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Feb. 24, 2024 - The Matt Walsh Show
01:26:22
My Discussion With Jordan Peterson

PDS Debt - PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/Walsh Matt Walsh and Jordan Peterson sit down to discuss the benefits of therapy and the problems with mental illness.

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So there's an idea, for example, that's central to the Christian worldview that wherever two people are together, the spirit of God himself is present.
And a secular interpretation of that is that it's therapeutic.
[MUSIC]
Dr. Peterson, thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.
I appreciate it.
I'm looking forward to it.
Now, we were just talking a little bit off air, and I want to set up what led to this conversation for the benefit of the audience that isn't on Twitter.
But I think that a lot of people in the audience are expecting or maybe hoping that this will be kind of a debate Between us, and I don't want to disappoint anyone, but that's not exactly my plan.
I actually just wanted to talk to you and get your insight into a lot of these issues having to do with mental illness and therapy.
And I'll admit up front that I have a lot of doubts and a lot of questions on this topic, but my mind is not totally made up.
So you might even change my mind, which doesn't happen very often, but it could happen today.
So let me just, I guess, set this up a little bit, what started all this.
I tweeted something a couple of weeks ago about therapy, and I expressed my view that I've said several times publicly, that I think therapy is very often a waste of time, it's very often something that does more harm than it does good.
And we'll expand on that in a moment.
That turned into a conversation about mental illness and things like depression and anxiety, something I've also talked about quite a bit, and whether those things are really a disease or whether they've been miscategorized.
And I think that we have made sort of a category error with them.
That made people very upset.
And that's when it was suggested that you and I should talk.
And I think people are hoping that you'll set me straight on some of this.
So I'm hoping that we could kind of Start with the second thing, which is mental illness, and then I think that will lead more naturally into the conversation about therapy and what it is and what its purpose is.
So, again, my view, just to start things, is that it seems to me we've made a major mistake In treating things like depression as a disease, you know, as if having them is like having diabetes or malaria or something, treating it as a totally physical phenomenon.
And from that category error, a lot of negative consequences have followed.
What do you say to that?
Well, I would say that within the broad and vague category of depression, There are many separate entities lurking and hiding, and that conflating them is problematic with regard to understanding and also with regard to treatment.
And so, depression per se is a secondary category.
It's a secondary manifestation of proclivity to negative emotion.
That's the broadest possible conceptualization.
And that manifests itself in the personality structure as trait neuroticism.
All of the negative emotions clump together, which means that if you're more likely to experience one, you're more likely to experience all of them.
So, you could think that there's a general emotional arousal Capacity that typifies emotions and it branches into two major subcategories, positive and negative emotion.
And those are quite separate neurologically and psychopharmacologically, functionally, although they are to some degree mutually inhibitory.
So there are chemicals that Increased positive emotion, and there are chemicals that decrease negative emotion.
The chemicals that decrease negative emotion can be subdivided into chemicals that decrease anxiety per se, that's benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and alcohol, and medications that decrease pain.
And pain is frustration, disappointment, grief, shame, and physical pain.
So that's the negative emotion side is where you have trait neuroticism, and then that can be subdivided, that can become pathological.
And by pathological, what is meant is something like either unbearable or interfering with functions associated with most basically survival and reproduction, right?
And that's a judgment call.
Levels of negative emotion get so high that they now take on clinical significance.
The way that well-trained clinicians determine that is that levels of negative emotion have risen to the point where, as I said, either the person finds it subjectively unbearable, or there's evidence that important domains of broad function have been compromised.
So, for example, if I was trying to determine if you abused alcohol, I would find out, first of all, how much you consume, but then I would find out, is that causing you trouble with the police?
Is it causing you trouble with yourself in terms of guilt and shame and regret?
Is it causing trouble with your family?
Is it interfering with your employment?
Is it starting to take over your life?
And you make the same kind of diagnostic judgment when you're evaluating someone who's suffering from an excess, let's say, of anxiety or an excess of of pain, which would be more a depression-like phenomenon.
Now, and so you have to do a very careful diagnosis to find out to what degree that's occurring, to what degree it can be attributed, let's say, to anxiety or to depression, how long-standing it is, and then there's the necessity for a detailed causal analysis.
You made mention of the mistake of categorizing Depression, for example, which is a pain-like phenomenon as an illness, and I would say, well, sometimes it is a consequence of a physical illness, and sometimes it's more psychological or functional, and you have to be very careful, from a diagnostic perspective, that you get that right.
So, I'll give you an example.
I just talked to a neuropsychiatrist at McLean's Hospital.
in Boston named Chris Palmer, and he's very much convinced that a lot of endogenous depression, so that's depression that doesn't seem to have an immediate cause in loss or other catastrophe, is a metabolic disorder, and he's trying desperately at the moment to treat it with diet.
So there's some forms of depression that are clearly illness-related.
Like, we've known for a long time that you're much more likely to have signs of immunological dysfunction if you're depressed, for example.
So, when I diagnosed my clients, the first thing I would try to figure out was, well, are you just ill?
I don't mean just, as if that's nothing.
It's not nothing.
But if the depression is a secondary consequence of some physiological disorder, that has to be... Well, that's the first place you'd start, hopefully.
See if the person's just ill.
And there's lots of forms of depression that seem to have that more physical illness-like manifestation.
So, seasonal affective disorder is a good example, because people who have seasonal affective disorder are reliably much more depressed at the darkest times of the year.
And that seems to be a circadian rhythm disorder.
So, sorry, that's a long-winded answer, but it's necessary.
There's the broad category of negative emotion.
There's the narrow category of depression.
Within depression, there are multiple entities, and they have some commonality, and the commonality would be pain-like suffering, but the causal roots can be manifold and virtually unrelated.
Yeah, so that might help clear it up.
So if depression is a consequence of a physical illness, then does that mean that the depression itself is an illness, or is it just a manifestation of an illness?
Well, see, there's a problem with the question, because it's not much clearer what an illness is than it is clear whether or not depression is an illness.
Right?
Because you can think of illness in a relatively straightforward manner as something caused by a pathogen, like a virus or a bacteria.
But there's many things that we would consider illnesses that aren't obviously caused by a pathogen.
And so the notion of illness is in itself the kind of mystery that you're also facing when you are trying to wrestle with the question of what constitutes depression.
You can define illness As deviation from normality, sometimes that's a useful conceptualization.
You can define illness as deviation from ideal, which is quite a bit different than deviation from normality.
You can define illness in terms of function.
If you're sufficiently led astray by a given circumstance or trait, so that, as I mentioned earlier, multiple important areas of your life are compromised, then that can be thrown into the category of illness.
Both illness and health, let's say, if they're opposites, they're very, very ill-defined and global concepts.
This is partly why the idea of healthcare, in some ways, is also utterly preposterous, because Well, what isn't relevant to health?
