Madness in the Mental Health Profession

by Esther Israel

    The snippets below were written by me in January 2025. I was inspired by interviews of, debates with and writings by Douglas Murray (https://douglasmurray.net/). This was the first video clip I saw of him ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP_kBIrl30c ) that my mother told me to watch in October 2023. Since learning about Douglas Murray’s good work, I read all three of his books (and soon his fourth book), his free articles and I follow him for news and perspective on Israel. I never heard a journalist speak and write with such moral and mental clarity and with a succinct breadth of knowledge.

    A recurring thought I have when I listen to Douglas Murray and read his works, is that so much of what he says and writes applies to the current state of mental health care. I have worked in a variety of mental health settings as a case manager and talk therapist, with various populations and different professional and front-line mental health workers. Whatever Douglas Murray talks and writes about in current events, explains to me (without addressing the topic specifically), why the collective mental health in the places that I navigate has plummeted. I jotted down some of my own ideas about mental health that are inspired by Douglas Murray’s refreshing take on reality. I put them in different categories.

The state of mental health:

Collective mental health has deteriorated for three reasons. Treatment has been corrupted by academia which values prestige over learning. Health insurance companies offer a false sense of security rather than promoting health/wellness. The pharmaceutical industry espouses medication in place of prevention. These are predatory institutions and corporations that choose bad ideas over people.

‘Start by believing’ in an era where most people get their sex education from pornography and talk therapists receive no formal training on sexual science, is a dangerous premise. Some patients will be confounded when a therapist isn't taking their side. Therapists are professionals who help people navigate the truth as they see it. If it’s clear what side to take on sexual assault, therapy becomes case management.

When people are in acting out mode, they will initially lash out at anyone that challenges their claims of victimhood. Next, they move to maligning those that disagree with them. Third, they reinforce their victim role perception by claiming that if others would have addressed their pain prior to their acting out, they would not have acted poorly. Fourth, they continue their agenda of blaming others for casting them in the role of bad guy. At this point, everyone involved with this perpetrator masquerading as a victim is an enabler.

Three things are lacking from the mental health care system today: ethics, levelheadedness and historical knowledge of the profession’s evolution.

Resentment comes up as anger, hate, revenge, blame, interrupting, and spreading misery in the name of social justice. These are not merely emotional displays. The values behind them are a desire for dominance and vengeance.

Sometimes helping professionals analyze bad behavior to find the root cause. The trauma is uncovered yet the problematic behaviors and misery continue. Zero sum therapy goes on. No one thinks to look at their current attitude and their role in their current circumstances.

The decline in collective mental health has been happening slowly but surely and correlates to societal moral decline.

Mental health in Utah:

A new type of conversation is happening online about adolescent treatment programs in Utah. Former patients are recalling instances when they were mistreated while in residential treatment. They communicate with each other and agree that their entire treatment experience was inhumane. These conversations among patients require a counterpoint from the treatment program they name. This is not possible because of laws on confidentiality. Assertions about one's treatment experiences cannot be compared against their therapy notes and shared with the public. Internet forums that allow self-identified former patients to anonymously post about experiences and name staff who cannot in turn respond if it will involve disclosing the identity of patients or violate their employer’s code of conduct, inflate one view and a distorted reality about adolescent residential treatment programs in Utah.

The difference between what the public experiences as mental health problems and what legislators perceive as the mental health problems are vast, and neither group is aware of the gap. The Utah State Legislature keeps changing the way treatment agencies in Utah are permitted to provide services based on testimony from former patients and mental health administrators. The plural of anecdote, even if it's coming from two sources, is not data. The government should rely on the longitudinal outcome research studies of treatment programs. Why are Utah legislators so eager to hear the biased accounts of consumers and administrators that volunteer to testify? Who is seeking reports from mental health workers with job security concerns if they speak up about their work experiences? 

Something happened in the employer-employee relationships of mental health workers in Utah. The caregivers are not being protected from volatile patients, those with criminal mindsets and/or an ax to grind. Mental health jobs have become more dangerous. Employers do not provide adequate buffers between patients and providers.

Mental health treatment agencies in Utah train their staff to see the unsafe behaviors of patients through a trauma lens. That explains why the safety of the staff, the patient and the program is ignored. It is more important to have the right therapeutic stance than to prevent harm via application of research and statistics.

Mental health workers:

Burnout is unrelenting workplace stress that isn’t managed well. This definition leaves the onus of burnout on the employee rather than on the employer. We all hold beliefs about our competency to manage stress, have a general sense of how much stress we can handle for a given time period and how much stress we want to deal with. Even though the nature of some stress in unpredictable, we can try to deal with it by thinking of it in terms of duration, intensity, and reasons to endure. When employers have such a high staff turnover rate, wouldn’t it make sense to think of burnout as willingly squandering employee resources?

The urging of self-care as the one and only solution to prevent, cope with and overcome burnout in the mental health care system, reflects its inability to practice what it preaches. Mental health workers speak openly and repeatedly about the solutions to their burnout: more pay, fewer hours and less responsibility. These options are repeatedly dismissed, denied and discounted. At the same time, there are efforts to characterize mental health workers as altruistic. If mental health workers are employees coping with burnout, what do employers think of the treatment mental health employees provide to vulnerable populations? There is nothing more pathetic and hypocritical than employing mental health workers with learned helplessness.

