Sanah Ahsan on why Psychologists are useless

Sanah Ahsan, a poet and activist, writes in the Guardian ' I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health'

This is problematic. Psychologists- like normal people- should be aware that everybody who has something to sell, or who is claiming some sort of authority, is likely to be telling self-serving lies. Nobody says ' I'm a bit shit at my job but please hire me anyway.'.

Why would anybody be 'devastated' by such lies? If a hooker says 'me love you long time' would you really experience devastation if she moves on to the next john within five minutes?

Paranoia is a medical condition which is described, in simple language, as ' rare mental health condition in which you believe that others are unfair, lying, or actively trying to harm you when there's no proof.' Ahsan is displaying paranoia. She believes that some inchoate or unidentified entity is 'telling devastating lies about mental health'. Who is doing so? Was it her Professors or is it her Colleagues? If not, why should she get worked up about the matter. Only what medical experts say about medicine matters. What plumbers or pimps say is discounted immediately. Essentially, Ahsan is saying that she was taught by liars and works with liars. She gets paid as part of a Credentialized Ponzi Scheme which is now collapsing because it does little good relative to its cost and thus, when the economy goes down, it is increasingly dispensed with. 

Ahsan's point is not merely medical- viz. that her profession is fraudulent- it is also political. She says- 'Society’s understanding of mental health issues locates the problem inside the person – and ignores the politics of their distress'. This is false. We easily distinguish a maniac who goes around stabbing random people because Satan- in the shape of the neighbor's dog- told him to do so, from a Terrorist who has an explicit political objective. The problem with the maniac is indeed inside his head. The Terrorist on the other hand is part of a network. In the former case, medication and restraints tackle the underlying problem. In the latter case, you have to go drone strike the fuck out of the Terrorist HQ or, at the least, disrupt its finances and communications. 

Throughout history, the politics of distress has been about policing the fuck out of those who distress the productive or the powerful. Otherwise the polity collapses. 

We are living, we’re told, through a “mental health crisis”.

That's true enough. The provision of mental health services has fallen relative to demand. It is likely that a cheaper model for delivery will be found. This may involve using group 'Zoom' sessions and pharmacists handing out more mood stabilizers without a prescription.

Mental health services cannot cope with the explosion of demand over the past two years: 1.6 million people are on waiting lists, while another 8 million need help but can’t even get on these lists. Even children are showing up at A&E in despair, wanting to die.

Thus a much cheaper delivery model will have to be found. Psychiatric nurses attached to GP Surgeries will have a bigger role. The voluntary sector might be able to pick up the slack in some places. But, overall, there will be reduced expectations regarding provision. Morbidity may fall if people feel there's no point complaining. Distress will turn into a quiet habit of misery.  

But there is another way to see this crisis – one that doesn’t place it firmly in the realm of the medical system.

More distressed peeps should win the lottery and combat depression by buying super yachts.  

Doesn’t it make sense that so many of us are suffering? Of course it does: we are living in a traumatising and uncertain world.

Not compared to the Ukrainians we don't. We may cease to be traumatized when we find that it does no good whatsoever.  

The climate is breaking down, we’re trying to stay on top of rising living costs, still weighted with grief, contagion and isolation, while revelations about the police murdering women and strip-searching children shatter our faith in those who are supposed to protect us.

Which is why the lady is planning to move to war-torn Ukraine or flood devastated Pakistan.  

As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade,

the lady may have completely wasted her own and her patient's time. On the other hand, some psychologists are smart and can help people rather than just tick boxes and go through the motions 

I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress.

So, people who are shit at treating mental disorders or psychological issues should concentrate on political issues instead. Why stop there? Why not say that a janitor who shits on the floor he is supposed to clean should concentrate on proving the Reimann hypothesis or finding the secret of zero point energy?

Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week?

It could be effective if the person in question stops buying Lotto tickets and starts cleaning houses or taking in ironing.  

Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace,

They may do, if they enable the guy to get a better job or start something on his own. Better mental health correlates with better decision making and getting the fuck out of toxic relationships or work-places.  

However telling black people that whitey be debil won't make them happier or better adjusted. Indeed, it is what you would tell them if you wanted them to fuck off back where their ancestors came from. 

