the full video, and read the rest of the article!
x.com/shellenberger/status/2…
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Jonathan Alpert retweeted
The American Psych. Assoc. says therapy is “effective,” but Americans diagnosed with depression rose from 20% to 30% since 2015, while the number of Americans in therapy rose from 17 to 22 million. Victimhood ideology and the valuing of feelings over virtue are to blame.
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Thanks for the mention @GeorgeWill
Jun 11
Graham Platner’s ‘journey’ evades accountability
washingtonpost.com/opinions/…
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Would you be OK with Graham Platner dating your daughter? dailywire.com/news/would-dem… @grahamformaine
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Jun 11
Thx for the mention @georgewill Opinion | Maine Democrat Graham Platner is steeped in the jargon of therapy-speak - The Washington Post washingtonpost.com/opinions/…
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Good to see Therapy Nation at one of the cutest NYC book shops - Three Lives & Company.
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Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist and author of Therapy Nation, warned that while the mental illness can "explain" what happened, it does not "erase harm" caused by West's actions.
"Forgiveness, if it comes at all, typically follows sustained accountability, consistent treatment, and a long period without exhibiting the behavior that was in question," Alpert noted.
radaronline.com/p/kanye-west…
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Jonathan Alpert retweeted
Jun 4
Jonathan Alpert writing for The Free Press
open.substack.com/pub/bariwe…
“This is where therapy culture ceases to strengthen people and starts quietly weakening them. The person becomes increasingly protected from scrutiny, and increasingly fragile as a result.
We are becoming emotionally articulate while growing psychologically brittle.”
So pop a pill
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Jonathan Alpert retweeted
On Lifestyles with Allan Tee from 14.00CET, @JonathanAlpert with 'Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It's Left Us More Anxious and Divided', and Liam Hughes' 'Bodily Fluids: Five decades of blood, phlegm and bile on the hospital frontline' @EyeAndLightning
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Democrats' 192-Page Autopsy Sounds Like Bad Therapy realclearpolitics.com/2026/0…
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Jonathan Alpert retweeted
Jun 2
At the White House today interviewing a very special guest for Pod Force One. Check it out here, 6am Wednesday.
youtube.com/@podforce1?si=8M…
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Jonathan Alpert retweeted
Jun 2
DNC’s 192-page autopsy sounds like bad therapy. Democrats still have a big problem | Jonathan Alpert, Fox News
The Democrats have far more than a messaging problem. They have a self-examination problem. On May 21, the Democratic National Committee released 192 pages of proof.
Therapists know that some patients can talk endlessly about their problems without ever confronting what’s keeping them stuck. They can explain fluently why their lives aren’t working: toxic people, unfair systems, bad bosses, childhood wounds.
Sometimes those explanations are valid. But eventually good therapy requires interruption. At some point, I find myself stopping the narrative and asking the harder question: "What role are you playing in why this keeps happening?" Without that confrontation, therapy can quietly become an endless rehearsal of explanation instead of a process of growth.
Reading the Democratic National Committee’s post-election autopsy, I couldn’t help thinking about those patients. The report was supposed to explain why Democrats lost the presidency, Congress and much of the country’s trust. Instead, the rollout itself became psychologically revealing.
The DNC released the report with a disclaimer printed across every page: "This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC." And when some conclusions made party leadership uncomfortable — including the finding that Democrats wrongly assumed voters already understood Donald Trump’s weaknesses and that his negatives were "baked in" — party annotators pushed back directly in the margins with comments like "no evidence provided" and "contradicts claims elsewhere in report."
As a therapist, I’ve seen similar dynamics many times. Patients sometimes acknowledge uncomfortable truths while simultaneously arguing with them, qualifying them or trying to explain them away before those truths fully land emotionally. A party commissioning an autopsy and then debating the pathologist in the margins is not necessarily a party ready to hear hard news.
The report catalogs tactical failures, messaging problems and demographic erosion. It acknowledges the party’s growing disconnect from working-class voters, men and large parts of the country. But what it struggles to confront is the broader psychological culture that may have contributed to those failures in the first place.
Over the last decade, many elite institutions aligned with the Democratic coalition — universities, media organizations, nonprofits and parts of corporate America — have increasingly adopted the language of validation, emotional safety, trauma and harm. Disagreement is often treated less as disagreement and more as evidence of cruelty, insensitivity or moral defect. Emotional discomfort is increasingly framed not as part of democratic life, but as evidence that something harmful has occurred.
That shift matters because political movements, like people, can lose the ability to test reality. In therapy, patients sometimes become so invested in protecting a preferred self-image that criticism itself starts feeling intolerable. Once that happens, self-examination becomes performative rather than transformative. The goal subtly shifts from discovering what is true to protecting what feels emotionally safe.
You can see traces of that mindset throughout the autopsy itself: the discomfort with confrontation, the instinct to soften or qualify uncomfortable conclusions before fully reckoning with them and the difficulty tolerating interpretations that threaten identity or self-concept.
Modern political institutions now perform self-awareness the way some patients perform insight. They hold listening sessions, release reports and speak the language of reflection while carefully avoiding the more painful possibility that some of their core assumptions may simply be wrong. The performance of introspection gradually replaces introspection itself.
But good therapy doesn’t simply validate. Good therapy helps people deal with their reality. Patients sometimes arrive in denial. They rationalize failures, externalize blame and construct narratives that protect self-esteem. Growth begins when those defenses are challenged compassionately but directly. In my new book, "Therapy Nation," I argue that many of our institutions — from therapy offices to universities to political movements — have confused validation with growth and self-expression with genuine self-examination. A therapist who reflexively validates everything a patient says may provide temporary emotional relief while reinforcing the very patterns keeping the person stuck.
The DNC autopsy reads similarly: aware enough to recognize problems, but still uncomfortable with fully confronting what those problems might actually reveal.
The right has its own forms of tribal defensiveness and motivated reasoning, including among some who refuse to reckon honestly with January 6th, where people stormed the U.S. Capitol. But the DNC report offered an unusually vivid example of a broader cultural instinct: the desire to appear introspective while protecting oneself from the full discomfort of genuine self-confrontation.
A real autopsy cuts to the bone. It doesn’t come with a disclaimer. The fact that the DNC’s did may tell us more about the party’s condition than any of its findings. Until Democrats can tolerate the discomfort of genuine self-examination without annotating it into submission, they’ll keep mistaking the performance of self-awareness for the reality of change.
foxnews.com/opinion/dncs-192…
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Jonathan Alpert retweeted
Jun 1
.@JonathanAlpert tells @JackPosobiec that Tyler Robinson's team is "clearly worried" because there is overwhelming evidence against him.
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