Mental health in pop culture:

There can be the misuse of communication and relationships in talk therapy. The helping profession then becomes a pretense. A shallow attitude of trust and connection cannot treat mental illness; but it is easy for insurance and legislators to get behind. Being a sounding board to people with their own ideas and contradictions in a world that supplies its own sets of ideas and contradictions is bound to cause tension. Tension isn’t the enemy.

Modern mental health does not offer a way of coping with loss of meaning and purpose. Building mastery, pursuing pleasurable and positive experiences does not suffice.

Fundamental attribution error in talk therapy: My family was abusive and neglectful. The reason why I’m a wreck is because my family still triggers me with their dysfunction. I’m sure that if I would have been raised in a normal household, I wouldn’t have the same struggles that I do now.

Popular culture has reduced all kinds of therapy and treatment programs to choosing from a few narratives, be it cognitive behavior therapy, dialectical behavior therapy or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. You name it, we got it! No one is learning how to cope with vulnerabilities and contradictions in a world we don’t understand. No one is pursuing truth.

Cancel culture is nothing more than stupidity chasing away reality.

An increase in mental illness and substance abuse are the reasons why people are seeking mental health and substance abuse treatment, not the growing acceptance of mental health care. It is possible for society to exploit its citizens and encourage them to get help for their problems.

Talking about past misfortunes at the hands of others is much easier than changing behaviors that would improve current circumstances.

Dangerous people and dangerous ideas:

We are hearing more and more stories of mass shootings. The media controls the narrative as it applies to guns, mental health, bullying or family problems. What is never discussed are all the warning signs and red flags the shooter raised prior to their rampage. This is much like the mental health care system that ignores the high burnout rate of its staff and the skewed ratio of patient improvement to cost of treatment. Conversations about shootings rarely involve caregivers who knew the perpetrator. This means that the public is given very different ideas about how to think about mass shootings from how experts in the field and those in the trenches understand the problem.

There are many reasons our society attends to the perpetrators of violence more than the victims of violence. Perpetrators are interesting. Not only are they interesting, paying attention to them makes one feel virtuous by comparison. There is also the Freudian defense mechanism of projection. Discussion of the mass shooting is a safe way to entertain our own helpless rage.

We talk about ways to make schools safer and simultaneously ignore the daily reality of lack of safety of teachers. Pretending to care when people are paying attention is related to our moral and mental health decline. When we choose to skew reality to fit with a narrative, we create a harmful reality. We become more vulnerable to coping with reality when we opt out of it.

The mental health care treatment model isn’t well designed to deal with harmful behaviors. Mental health training encourages caregivers to view unsafe behaviors as stemming from trauma. The attitude in society is that trauma deserves our sympathy. The only tools a therapist can use when dealing with a patient’s addictions, crimes and sabotage is therapy and documentation. The cycle of violence, delusion and distraction endures, as documented in confidential therapy notes.

There is a gap between what mental health workers in residential treatment settings say and what they see. Mental health workers are groomed to be empathetic. This allows administrators to assume their employees are ready, willing and able to keep up with the work policy changes that do not improve mental health, definitely cause more harm and certainly prevent problems from being addressed.

Little downtime and minimal opportunities for socializing in certain workplace settings leads to isolation. Isolation is a dangerous practice for employees in schools and mental health workplace setting. Teachers and caregivers are gatekeepers who need to discuss red flags and connect the dots with their colleagues.

It is not easy to share the science of sexuality and trauma when it intersects with identity politics and the party line. Talking about facts and offering alternative explanations may incur wrath and confusion. It’s like cognitive behavior therapy, scientific methods, advocating for living in reality and reminders about cause and effect is oppression.

The transgender youth phenomenon is a fad that arose from social media access by teenagers susceptible to social contagion coupled with a lack of online supervision, parental anxiety about real world dangers and inadequate sex education in society at large.

Patients of wraparound mental health services are unprepared to work long and hard to address their lifelong conditions. Providers of mental health are unequipped to provide coordination and continuity of care. The deterioration of collective mental health is from patient’s lack of preparedness and caregivers lack of resources. If people don’t get better, we say it’s because they have complex trauma.

A fool is someone who demonstrates poor thinking when it comes to common sense, reasoning, judgment and understanding. A rude person is someone who uses incivility to make their points and hides in groupthink when challenged about their lack of respect toward those with life experiences different from what they are championing. A lazy person utilizes scaremongering to attract unequivocal approval when comprehensive review illuminates a complicated picture. College campuses are teeming with all three types of learners and instructors.

Back when the adults were in charge and rational thinking was prized, I used to interrupt interrupting teenagers during family therapy when they corrected their parents on their preferred pronouns. As a talk therapist, I'd never consent to have a therapeutic conversation overtaken by impudence, virtue signaling and emotional tangents. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

The anti-Freud sentiment in the mental health profession often belies ignorance, anti-Semitism and a desire to take down an important historical figure. Little does one know this is an enactment of what Freud called the Oedipal complex and death drive/thanatos that has been espoused before in other cultures. As if ridiculing Freud and his ideas will solve mental health problems. When history repeats itself in the present, Freud called this a repetition compulsion.