By grafting Psychology to Grievance Studies, you infect patients with a paranoid world view. That's not 'therapeutic' at all. It is actively mischievous. The plain fact is that issues re. race, age and gender are preventing me from achieving success as a Beyonce impersonator. But it is because I am also shit at dancing and singing or even being a tolerable human being which explains why my life sucks ass big time. 

and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder

is a good thing if the crazy biddy thinks God wants everybody to sodomize her all the time.  Once she understand that God isn't talking to her, the thing is the product of some neuro-chemical imbalance, she can stop running naked into biker bars. 

(in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home)

it is important that women make better choices.  

does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife.

Not if it is taught by stupid people. Mindfulness, done properly, improves cognitive functioning which helps you get out of poverty, resist the pressure of delinquent peers and to do well in competitive exams.  

If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” –

but we'd say it was wilting and spray it with water or tequila or whatever it is that plants are into.  

we would change its conditions.

Thus when a poor person goes to a Doctor and says 'God is telling me to stab my wife', what the Doctor should do is give him lots of money- right? 

Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us,

This is because humans aint plants or pets. It is up to them to change the conditions of their lives. A Doctor should not be in the business of just handing out bags of money. The thing is not sustainable. Suddenly everybody would claim to be mentally ill and would quit their job. The economy would collapse. 

and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.

Very true. The Ukrainians shouldn't be fighting Putin's goons. They should spend their time acknowledging their hurt. Indeed, everybody should quit their job and whine about how much it hurts that your Mummy aint the Queen Gor' Bless 'Er.  

In efforts to destigmatise mental distress, “mental illness” is framed as an “illness like any other” – rooted in supposedly flawed brain chemistry.

Which is certainly true for some people 

In reality, recent research concluded that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain.

For some people- sure. Misdiagnosis can indeed harm patients.  

Ironically, suggesting we have a broken brain for life increases stigma and disempowerment.

The alternative may be to say that you just like stabbing people. You are evil, not mad.  

What’s most devastating about this myth is that the problem and the solution are positioned in the person, distracting us from the environments that cause our distress.

But shitty psychologists are too fucking stupid to understand economics and sociology and politics and so forth. Still, if they are misdiagnosing people or aren't making them feel better then sack them. What this lady doesn't get is that her criticism is only valid if people like her are shit at their job. This is an argument to sack shitty psychiatrists and psychologists. Why not promote according to ability, not Credentials?  

Individual therapy is brilliant for lots of people, and antidepressants can help some people cope. But I worry that a purely medicalised, individualised understanding of mental health puts plasters over big gaping wounds, without addressing the source of violence

This is the problem of misdiagnosis and over-medication. Doctors who over prescribe or misdiagnose should be penalized. But this is an argument for improving medical services not a paranoid type of political activism. 

On the other hand, as a trained and highly experienced lavatory cleaner, I can say that not till the entire political system is changed such that people no longer shit and piss will the toilet I'm in charge of be clean.  

. They encourage us to adapt to systems, thereby protecting the status quo.

If public toilets are kept clean, humanity has no incentive to figure out a way to stop pooping and pissing. By refusing to clean the toilet I'm in charge of, I am helping change the status quo.  

It is here that we fail marginalised people the most:

Very true. Marginalized people should not piss or shit.  

Black people’s understandable expressions of hurt at living in a structurally racist society

which is still better than the structurally poor and violent as shit society their people come from 

are too often medicalised, labelled dangerous and met with violence under the guise of “care”.

Moreover,  leading Tory politicians come into our houses at night and suck us off thus depriving us of vital jizz.  

Black people are more likely to be Tasered, sectioned, restrained and over-medicated than anyone else in our mental health services today.

Unless, like me, they are Hindu black. On the other hand, Hindus are more likely to voluntarily seek psychiatric help of various sorts. This may be an 'education' effect rather than something cultural. The fact is Hindus like having some medical complaint they can boast about. 

The UK could learn a lot from liberation psychology.

If it wants to go the way of Chavez's Venezuela- sure. Why have a few mad people with little power when you can ensure the country is run by lunatics? 

Founded in the 1980s by the Salvadorian activist and psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró

a Jesuit murdered along with others  of his ilk in 1989 in El Salvador 

, it argues that we cannot isolate “mental health problems” from our broader societal structures.

Nor can we isolate cleaning the toilet with broader problems of neo-liberalism and the fact that people poop and piss.  

Suffering emerges within people’s experiences and histories of oppression.

Just like pooping and pissing. Fascist Mummies are constantly badgering babies to 'make' in the potty. Jesuit priests from El Salvador must show Mankind a better way. Money is the Devil's dung. Only when peeps stop shitting will Capitalism collapse and the Kingdom of Ends be attained. That's why it was deeply unfair for the Municipality to sack me from my job as a lavatory cleaner. The real problem is Neo-Liberalism.  