If you have a category that's so broad that it contains everything, it's not that useful as a category.
And health is a category that's essentially that broad.
Health doesn't mean much different than ideal, for example.
So, is depression an illness?
Well...
The problem with those binary questions is that by asking them, you assume that one of those concepts is more well-defined than the other.
And in this case, it's just not.
Do you think it'd be fair?
I haven't really thought much about this, but the actual definition of what an illness is is interesting.
When you point it out, it takes some thinking to get to that.
But would it be too simple to say that illness is a physical Malfunction of some kind?
Well, it's... Sometimes it's too simple, because you can be... You can become physically ill for reasons that are essentially psychological.
Now, it depends on where you draw the line between psychological and physical, but we'll just use common language approach.
I've had clients who...
And this is specific to more, let's say, cognitive approaches to depression.
I've had clients who were cast into misery as a consequence of Thoughts and behaviors that weren't sufficiently functional.
So, for example, you can find yourself isolated, alone, angry, bitter, resentful, stressed, with high blood pressure and panic attacks because you're not Because you have no friends, and you can find yourself in a situation where you have no friends because you have no social skills, and you have no social skills, let's say, because you weren't socialized well, and you lack a lot of the micro-routines that make you socially acceptable.
Now, that's a complex pathway to pathology, but you can understand that a behavioral approach to that, or even a cognitive approach, might be the most appropriate.
There's lots of people who are miserable because they're isolated.
That's very common.
And they're miserable enough so that it's not only making them suffer subjectively, but the stress that's associated with that destroys them physiologically.
If you are stressed beyond a certain level, your body starts to devour its future resources to manage the present.
That's what a stress response does in some ways.
It ratchets up your metabolic rate, even, so that you can focus more attention on the present to solve the crisis that surrounds you.
But the cost of that is that you're burning resources that you might optimally want to conserve for the future.
And if you're doing that for a few minutes or even hours because you have to address a crisis, Well, fair enough.
You'll go to sleep, you'll eat, you'll go to sleep, you'll recover.
But if you're like that chronically, then it starts to physically take you apart.
It accelerates your aging.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
And so, a stressful job can do that.
Would you say, well, is having a stressful job an illness?
Well, No, but it certainly can contribute to having all sorts of illnesses.
That's absolutely crystal clear.
And so, now, you know, you're concerned, I think, more, and probably rightly so, with fuzzy thinking around such issues.
And you should be concerned about that, because when you go see a professional, Who will undertake an appropriate diagnosis.
You want someone who's sharp and who uses very careful definitions.
Because if they aren't capable of making such differentiated diagnosis, they won't identify the cause of your problem.
And in consequence, they won't treat you effectively.
You know, it would often take me months to diagnose someone who came to me as a client.
Now, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on physicians, and psychologists, psychiatrists for that matter, to diagnose in the first five minutes of their encounter.
And even patients slash clients themselves might want that, because no one likes to live in a mystery.
I'll tell you, man, getting the problem right is 90% of the solution.
In psychology as well as in politics, you might say, you know, you want to make sure that you're barking up the right tree.
And that's very tricky in a situation where the person's presenting symptoms are in the constellation of depressive ideas and emotions.
Technically, depression is a pain-like disorder, by the way, as opposed to anxiety.
So anxiety, especially excess anxiety, is a response to threat.
Pain is a response to punishment and damage.
So anxiety is a more abstracted form of negative emotion.
If you're depressed, you're more likely to be anxious, and vice versa, because all negative emotions overlap.
But the treatments for those two things are also They're also quite different.
Let me... You're talking about causes, and you mentioned earlier someone who has... whose theory about depression that doesn't have an immediate cause might have something to do with metabolism.
So, here's kind of my fundamental thing that I keep running into when it comes to... And I'm using depression, of course, I think this applies to many other things that we call mental illnesses, but just using that.
So, it seems like you can kind of separate it into two broad categories, and one is that you've got someone who, say, is coming to you and they're depressed, and then you ask them what's going on in their lives, and then you find out that the wife just left them, lost their job, their kids don't respect them, whatever, and it becomes really obvious that this is a response to things that are happening in their lives.
In fact, a quite rational response to terrible things that are happening in their lives.
So, in a case like that, it would seem obvious to me that You know, that's not an illness.
That's you processing and responding to what's happening in your environment.
On the other hand, you have the depression that doesn't appear to have an immediate cause.
And I don't know if this is exactly your view, but one thing I've heard a lot from people is that, well, you know you've got actual clinical diagnosable depression when it does not have that immediate cause.
But my point there, and this is where it gets pretty abstract, But I think it's kind of a misnomer to say that depression could ever not have a cause.
The human condition itself, the very fact that we are conscious beings operating in this world of death and misery, and we're living temporary lives, and we know it, and we're all going to die, and we know it, and that we have this awareness, we are self-aware, we have this awareness of ourselves, which I think is what consciousness is, that that alone Is reason to feel despair, which is depression.
Right.
Well, one of the things that you can derive from that is that the mystery isn't why people are depressed, it's why they're ever not depressed.
That's kind of my view.
Well, you can say the same thing about anxiety.
I mean, your point there is that all cognizant mortal beings have sufficient reason for despair.
Right.
Yes.
Well, I actually think that's true.
I think the fact that we are able to live without paralyzing anxiety, because I think anxiety is probably the more germane response in the face of that kind of existential doubt.
The fact that we're able to live in the absence of anxiety ever is a fundamental mystery.
I also believe that psychologists who have their Their thoughts, lined properly, are much more concerned with the mystery of sanity than they are perplexed by the mystery of insanity.
Now, it isn't obvious how we can live without anxiety.
In fact, it's not obvious at all.
And it's not obvious at all.
How it is that we structure our beliefs to extract sustaining meaning from the mortal chaos in some ways that surround us.
Now, let me go back to the beginning of that question, though.
So, you pointed to people, for example, who are in a reactive state of, let's say, grief that's depression-like.
And depression looks a lot like a grief response, by the way.
They overlap tremendously.
Now, a good clinician will Move forward, let's say, if someone is bereaved.
Trying to determine when that switches into clinically relevant depression is a judgment call, but here's one way that a good clinician would contemplate that.
If you've suffered a loss, but the manner in which you're reacting to that loss is accruing more losses around you, So that you're starting to go like this, then that's a pathway that, well, leads to no good end, and where intervention might be useful.
No, and so obviously that's a tough call because, for example, if you're in love with your wife and you've predicated some of your, or much of your, happiness and security on her presence and she dies a terrible death, you have every reason, as you pointed out, to despair.
But if the despair multiplies and metastasizes so that your suicide is the likely outcome, Even though that's understandable, it seems both undesirable and also potentially ameliorable.
Partly because there are less and more productive ways of dealing with grief, even if the grief is catastrophic.
