What’s the Point of Therapy?

Jonathan Alpert’s article, We're Spending $300 Billion a Year on Mental Health Care. Why Is It Making Us Sicker? raises the question of whether we can do a proper job as psychotherapists if we’re afraid to cause clients psychological and emotional distress. The article prompted discussion among my colleagues about the point of therapy and how differing generational experiences impact therapeutic approaches. In our 60s, 70s and 80s now, we were brought up by parents who’d endured World War II and the Great Depression and our therapeutic approach is old style—tell it like it is and play it as it lays. So, it makes sense that our method might differ from that of the current crop of therapists who were raised with gentle parenting, trigger warnings, and both the forgiveness and self-esteem-for-all movements at the end of the last century. Our discussion brought to mind a former client I’d seen when...