Liberation psychology sees people not as patients, but potential social actors in the project of freedom, valuing their own lineages, creativity and experience, rather than being forced into a white, eurocentric and individualistic idea of therapy.

But England has no indigenous non-White population. All colored people living here are immigrants or the kids or grandkids of immigrants. If they really don't like 'White' or 'Eurocentric' ideas, why don't they just go back home? The fact is colored people in this country don't want it to turn into a colder and damper version of their ancestral shithole. Priti Patel, not this 'psychologist', represents their thinking. Indeed, the Guardian readers she is appealing to are overwhelmingly white- with a sprinkling of ageing LGBTQ toffs of color.  

It directly challenges the social, cultural and political causes of distress through collective social action.

Nope. That sort of fuckwittery is what makes Labor unelectable. Seriously, poor peeps in this country don't want to take lessons from El Salvador. On the other hand, this lady does make a compelling argument for cutting the mental health budget. Clearly a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists are shit at their jobs.  

This framework makes complete sense when we hear that the pandemic in the UK has affected poor people’s mental health most.

Poverty is Nature's way of telling you to fuck off and die. Work is your way of making Nature your bitch. Poverty causes Work. Wealth causes Virtue Signaling Politics. As the country gets relatively poorer, the sway of the Virtue Signaler will diminish. We can neither afford crap psychologists nor the crap that those crap psychologists spout. Let them go to El Salvador in they are so interested in 'Liberation'. 

Does it mean wealthy, privileged white men don’t experience suffering? Of course they do.

Which is why they paid for research which ended up benefiting everybody. 

We’re still learning about the complicated ways these structural issues affect our everyday lives.

This woman is too stupid to learn shit.  

For example, how the pressures of individualism and capitalism may lead to isolation and substance abuse,

but 'isolation' and 'substance abuse' exist plentifully in Communist countries. I recall Gorby's Russia where the drying up of Vodka supplies caused massive glue sniffing. People sharing flats with three other families were actually more isolated than those living alone in houses in the West. Why? They were afraid of saying anything which might get them shipped off to a Gulag. 

or how colonial violence towards immigrant families plays out within homes and on bodies.

Why the fuck would immigrants come to a place where they would experience 'colonial violence'? Indigenous people who object to settlers from elsewhere are cool if they are Palestinian. Why not if they are from Putney? I myself have experienced a lot of racist abuse from a g.f in Parsons Green. That's why I no longer date Iyengars. 

Let me be clear, I’m not saying people in distress should be out there on the picket line.

Coz that could get you fired.  

Pain can be debilitating. But those of us who are supporting people in distress, such as mental health workers, have a key role in social transformation.

Only if they actually improve the mental health of those they are meant to serve. I too would have been playing a key role in social transformation if I had actually cleaned the lavatory I was in charge of. 

Social action is the medicine that relieves people’s personal and collective distress.

What is medicinal for a sick person may be poison for healthy people. The most mischievous type of social action involves telling stabby stabby Schizos that they must play a great role in liberating the proletariat and ushering Mankind into a Utopia where no one will ever need to piss of poor.  Back in the Sixties, there was a theory that the industrial proletariat had become too affluent to play a vanguard role in the coming Revolution. Thus the 'mandate of Heaven' had passed to the Students. Mao got the students to beat up his opponents. Then he brought in factory workers to beat the students and chase them into the country side. By the Seventies, crazy 'psychiatrists' thought that the mandate of Heaven had passed to the pedos and the drug addicts and the crazy people. But they just stabbed each other or stole everything they could get their hands on. 

Older people like me recall the 'anti-psychiatry' movement of the Seventies- Thomas Szaz, R.D Laing- etc. Foucault's psychiatrist had done useful work on Lithium salts. He was driven out of the profession by Maoists. But it was the chemical approach which prevailed. The Leftists went mad and proved to be utterly useless. 

Instead of trying to change “mindsets” in therapy, we need to change race- and class-based hierarchies, the housing and economic system.

In which case, studying psychology is useless. Only economists can interpret the relevant data sets.  

Universal basic income has psychological benefits,

so does getting beejays from super-models. 

and recent studies show how it improves the “crises of anxiety and depression”.

I want to be part of a study featuring beejays from super-models.  