And partly also because, well, let's say you're the father of three children and your wife dies.
It's understandable that you'd be thrown into the abyss, but it's counterproductive to wander down that road to the point where you die, too, and now your children are facing a dual loss.
And so, one of the, of course, what that means is that one of the mysteries that Wise clinicians contend with is how to help people find sustaining meaning in the midst of genuine crisis.
There's not much difference between that and helping people find meaning in the course of their vulnerable lives.
And that is something that, well, that's the purpose of the religious enterprise, all things considered.
And we do find sustaining meaning.
Yeah, and that's kind of my point.
I don't want to jump ahead to the therapy piece of this, but you said the job of the clinicians is to help them find sustained meaning, and I totally agree with you on that.
But my question is whether a loss of meaning is really a medical concern at all, or have we taken clinicians and they have essentially, we've taken all
these things that historically, you know, anxiety, despair, grief, obviously, human beings have been
dealing with that since time immemorial and have also been writing about it and thinking about it
and finding different ways to cope with it. But if you go back before the kind of psychiatric
revolution, I guess we would say, that's all I have to say.
If you wanted to consult with someone to help you with these issues and to find meaning, you'd talk to a priest or you'd read a philosopher.
And so it seems like they've taken the priest and the philosopher and we've collapsed all of that into the doctor.
And now the doctor kind of plays all of these roles.
Which troubles me because I think that in most cases, and I'm not just saying this because I'm talking to you right now, but you're an exception to this.
You are a philosopher, really, I think, as well as being a doctor.
But that to me is a rare case.
I mean, most of these therapists and psychiatrists, at least that I have encountered and talked to, Not only are they not equipped to be philosophers and priests as well, but they seem to have less of an understanding of human nature and the human condition than even the average person on the street does.
That's my problem, is that we've taken all these things, we've just contained it all in the medical field, which also means that if you don't have the PhD, if you don't have the doctorate, if you don't have those letters next to your name, and you start talking about these big issues, like, what's the meaning of life, and why are we living, and what's the point, and why keep living if you're suffering?
These are big problems, and we all have a stake in it.
But if you're not a doctor and you talk about it, people will say, well, where's your degree?
Who are you to talk about this?
And I always say to that, well, I'm a human being.
I live a life just like you.
We should all be having this conversation.
But we've decided that it is a medical issue only, which kind of narrows the scope of the people that are allowed to have an opinion.
Well, I would say that's part of the problem with an overbroad definition of health, right?
Because that's also a reflection of the collapse of the sacred into the profane.
Because when the sacred collapses into the profane, one of the things that happens is that everything becomes about health.
It's a secondary consequence of the collapse of the spiritual into the material.
If there's no spiritual, everything becomes material.
If everything is material, well, then the difference between what's good and what's bad becomes health.
And if everything is health, then the doctor is the magic bullet.
Now, and obviously there are all sorts of problems with that.
There's no reason to assume that on average, apart from their generally higher cognitive abilities, that physicians are any better at dealing with the iniquities of life than anyone else.
Let's see, so could I make a case for clinical psychologists per se?
Because I'm a clinical psychologist.
When I trained as a clinical psychologist, it was difficult to become one.
So, for example, GRE, so that was the entrance exam, the standardized entrance exam.
If you didn't score 95th percentile or above on that, the probability that you were going to get into a high-level clinical psychology program was extraordinarily low.
And those are basically IQ tests.
They're not basically IQ tests.
They're IQ tests.
They're heavily verbally loaded, but they're IQ tests.
And then the training was long and arduous and difficult.
Not unpleasant, I would say.
I enjoyed it a lot, but you had to develop a high level of conscientiousness to manage it.
And so, I would say it was often useful, and I watched my colleagues transform as they were trained and as they were called upon to offer counseling and develop strategies with their clients.
I watched them mature and become more reliable and more awake and alert.
And wiser.
And I would say for many people, having a consultant who can help you take apart the issues of your life, who can listen to you, and can help you strategize can be extremely useful.
Now, that's balanced with the threat that there's nothing more dangerous than a loose cannon therapist.
So, and one of your concerns, and one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation, was because you were expressing concern that the therapeutic industry as such may now do more harm than good.
And I would say, I'm probably inclined to agree with that.
And I would say as well that it's partly because of something else you pointed to, which is the drift of the therapeutic away from the ethical.
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Now, some of the greatest clinicians that ever lived were For all intents and purposes, religious people.
Freud was Jewish and from a religious community and an indeterminate number of the propositions that structured his thinking were religious, which is exactly what Carl Jung pointed out to him.
And that's really what led to their separation, their professional separation and estrangement.
When Jung looked deep into the psychoanalytic endeavor, even more deeply than Freud did, what he discovered was the religious substructure underneath it.
And Jung got that right, dead right.
And then there was another very famous Clinician Carl Rogers, who was a humanist in the 1960s, but Rogers was a humanist the way that he was a Christian missionary on his way to China when he lost faith in his religious enterprise.
And all he did, all, was translate the fundamental dynamics of Christian ethics into the therapeutic realm and wallpaper the name humanist on top of that.
Now, look, I'm saying that as a great admirer of Rogers.
Carl Rogers, I learned a lot from reading Rogers' work, but he was essentially a Christian ethicist.
And I would say as well that to the degree that the therapeutic process works, it works because of It's embeddedness in a much deeper tradition.
So there's an idea, for example, that's central to the Christian worldview that wherever two people are together aiming up and telling the truth that the The spirit of God himself is present, right?
That's the notion that where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am that Christ makes reference to in the Gospels.
Well, there's a psychological meaning to that, which is that Honest communication is therapeutic.
It's the wrong word.
It's enlightening.
It's illuminating.
It moves you closer to God.
And a secular interpretation of that is that it's therapeutic.
But that language suffers from the contamination of enlightenment with the material, with mere health.
Now, you know, one of the things I loved about being a clinician is that you had the opportunity to let people unfold in front of you.
And I mean something very specific by that because we are language-oriented creatures and it's a Christian insistence, Judeo-Christian insistence, that our essence is akin to the Word.
And what that means is the Word is the highest manifestation of our spirit, let's say.
Well, I had people in my practice who no one ever listened to their whole life.
And they needed to unpack themselves for a thousand hours before we could even begin.
They had never had anyone in front of whom they could lay the cards on the table.
And because of that, they were tangled in ways you can hardly even imagine.
Because we need to articulate ourselves.
To become articulated.
To become articulate.
To become flexible.
To be able to dance in the world.
To be able to interact with other people.
To be able to communicate.
And that can't happen without being listened to.
And lots of people have never been listened to.
One of the things that you do as a clinician is just listen.
Just.
It's not so easy.
And one of the things that's so fascinating about this, one of the reasons I love being a clinician, is because people are insanely interesting once they tell you the truth.
