The Therapy Industrial Complex

The people I know who talk about therapy the loudest are also the most profoundly emotionally unstable people I know. I also know people who have been going to therapy for years and struggle with the exact same (and solvable, non-neurological) issues in spite of persistently going there for years. I know also significantly more people who have never been to a therapist a day in their life and have healthy and normal interactions with others and relationships to themselves despite having also experienced fairly traumatic and bad things.

This is not to say that I think therapy in general is a bad thing, but in recent years (I believe, precisely since January 20th, 2016) the western world began commodifying ‘mental health’ in a way that feels remarkably fucked up, weird, and totally unconcerned with making people mentally healthier or more resilient. Betterhelp is a therapy-as-a-service business that alone generated 1.03 billion dollars in revenue in...

To what extent does pre-birth genetic selection and engineering (e.g., in vitro interventions) limit the future autonomy of the child, and does this form of biotechnological determination risk reducing the child’s humanity by scripting their existence before they can choose it themselves?

Alternate Framing Options:
Philosophical Framing:
“Does the genetic engineering of future children compromise their moral autonomy and subjectivity, thereby rendering them ‘less human’ in a philosophical or existential sense?”

Bioethical Framing:
“Can the deliberate engineering of embryos be ethically justified if it significantly predetermines the life path of the individual, and where is the line between care and coercion in reproductive biotechnology?”

Critical Framing (more radical tone):
“Is the genetic design of human beings a form of pre-birth violence that strips autonomy and amounts to the erasure of potential selves before they can emerge?”

Quantum mechanics fundamentally challenges our understanding of personal identity through the nature of elementary particles. All electrons are completely identical and indistinguishable from one another - not just similar, but profoundly interchangeable with no distinguishing features beyond their basic properties (mass, spin, and charge).

The implications of this quantum reality extend to our philosophical understanding of identity itself. At the most basic physical level of reality, individual identity as we typically conceive it doesn't exist—particles are not discrete individuals but interchangeable instances of a type, suggesting our conventional understanding of personal identity may rest on shakier foundations than we assume.

• via Quanta Mag

“Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and is not desirable.”

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the "I" and the "me" over time (119).

According to Jameson, the schizophrenic lacks a personal identity, is unable to differentiate between self and world, and is incapable of experiencing continuity through time.
There are several reasons why Jameson associates these attributes of schizophrenia with postmodernism and late capitalism. In many respects the media culture of the late twentieth century simulates schizoid experience. The rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media erodes the viewers sense of temporal continuity. To use the same words that Jameson uses to describe schizophrenic experiences, the images that flash across the MTV viewers' retina...

Reasons, purpose, aim of the chosen topic: 1. Personal level as cosmopolitan identity, 2. Academic research level as a master student of culture and organization, 3. Societal level as part of Korean diaspora in Germany for social integration

1. I regard myself as cosmopolitan who has a very mixed identity of eastern and western culture
2. It is a fascinating topic to fulfill my academic interest as cultural researcher/student
3. Guiding for practitioners to understand how to harmonize with immigrants

This chapter aims to account for the emergence, expansion, and consolidation of a "happiness industry" which is based on the commodification of happiness at multiple levels—ranging from positive psychological techniques offering individuals efficient self-management of their emotions, cognitions, and motivations, and including a wide variety of self-help literature, coaching and professional advice, pharmaceutical goods, body-shaping products, tourism and experiential marketing, and even cinema. It is argued that these happiness "emodities", namely psy goods and services aimed at increasing the happiness of individuals, simultaneously presuppose and target the construction psytizens. By coining the term psytizen, the chapter aims at stressing the psychologicist bias and individualistic kind of subjectivity that underlie the neoliberal discourse of happiness. It defends the idea that ideological and economic analyses should go hand in hand. The first part of the chapter addresses the...

Something went wrong trying to save https://www.google.com/ar-gradient(to right, rgb(31, 31, 31) 0px, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 100px), linear-gradient(to left, rgb(31, 31, 31) 0px, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 100px), linear-gradient(rgb(36, 40, 50) 0px, rgb(31, 31, 31) 80px.