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In the last decade, people have been opening up about mental health struggles more than ever. While it’s an overwhelmingly positive thing that we are destigmatizing these issues that nearly everybody deals with at some point in life, there are definitely some downsides. One of the biggest ones is that it’s extremely common for people to aggressively push others to seek therapy as if there are no potential downsides or risks. And all too often in this case, the compass of shame and stigma swings too far in the opposite direction, where a lack of interest in therapy for any reason has become stigmatized. More disturbing, people are often shamed and gaslit for attempting to open up about bad experiences with abusive or incompetent therapists. People whose mental health deteriorates after multiple sessions with a specific practitioner may be blamed for “not doing the work” or told that it hurts to work through trauma, as if it’s not simply possible to have a bad therapist. And logical concerns about potential ethics violations in therapy are often shut down with trite excuses that a predatory counselor may just not have been the right fit.
It’s time to acknowledge that therapy is not effective or beneficial for everybody, and that bad therapists are more common than you may think. Every year, countless people around the world are harmed by abusive, predatory, and incompetent counselors, who…