Everyone's a Dostoevsky character.
Like, crazily complex.
And this is true even for people, for so-called simple people.
You know, there's no such thing as a simple human being.
There are people who are less verbally sophisticated, and less cognitively sophisticated for that matter, but that doesn't mean they're without their depth.
And so one of the things a good clinician can do is let a person unfold.
Encourage them to unfold.
You're in loco parentis when you're doing that.
You're acting like a... You're offering to the person the opportunity that under optimal conditions would have presented itself to them as they matured.
And that does have a healing consequence, an integrating consequence.
Yeah, there's a couple points there I wanted to ask you about now that we're on the subject of therapy.
But before we do that, one other question on the mental illness piece.
I wanted to ask you this.
This is kind of a It's kind of a deep cut, and most of the audience will have no idea who I'm talking about, but I've always just wondered, since we're on the topic of mental illness, there's the guy Thomas Zoss, who wrote The Myth of Mental Illness.
Yes.
And he's a very unorthodox, even heretical these days, thinker, and I disagree with a lot of what he said, and he was a proponent of euthanasia, and I think that's how he died, actually.
But his basic idea was that mental illness, as I understand it anyways, that mental illness is kind of a metaphor that we have taken literally and we should not have.
Because the mind, you know, the brain is one thing, it's an organ, you can diagnose it.
The mind is not the brain, though.
And so you can't diagnose the mind, you can't diagnose ways of thinking in the ways that you can the brain.
And so when you call a thought sick, You say that the way someone is thinking is sick.
It makes sense metaphorically, but when you try to take it literally, it makes less sense.
Yeah.
What's your take on... I know you're familiar with him.
What's your take on that?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
Well, certainly he was required reading in my clinical training program.
It's not like clinical psychologists in particular aren't acutely aware of the potential dangers of therapy.
Incredible complexity of psychiatric or psychological diagnosis and the possibility of doing harm.
All three of those things were major foci of our training.
Are there sick thoughts?
Well, I would say...
There are circumstances under which there are sick thoughts, and they're sort of bottom-up.
So, for example, if you take too much amphetamine, you'll become paranoid.
And if someone is paranoid, or paranoid schizophrenic, and you give them amphetamines, that makes them worse.
And so, you can produce pathologies of thought.
Now, imagine a pathological thought would be the kind that If you harboured or acted out would cause harm to come to you or to the people around you which in a way which would in turn reflect harm upon you.
That's not a bad way of beginning to understand what pathological or sick thought might be.
There are situations Under which that will arise for physiological reasons.
Now that doesn't mean that Sazh was entirely incorrect in his criticism because there are... The mere fact that pathological thoughts can arise from an underlying materialist pathology doesn't mean that All thoughts that everyone disagrees with are pathological, or that all pathological thoughts are caused by an underlying physiological abnormality.
Right?
And I mean, you can understand why this is so complex, because we're often working in the domain of mental health at the border between the physical and the mental, or the spiritual, or the psychological.
And that's a very tricky border, because We're half material, so to speak, and half spiritual.
And those are stacked on top of each other and interlaid in a way that we really don't understand.
And so, there's going to be murk as a consequence of that complexity.
I mean, Thomas Saz thought that mental illness was a myth, partly because, well, for the reasons that we've already alluded to.
He, at some fundamental level, he didn't believe that the illness metaphor was a good interpretive rubric for interpreting psychological function.
And there's some truth in that.
There's some truth in that.
You know, you can see, for example, in the Soviet Union, and increasingly in the West, The blurring of the line between mental illness, between idea and mental illness, can lead to such things as the transforming ideological stance into psychopathology.
I mean, the Soviets would throw you in prison for your political disagreements and categorize that as a form of mental illness.
And so, obviously, there's terrible danger on that front.
Like, I've been trying to delve into this for a long time, you know, and so I've concluded that the fundamental mystery isn't one of illness, it's one of health.
That everyone has a reason to be anxious and terrified and nihilistic and bitter and resentful and angry and all of those things.
And the pathway through that is the mystery, the golden pathway through that, is the mystery, the destination place that enables you to forego the temptations all of those states offer.
That's the mystery.
And in the fundamental analysis, that's a religious issue right at the bottom of things.
But there have been great clinicians who understood that.
And I would say that Jung, Carl Jung, is the foremost among those.
And I think that brings us back into this issue of therapy.
My general view of therapy is that, of course, I don't think anybody would say that it has no place or that nobody should ever talk to a therapist.
I think it does have a place, and there are people who have benefited from it.
There's no denying that.
I guess I take a very minimalist view, in many ways, on the circumstances where I would see therapy as being necessary or productive, and also the kinds of therapists That will actually help.
Because when I look at, you look at it broadly, and obviously correlation is not causation, but there's a lot of correlation here.
We look at therapy is more popular now than it's ever been.
No doubt about it.
More people are going to therapy than ever.
People are more open about it than they've ever been, certainly.
And then at the same time, we find that by pretty much every measure, anything that we would call mental health is deteriorating.
And we're even inventing new forms of mental sickness that the world has never seen before.
Millions of people who now apparently are confused about their basic, you know, their gender.
These basic facts of themselves, they're confused about.
So, it seems to me that if therapy generally was working, then we should see those markers going in the other direction.
Instead, it seems like it's only getting worse and worse.
And... Yeah.
Well, that's... I mean, that's... So, you know, let me go after that.
Like, bluntly, to begin with, it's a diagnostic issue, and it's a very complex one.
I mean, there are multiple reasons why general mental health, so to speak, of the population might be decreasing.
So, let's take ones that aren't psychological at all, that have nothing to do with therapy.
Because you could make a case that the whole issue that we're discussing The relationship between the proliferation of therapeutic types and the increase in mental health, as you said, correlation isn't causality.
And so we could do, on the political front, what I would do diagnostically.
Let's assume, to begin with, that people are more unhappy because they're actually ill.
Okay, so now let's ask, well, in what way are they ill?
Well, how about 40% of Americans are going to be morbidly obese by the year 2030?
Now how about that's associated with a plethora of immunological conditions, much higher likelihood of depression and so forth, because of just straight, the absolutely catastrophic levels of poor physical health that that indexes.
And then you could add to that the epidemic of diabetes that accompanies it.
And God only knows what contributing factor that is.
The food pyramid that we were fed for so long that's made everyone ill beyond comprehension.
So that's a major problem.
And this Chris Palmer that I mentioned earlier, he's starting a new clinic at McLean Hospital to treat Endogenous depression, so that's the kind of depression that doesn't seem to have an immediately precipitating cause, right?
It looks more physical in its origin, let's say.
Schizophrenia and manic depressive disorder, which is also, like, well, wildly oscillating mood that's always looked, to me, and I would say to clinicians in general, like something with a deep, but indeterminate physiological cause.
