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Feb. 3, 2024 - The Matt Walsh Show
07:28
This Is What I Would Do If I Was A Therapist [Weekly Walsh Original]

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Towards the end of last week, I found myself in the middle of a social media firestorm, if you can believe it.
Now, I'm not usually the sort of guy who makes people on the internet mad.
In fact, I think this might be the first time in my life that such a thing has ever happened.
Sometimes I don't know when you're kidding.
I was trending on Twitter for a few days because of some comments I made about therapy, mental health, and depression.
Now, to be clear, therapy is overrated, overused, and not nearly as effective as people seem to assume.
Sounds good, doesn't work.
I will just mention this one response from a child therapist on TikTok.
Who was offended by my therapy skepticism.
So, let's just watch that.
I'm Matt Walsh.
What's wrong with you?
Uh, yeah.
I saw your Psychology Today profile.
Is it true you can help me in only five minutes?
Yes.
That's all the time I need to fix you.
Uh, okay.
You take insurance, right?
Of course.
But only if they're owned by private equity.
The government can't take away my right to choose your healthcare.
Great.
Is it okay if I let you know what's going on?
Yeah, I've already started the meter, so you better make it quick.
Oh, oh, okay.
Um, I'm lonely, I don't know how to make friends, everyone keeps making fun of me, and I don't know how to talk to females.
Okay, okay, stop whining.
I know what you need to do.
You're gonna want to write this down.
Alright, great.
What is it?
Stop it!
Um, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that.
Just stop it!
Stop looking like an idiot and make some friends!
I mean, I gotta say, the acting and writing could use a little bit of work, but other than that, pretty spot on.
I mean, that is unironically not far from how my therapy practice would work if I had one.
I don't know why he had his eyes closed the whole time, as the idea that I was falling asleep.
You know, I wouldn't make it through a day.
I would not make it through a day as a therapist.
But if I was a therapist, it'd be pretty similar to that.
Although, I'd probably model it more after this scene from an obscure HBO show nobody watched 10 years ago.
But I like this one scene anyway, because this is what therapy would be like if I was doing it.
Here it is.
So, I'm not the kind of therapist who puts their foots around.
I like to dig in fast and I give feedback.
Stop fidgeting.
What are you doing with your arm?
Nothing.
I'm just nervous.
Put your hands in your lap.
Focus.
Sit up.
Good posture sends positive messages to the brain.
We're here to work.
So, what are your issues?
Give them to me.
Well, I am sad about this breakup I just went through.
She left you.
Yes.
And now you feel rejected and unlovable and you can't understand why she no longer loves you.
Yes.
You do know that she's not the only source of love for you in the world.
But I want her love.
We don't get everything we want in life.
You don't get to ever love.
That's it.
End of story.
Next issue.
Again, unironically, that would be good therapy.
One of the big problems with therapy is that in its least effective forms, it gives people a forum to whine and talk about themselves in a way that feeds the meter for the therapist and gives the client an excuse to be narcissistic and self-indulgent, but does not lead to action or change.
In fact, the therapist is incentivized to not spark any lasting change because that would interrupt the cash flow.
This is a The fact is that for most people in therapy, the source of their problems is not some complex, deeply hidden trauma they need to, you know, have years of discussion to identify and unpack.
But if therapists give simple answers, again, they'd be out of a job.
What a lot of people really need is to be told exactly what you heard in that clip, which is, this is the way things are, this is life, you can't always get what you want, deal with it, stop complaining, move on.
I mean, that is the answer to like 99% of the emotional complaints that you have.
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This led, after a couple of the steps, into a discussion about depression.
I'm just tired.
The days are short, I don't know.
There is a difference between sadness and depression, but it is one of degree, not of kind.
Depression is a deep, persistent sadness.
It's like the difference between being hungry because you skipped lunch and being hungry because you haven't eaten in two days.
They're both forms of hunger, but one is more severe and more debilitating than the other.
So it's just a matter of degree.
And the same is true of sadness and depression.
Depression is sadness to a much greater degree.
I am dead inside.
Now, it seems like there's no reason why this point should make people so angry that they call for me to be deplatformed and fired from my job, but that's what happened.
The reason that it gets this reaction is because most people are programmed to lash out at anyone who says anything that appears to fall outside of the orthodoxies and teachings of the psychiatric industry.
What?
Don't ask questions.
So, for example, one of the many clinical mental diseases that psychiatrists have come up with is something called oppositional defiant disorder, which is a disorder characterized by a child acting oppositional and defiant.
Now, it's definitely true that some children, many children even, all children to some extent, do behave in oppositional and defiant ways.
That is very real, but it's not a disease.
Kevin, you're such a disease.
Shut up!
But this is what these people have done.
Every difficult human emotion or experience has been arbitrarily and entirely subjectively recategorized as a clinical problem.
And if you think I'm making that up, you can go, you can find the DSM, you can find it online, you can go through it, and I guarantee you, literally every negative emotion has multiple diseases for it.
And this is what has happened with depression, in my view.
Depression is real.
It is serious.
I do not believe that it is a disease, however.
Depression is despair, which itself is, again, essentially a much more persistent, deeper, more encompassing sadness.
I prefer the word despair.
So, despair, I submit, is not a disease, because it is a completely natural, even fundamental aspect of the human experience.
It's called being human.
As we disease-ify and medicalize all of these difficult human emotions, what we find is that year over year, the problems get worse.
Suicide becomes more common.
People become less able to cope with the challenges of life.
The strategy isn't working.
And it isn't working because it's based on a lie.
And it's a lie that makes people feel powerless.
That it, in fact, trains people to take comfort and seek respite in their powerlessness.
So I'm suggesting that it may be time to stop.
Analyze some of these basic presuppositions.
Realize that this is a field that has been extremely, disastrously wrong about a lot of things.
That's all I'm trying to say.
And I will keep saying it, no matter how angry people are about it.
And it's why that industry is today, once again, finally, cancelled.
And we worked all day at the best job ever.
We knew every drug, and we all remembered the proper dose of the medicine.
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