He's treating all of them with diet.
So God only knows what's going to emerge on that front, because he thinks they're metabolic disorders.
I just released a podcast with him, and he's not the only one.
There are more psychiatrists at McLean's, which is the premier psychiatric hospital in the United States.
There are more and more psychiatrists who are investigating that.
So that's one possibility.
Another possibility is the sort of thing that people like Jonathan Haidt have been pointing to.
We have no idea what the smartphone is doing to young people.
I mean, first of all, it's definitely interfering with their play.
Like, young children socialize with play.
And regardless of the content on a smartphone, the mere fact of the existence of those incredibly compelling electronic gadgets interferes with social interaction in ways that have consequences.
We won't understand until that whole problem morphs into something that's as unlike smartphones as smartphones are unlike TV.
And we're probably like right on the threshold of that.
So there's that.
And then there's the content of the smartphones.
We have no idea what, you know, on-demand pornography has done to the mental health of young men and young women.
But you can be virtually certain that it's Terrible.
The clinical evidence certainly suggests so.
So, I'm walking you through, let's say, the equivalent of a diagnosis on the political and economic front.
There are a lot of potential causes of the apparent increase, especially in depression and anxiety.
Now, it's also more pronounced, by the way, on the female side.
So, all of the epidemiological data suggests that women have becoming reliably less happy since the early 1960s.
And that's even more... It's more marked on the female side than on the male side.
And Jonathan Haidt, again, has showed that the rise of progressive, hedonistic, power-centered, radical political beliefs, especially among young women, seem to be radically contributing to their decrease in mental health.
So that's a lot of possible factors.
Now, I'll throw some evidence your way, let's say, with regards to the claim that you're making.
So this is what I think I'm seeing happening on the therapeutic side.
So, you pointed to the fact that the dividing line between a therapist And a philosopher is Theon.
And the great clinicians whose works I've studied were remarkable philosophers.
And I suppose there's about 10 that have deeply influenced me.
And some of them were psychoanalytic, some of them were... So they were more concerned with dreams and imagination, let's say, and the foundational structures of belief.
Some of them were more oriented towards Cognition, cognitive therapists, some of them were much more inclined to use behavioral approaches.
Some of them were humanistic.
Some of them were phenomenologists.
There was a variety of schools of therapeutic inquiry.
And I learned a lot from the masters of each of those domains.
Now, what I think's happened, Matt, is that over about a hundred years, the therapeutic pioneers, amassed a huge storehouse of clinical value and established a domain of appropriate endeavor for the clinical enterprise.
But what's happened to that enterprise is the same thing that's happened to universities, is that once that storehouse of value was established, The second Raiders and the Parasites moved in to monetize it, and it's just morphed into something that bears virtually no resemblance to its original conceptualization.
And so, you know, maybe one person in A hundred has what it takes to be a credible, strategic consultant and therapist.
Or maybe it's one person in a thousand.
But when it's distributed, Broadly, as an endeavor, I certainly see this happen in the domain of social work, for example, which is just a complete bloody catastrophe.
I mean, the social work departments reliably attract the worst students.
Foggy-minded, unintelligent, Unable to distinguish between, like, a toxic compassion and a true wisdom.
Complete bloody catastrophe.
And then, therapy is distributed everywhere.
It's rife in the education systems.
It's the answer to all problems.
Well, you know, the enterprise has degenerated, just like the universities have degenerated.
Same reason, even.
It's something like, once you store up enough value, then...
You lay yourself open to invasion.
Something like that.
And as part of that deterioration, I mean, how many... You know, you mentioned smartphones, which I agree.
I think that the effects of smartphones on kids especially is... It's a catastrophe that we can't even wrap our heads around because it's...
There's nothing to compare it to in human history, exactly.
We don't have any other examples of generations of people who centered their entire lives around a little box to the extent that people do with phones.
So all those things, pornography.
But how many therapists are likely to actually say to a patient who comes in who's depressed or anxious, how many of them are likely to say, well, look, put the smartphone down, stop watching pornography, you're overweight, start eating healthy, get some exercise, get some sun, go for a jog?
You will say that, but how many are willing to say that?
Well, I would say, generally speaking, saying that is not helpful.
Now, let me explain why.
So, if you go see a physician, a physician is very likely, or was at least, to say those sorts of things if you're obese, you know, lose some weight.
The problem with that is people don't.
And the reason for that is that it's, well, because they're already set in their habits, and furthermore, People don't really like advice.
In fact, if you advise someone of something, they have a proclivity to do the opposite, just to maintain a certain degree of autonomy.
So one of the things that you learn as a clinician is that it's much the kind of realization that will produce conceptual and behavioral change, and hypothetically lead to increased health, are the realizations that people come to on their own.
And you can increase the probability that people will come to those realizations by just listening to them.
So, for example, if you came to me, and let's say you were having trouble in your marriage.
Well, the first thing I do is say, well, you know, what trouble?
And maybe you'd tell me 50 stories about fights you've had or are having with your wife.
And in doing so, you would start to see, at least in potential, what it might be that constitutes the problem and also what you might be contributing to it.
And then after that, you might start thinking about what it is that you could do to change that.
And if you came to those conclusions yourself, with all the micro steps necessary to understand why that conclusion was necessary, and in some ways incontrovertible, you'd be way more likely to initiate the changes.
And this is partly why therapy is somewhat of a time-consuming process.
Advice just doesn't work.
Now, there were times in my therapeutic practice where For the sake of speed, and maybe in relatively dire circumstances, I would offer...
My client's advice.
But a little of that goes a very long way, and it's also partly because you don't want to steal someone's destiny.
So imagine you came to me, and you were having some trouble with your wife, let's say, or your career.
Let's say your career.
It makes it a little less personal.
And I, having listened to many people who had trouble with their career, I offered you a solution to a problem that you had with your boss.
And you went and implemented it, and it worked.
And you might say, well, hooray for that!
But I would say, no, not hooray for that, because I just had success in your life.
And that meant I robbed you.
I robbed you.
Because that was your problem, not mine.
And this is something to know even with children or with people that you love, is that people have their destiny.
You know, and that destiny, you can be there as a...
You can be there and walk with someone as they traverse the route of their destiny, but it's not up to you to fix it.
You can't.
People won't let you anyway.
It just doesn't work.
Behavioral psychologists really do this.
It's one of the things I admired about the behavioral tradition.
Behaviorists learned very early that it was very, very A very difficult matter to set the circumstances up properly so that people would, in fact, implement changes.
Even in small things.
So, what you're doing when you're practicing therapy properly is you're allowing people to have the time necessary to speak.
Because in speaking, they think.
And if they think, they actually often figure out what the hell's wrong with them and what to do about it.
But they need that time, especially if they're in dire circumstances.
And often people just don't have that.
Now, you know, I still have some qualms in some ways about the therapeutic relationship,
because you would hope to some degree that people would get that opportunity for communication
from their friends and from people they love, maybe from their priest in a functional religious society.
And then you could ask, well, can that be substituted for by a paid relationship?
And I would say, well, there's obviously some danger of conflict of interest there, but But, you know, you can do good things imperfectly as well, and it was certainly the case that many of the people who came to talk to me had no one else to talk to, ever.
And the talking was extremely good for them.
Let me ask you about that, because that's another question I have.
As you said, most people don't have, or many people don't have anyone to talk to, and There's probably a lot of truth in that.
Of course, people tend to do a lot of talking out to the world on social media, which is not a substitute for actual human connection.
But I also worry that therapy can, for some people, feed this kind of narcissistic impulse To talk about themselves too much.
I think it's good to talk about yourself to a certain extent, but it seems to me, especially the way people talk about therapy these days, they're proud of going, they look forward to going, and if you have something you're really dealing with and you're going to therapy in a serious way, it seems you wouldn't have the same attitude about it that people do, where it's almost like, oh, I can't wait.
It's like they're meeting a friend for lunch.
Maybe that's a good kind of relationship to establish, but it also could create a scenario where somebody just loves talking about themselves.
Oh, definitely!
And not only do they love talking about themselves, but it could also be true that Yeah, they may have things they want to complain about that they wouldn't be able to complain about to anyone in their life about those things.
Because the people in their lives are not paid to listen, and they've got their own lives.
And the people in their lives are likely to say, look, you just got to deal with that.
I don't have time to listen to this.
And those could be the kinds of things where it's like, I think the healthiest way to respond to that is to not talk about it.
There have to be things in your life that you don't talk about to anyone, and you just deal with them.
You have to have that capacity.
But if you have a therapist, then that means that you can pay someone to listen to every Okay, okay, so let's take that apart.
So, first of all, obsessive concern with the self is indistinguishable from misery.
to just shut up and deal with it, which also has to be a skill that adults develop.
Okay, okay. So, let's take that apart. So, first of all, obsessive concern with the self is indistinguishable from
misery.
So, to the degree that the hypothetically therapeutic interaction is only characterized by obsessive self-focus,
It's only going to produce misery, and even to foster a kind of narcissism.
And I would certainly say that there's a psychologist named Jean Twenge, and she has Concentrated on exactly the issue that you described with regards to hypothetical self-esteem programs in schools that have produced what she regards as an epidemic of narcissism.
So then you're pointing to the...
Difficulty of distinguishing between counterproductive dwelling on, or even narcissistic counterproductive dwelling on, the pleasure of martyrdom, the pleasure of self-flagellation and display, and communication that's actually oriented towards concrete solution to concrete problems.
Okay.
When I had clients, I always started with the behavioral approach, which isn't really so much even conversation-oriented.
There was an idea that stemmed from the Freudians that if you could just get it off your chest, if you could just express the emotion, that that would be in itself healing.
And that's a place where Freud actually went wrong, because there's no evidence that Merely venting your emotions, for example, in a communicative manner moves you forward on your path in any way.
So, behaviorists counteracted that potential error on the talk therapy or psychoanalytic side by being much more pragmatically problem-focused.
So, let's say you came to me and you said you were lonesome.
Well, we might be able to delve into your past and find out what experiences warped your perspective so that you were unable to socialize.
And we might be able, by doing so, to clear out some of the obstacles of conception.
Maybe you think, all people are untrustworthy because you were betrayed repeatedly when you were a child.
Maybe we can sort that out conceptually.
What a behaviorist would be more likely to do is say, well, What's our goal here?
You have zero friends.
Okay.
How about our first goal is that within six months you have one friend?
Now we need to define what friend is, which is not such a simple thing.
It'd be at least someone who knows who you are that you could talk to on some regular basis about at least some things that were important, right?
You can break down what constitutes friendship into its micro-routines.
You might start with someone like that and say, What I would do with someone like that, especially if their social skills were extremely lacking, which is often the case with people who've never been attended to or listened to in their life, I'd just start by training them how to shake hands and introduce themselves.
And you have no idea, Matt, how many people don't know how to do that.
I'd say 10% of people are just stopped cold in their tracks because they have no idea how to initiate a civilized Exchange.
They'll offer you a hand like a cold, dead fish.
They won't look at you when they say their name.
They mumble so you can't hear who they are.
They don't attend well enough to catch the other person's name.
They have no idea how to initiate an exchange.
A good behaviorist would teach someone how to do that and actually practice it.
I had clients where, you know, we did handshaking practice.
I certainly did that with my kids.
It's like, get it right!
Let's do it till you're expert at it, till you're great at it.
So that's therapy that's not merely talk, right?
It's skill-oriented.
And that can be of great aid to people, especially people who are terribly neglected.
It's much more concrete and practical.
It's very, very problem-focused.
What's the problem?
Well, I'm miserable.
Well, why?
Because I'm lonely.
Okay.
Do you have anybody in your life?
No.
Okay, well, who do people usually have in their life?
A girlfriend or boyfriend or a wife or a husband?
Some siblings?
Some parents?
Some children, some friends.
Okay, there's the realm of some business associates, some casual acquaintances.
Okay, so that sort of fleshes out the territory.
Maybe we can start by helping you learn how to make a casual acquaintance.
Do you have a corner store?
Does the clerk, do you go there regularly?
Does the clerk know your name?
Well, go there and introduce yourself.
Say hello.
Ask them how their day is going.
Listen to the answer.
Do that.
That's your assignment for the week.
After you've learned how to shake hands and, you know, present yourself like a quasi-civilized human being.
Very concrete.
It's one of the things I really liked about the behavioral training I acquired at McGill University, because most of my Teachers, I read a lot of psychoanalytic theory, humanist theory, and so forth.
I did that mostly on my own.
Most of my mentors were behaviorists, very practical people.
And they were trying to solve very, very specific, focused, local problems of adaptation.
And that can be tremendously useful.
So, and then that's another way you don't get to see the behaviorists.
We're very much concerned that the therapeutic process, as it was manifested by the psychoanalysts, would drift off into pointless, endless, quasi-catharsis with no real measurable outcome.
And the behaviorism school grew up in opposition to that.
What I found was helpful was I always started my clients with behavioral analysis.
It's the simplest thing to do.
And then I had clients for whom a more psychoanalytic approach was useful, but they're a pretty small minority of people.
They had to be creative people, generally, and creative people of some substantial intelligence.
They were more likely to I mean, look, profound people are capable of profound realizations, and that's kind of what you're after on the psychoanalytic front, but that's definitely not for everyone.
Another danger, too, of therapy, you really see this With the perversions of Freudian theory.
So, your typical dim-witted, badly trained psychotherapist, often a social worker, but not always, will assume reflexively that if there's anything wrong with you in adulthood, any form of suffering, it's because you were abused, and usually sexually, as a child.
That's the theory, and then what they do is go on a hunt for evidence to prove that theory, and one of the consequences of that, it's happened repeatedly, is that the therapists literally end up helping their clients conjure forth memories that don't even exist.
Unbelievably, like I said, a poorly trained therapist can do you a world, a world of harm.
A world of harm.
And we're also on thin ice there at the moment too, because therapists are now mandated by law to lie to you.
And so, that's especially on the gender front.
You're whoever you say you are.
It's like, no therapist has ever believed that.
Ever.
About anything.
Quite the contrary.
And the fact that my colleagues in their silence are complicit in this mass atrocity is one of the reasons I thought it might be interesting to talk to you about your skepticism about therapists.
Yeah, the so-called affirmative model of therapy.
Which, and I know you've said this many times, but clearly that's the opposite of what therapy is supposed to do in most cases.
It's insane!
You know, I mean, look, the first thing that a therapist, the first predicate of a therapeutic encounter is that identity is negotiated.
Right?
The whole therapeutic process is negotiation of identity.
No one comes forth and proclaims, this is who I am.
If you have a client like that, you might as well not even begin.
They're just looking for a rubber stamp.
And you're corrupt if you provide it.
It's like the person has to come in there with a questioning attitude.
Who am I?
Who should I be?
How should I present myself?
These are open questions.
And the therapist, too, equally has to come with the same attitude.
If you came to talk to me, my first presumption is something like, I have no idea who you are.
I have no idea what your problems are.
I have no idea what the solutions could or should be.
Like, we're going to find out.
We're going to discover.
We're not going to insist.
We're not going to proclaim.
Not at all.
It doesn't work anyways, but it's also counter-therapeutic in the extreme.
Is there... Two other things I want to ask you before we wrap up.
Is there ever a time... This is another problem that I have, I guess, with therapy, is that it seems to me that there are times when somebody presents a problem or an issue and the correct response Is words to the effect of, just get over it.
And not much more than that.
So just as an example, I talked about on my show recently, there's this Hollywood actor, I can't remember his name, but he said in an interview that he's in therapy now because he just put out this Marvel superhero film and it got some bad reviews.
And this is a grown man, wealthy, successful.
Got some bad reviews on a film and he's in therapy, which the fact that he's willing to even admit that out loud is already a problem.
And I think I think, you know, men 50 years ago would never if they were in therapy probably wouldn't tell you.
They certainly wouldn't tell you if that was the reason.
But with something like that, you know, I tend to think that.
Giving him any answer other than, look, man, they're bad reviews.
You just got to get over it.
We're not going to have a conversation.
I'm not going to sit here and talk to you for an hour about it.
We're not going to try to unpack your feelings.
You just have to deal with that.
It seems like any answer but that is inevitably going to feed into his shallowness and narcissism that has sent him there in the first place.
It could.
Well, so what I would say is that If someone has made a molehill into a mountain, the molehill is substituting for the mountain.
So let me give you a concrete example of that.
Let's say, and I'm sure you've experienced this in the confines of your marriage, you know how now and then, if you're living with someone, one or the other of you will become disproportionately irritated about some matter?
One response is, just get over it.
And the problem with that response is the next time the molehill comes up, it's going to be made into a mountain again.
Another response is, what the hell's bothering you?
And then the other person has to think, okay, like, why is that bothering me?
So what my question would be about this actor, it's like, okay, taking your objection at face value.
What's the big deal here?
And then I'd find out!
Because my sense would be that that's a manifest... That may not be a problem in and of itself, but it is definitely a manifestation of a problem.
Now, you already pointed to that to some degree, because your instant presumption was something like neurotic narcissism.
Well, that's a problem.
Now, the problem might not be that his movie got bad reviews.
The problem is that he couldn't handle the fact that his movie got bad reviews.
That's actually a problem.
Now, what you'll see is that if someone comes to you actually wanting help rather than validation for their neurotic narcissism, that once you let them talk about that, Look, you know the representation of hell in Dante's Inferno?
You start with the land of venal sins, and then Virgil guides you down the rabbit hole right to the depths of hell itself.
That's what you do when you investigate a problem like that properly in the therapeutic context.
God only knows what's lurking underneath that.
Now, this actor wouldn't be suffering if something like that wasn't the case.
Now, that doesn't mean that his problem is that the movie got bad reviews.
That's not the problem.
The problem is the neurotic and narcissistic hypersensitivity.
And God only knows what sort of monster lurks at the bottom of that.
You could imagine that it would be something like, this is just, you know, a hypothesis, but something like a terrible sin of pride.
So that leads to my, I guess, my last question, which is, how do you think this changes?
A lot of this is sort of gender-based.
When I was arguing about the therapy thing on Twitter, and I got into a back-and-forth with Lauren Southern, who's another conservative personality, I guess.
And I like her.
She gets a little mad at me sometimes when I do my whole harsh internet dad routine.
But after we went back and forth about it, she said something that I thought was interesting.
That's not good if Lauren Southern gets mad at you, because she's pretty harsh in her own right.
So if you're treading on Lauren Southern's feelings, you know, that's quite something.
That's true.
Anyways, anyways.
That's true.
It takes some effort on my part.
It takes some effort.
But she made a point at the end of it that I thought was interesting, which is that she said, you know, a lot of our differences on this topic is probably man brain versus woman brain.
So, on therapy, is there something to be said for the fact that, is therapy in general more useful, as a general statement, maybe for women than it is for men?
Or is it a totally different kind of therapy that men need, or how does that factor into it?
That's a good question.
Well, women are characterized by higher average levels of negative emotion.
So, one of the ways of conceptualizing that is that per unit of threat and punishment, women will suffer more than men.
And there's a variety of reasons for that, but I think the most fundamental reason is likely that women are wired more than men to respond to distress.
Distress of infants, particularly, and that that gives them a general proclivity to respond to distress.
And now, the upside of that is, well, infants don't die.
The downside of that is women suffer from higher levels of depression and anxiety.
And that's true cross-culturally, and it's more true in gender-equal countries.
So, it looks like it's very... it's a deep difference.
Women are also more people- and relationship-oriented than men.
And that's actually the biggest difference we know between men and women.
Women are reliably more interested in people than they are in things.
Most people who incline in the therapeutic direction are female, or have a relatively feminine temperament.
And there are aspects of my temperament, for example, that are quite feminine.
So I'm quite high in trait agreeableness, for example.
Like, quite spectacularly high, actually.
And that's a more feminine trait, because women are also more agreeable than men.
So, now, so... I would say the...
That listening ear mentality, rather than that concrete problem-solving mentality, is more feminine than it is masculine.
Now, there are more masculine approaches to therapy, like the behavioral approaches are, I would say, more temperamentally masculine.
They're a lot more problem-focused.
It's like, what the hell is your problem?
No, I mean exactly, precisely.
And what would you be willing to accept as a solution?
And how can we work on that concretely?
It's like an engineer's approach to psychological problems.
And that's less talky, you know, it's less relationshipy, it's less Suffused with emotion.
Having said that, you know, women are more likely to seek out therapy than men.
So... They also might have more issues to discuss, you know.
Well, the thing is, because women are more sensitive to threat and punishment, more things bother them.
Now, you might say, get over it.
It's like, well, you know, yes and no, because one of the advantages to having a lower threshold for detection of threat is that you see problems earlier.
And now the downside is that the false positive problem, right?
You see problems when they don't exist, you know, and you're not going to get one of those without the other.
Takes very careful discernment to.
That's partly, I think, why the dynamic of a marriage is so useful for people psychologically.
You know, women are going to be more likely in a typical marriage to see where problems might be arising.
Right?
But men are going to be better at constraining that.
Now, sometimes the men get too constraining and they'll ignore, you know, and then that's not good.
But sometimes the women get too sensitive and are Responding to crises that don't exist, and that's not good.
And so, good communication within a marriage optimizes those two approaches.
It's a minimization of two kinds of error.
False positives and false negatives.
So, would you say that therapy could be more, as a general statement, is more geared towards women?
Because it seems to me that women This is a very broad statement, obviously, but women, many of their problems or their unhappiness comes from not feeling understood, especially in a relationship.
Not feeling understood is the root of many of their problems, whereas for men, and maybe I'm just speaking, maybe I'm extrapolating from my own psyche or something, but for men it's...
Well, the thing about women, like, look, everybody needs to put their cards on the table.
Everybody needs that.
Now, I would say, as a rule of thumb, women have more cards to put on the table, and that's a consequence of their enhanced sensitivity to threat.
Now, one of the things you find in dealing with women, therapeutically or otherwise, is that If you let them put all their cards on the table, they often figure out for themselves that most of the issues aren't relevant.
But they're not going to figure that out without having the forum to do that.
This is one of the constant miscommunications between men and women.
So, women will bring up concerns, and the men will think, Jesus, no.
Really?
Really?
We have to be worried about that?
And what the men don't understand exactly is, well, if you let her talk through it, she'd figure out for herself that she doesn't have to be worried about that.
But that will not happen without that listening ear.
And that makes communication between very feminine women and very masculine men quite difficult, because the very feminine women will be, you know, bringing up issues left, right, and center, and the very masculine men are like, let's get to the solution!
You know, they're like engineers.
Let's get to the solution.
It's like, fair enough, you know, but you can't solve The problem, till you know what it is.
And what the women are doing is saying, well, here's a bunch of things that might be a problem.
You know, and there's, well, there's utility in that.
Painful though it is.
And it is painful, virtually by definition.
Now, does that mean that the therapeutic process is geared more toward women?
I think that the distinction that we drew earlier between like a more talk-oriented therapy and a more behavioral therapy might be useful to some degree.
Behavioral therapy is pretty useful for people who are cut and dried in their apprehensions.
You know, it's like, what's the problem here?
What are we trying to solve?
What are the simplest solutions we can take?
Like I said, it's a very engineering approach to the realm of navigation.
So, I would say that most more masculine men would find behavioral psychology much less, much more palatable.
It's not so emotion-focused.
It's not so feeling-focused.
And I'm not recommending it for everyone.
I mean, bloody well, the other thing you've got to understand, too, is that finding a therapist is like finding a lawyer.
Like, a bad lawyer, there's nothing more expensive than a bad, cheap lawyer.
It's really hard to find a good lawyer.
It's really hard to find a good psychologist.
Like, that's a difficult thing to manage.
I mean, when people ask me how to go about doing that, I would say, or I did say, at least until recently, that you should find a PhD in clinical psychology from an American Psychological Association-approved clinical school that focuses on research.
See, one of the things that clinical psychologists have that physicians don't is that well-trained clinicians are actually scientists.
And people think doctors, physicians are scientists, and they're not.
Not even a bit.
They're not trained to be scientists.
They don't know how to analyze the research literature.
They don't know how to conduct research.
They don't have that mode of thinking drilled into them.
That takes years.
Now, the American Psychological Association and these other accrediting organizations have become corrupt, and so, you know, that's a problem.
But I would still say, as a rule of thumb, PhD psychologist from APA-approved school.
That's a good first-pass approximation.
At least you've got someone then who is intelligent and conscientious.
At least that.
That's not a bad start.
Well, I feel like we've only scratched the surface, even though we've been talking for a while.
We could obviously continue for another two hours on this topic.
I find it quite fascinating, but we do have to wrap it there.
Dr. Peterson, thanks so much for talking through all this.
Let me add one capping thing, if you don't mind.
Look, when you're going for therapy, what you're trying to do is put your life together.
Okay, that's really hard.
It's really hard.
It's not something to be undertaken lightly, and you want to be sure that you have a good guide.
Because when the blind lead the blind, both fall into a pit.
And that's certainly the case with the so-called therapeutic enterprise.
If you find someone who is wise and who will listen, and you're aiming up hard and you're willing to tell the truth, then You can embark on the kind of voyage of self-discovery that can clarify your mind and help you shoulder your burdens with a certain degree of productive generosity and nobility.
But it's not a game.
And it can go spectacularly wrong.
How do you think someone can be confident they've found somebody like that?
A therapist?
They listen.
That's a big deal.
They listen.
And you come to trust them.
The same way you evaluate any deep relationship that you're likely to place some faith in.
But it's virtually impossible to overstate the utility of listening.
Look, if you listen, people talk.
If they talk honestly, they're thinking.
If they think their stupid thoughts can die instead of them, And that's the forum that therapy provides.
It's precisely that.
It's a place for thought.
Genuine thought.
And insofar as thought is useful and expressible in words, then genuine dialogue, dialogos, right?
That's the activation of that transformative spirit within the confines of that realm of intimate communication.
It's transformative the same way the word is transformative.
According to the dictates of Christianity, it's the same idea.
But the whole process has to be inspired by love and guided by truth.
Otherwise, you'll be led astray by false spirits.
Yeah.
Well said.
I think that's a good thought to leave it on.
So, thanks again, Dr. Peterson, for talking to us and talking through all this.
I thought it was a fascinating conversation.
We appreciate it.
Hey, man, thanks for the opportunity.
And, you know, hopefully what we talk through will be helpful for people who are skeptical, you know, in the manner that you are skeptical, and rightly so.
And that skepticism should be maintained.
You know, you don't reveal the secrets of your soul to any old passerby.
Yeah.
I think it will.
I think it will be very helpful to people.
So, thank you.
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