As a clinical psychologist, some of my most powerful work has been not in the therapy room but in successfully advocating for secure housing for, or working in the community with, queer, black and brown facilitators in organisations such as Beyond Equality, to prevent gender-based violence.

Who funds them? Will that funding dry up as Britain gets relatively poorer? Sooner or later some 'effective altruism' type economist will run the numbers on 'Beyond Equality' and discovers it has negative impact. Remember 'Kids Company'? Sooner or later either there will be a Me Too scandal or senior executives will allege Institutional Racism, or the anti-Semites will take it over. From telling boys not to keep raping girls the organization will focus on saying 'Boo to Israel! Jews invented the slave trade.'  

The network Psychologists for Social Change shows us a practical imagining of this work.

It also shows that this type of 'imagining' is useless. Just attend Church if you like listening to sermons.  

We also need social change that is preventive, such as investing in young people

using what? Money? Or Moonshine? If it is money then only Economics matters. Silly sausages may be able to get funding for their pet project but then either there is Embezzlement or a Sex or Race scandal or an audit discovers that the thing adds negative value. The thing may continue as a coffee klatch with ideas above its station. But it would be a case of 'you listen to my stupid shit and then I listen to your stupid shit. Then we say 'Boo to Israel' and go home.'  

and community-led services such as healing justice london and 4front. They work to shift trauma in marginalised communities through building social connectedness, social action and creativity, towards futures free of violence.

But, sooner or later, peeps tell them to fuck off if they can't actually hand out cash. It turned out that 
Camila Batmanghelidjh didn't have a magical way with delinquent kids. She paid them cash to turn up. But she ran out of cash and so the thing folded. Many years ago, a friend of mine set up an Islamic charity. It was ahead of the curve in that it was talking about de-radicalization. The problem was that all its members were posher than the Queen's tits. So my friend got me to attend as the token 'radical Mulsim'. This was because I had a very thick beard and wore kurta pajama and looked as stupid as shit. 

None of this is to dismiss the value of one-on-one therapy (that’s part of my job, after all).

Yes it is. The NHS should stop paying psychologists. The money saved can be spent on housing and social security etc.  

But therapy must be a place where oppression is examined,

Very true. Ukrainians who are being oppressed by Putin's goons need therapists not guns and missiles.  

where the focus isn’t to simply reduce distress, but to see it as a survival response to an oppressive world.

This is the crux of the problem. The survival instinct of the oppressed will cause them to tell therapists to fuck off- unless they can actually hand over a fistful of cash. Otherwise, they are a waste of time.  

And ultimately, I’d like to see a world where we need fewer therapists.

Archbishops and Jesuit Priests in El Salvador used to bang on about the need for revolutionary change. What was the outcome? The people decided they needed fewer Catholic priests. At one time the population was almost entirely Catholic. That proportion may now be 40 percent. Religion does not become more relevant when it embraces 'Liberation', it loses market share to happy-clappy sects which focus on bettering oneself not 'fighting the system'. 

A culture that reclaims and embraces each other’s madness.

Why not reclaim and embrace each other's turds?  

Where we take the courageous (and sometimes skin-crawling) risk of turning to each other in our understandable, messy pain.

Keep embracing my turds and you will get even more messy.  

Meaningful structural transformation won’t happen overnight,

unless it does as happened when the Berlin Wall fell or the crowd turned against Ceauscescu 

though the pandemic taught us that big changes can happen pretty quickly.

which is why having money in the bank- rather than donating it to shitheads- is important.  

But change won’t happen without us: our distress might even be a sign of health – a telling indicator of where we can collectively resist the structures that are hurting so many of us.

No. We may all feel collective distress coz of floods and droughts but unless we are real Sciencey we can't collectively do shit. But Science needs money- lots and lots of it.  

To return to the plant analogy

this lady is a vegetable 

– we must look at our conditions.

Plants can do no such thing.  

The water might be a universal basic income,

paid in a hyper-inflated currency which will buy you shit.  

the sun safe, affordable housing and easy access to nature and creativity.

and beejays from Super-models at least once a week. Also I want to dance like Beyonce. Government must pay for plastic surgery and twerking lessons.  

Food could be loving relationships,

hugs for hoodies? Cool. 

community or social support services.

not to mention sexual support services 

The most effective therapy would be transforming the oppressive aspects of society causing our pain.

Why can't everybody just be nice and stop doing naughty things?  

We all need to take whatever support is available to help us survive another day.

Or we could just buy stuff with money we earn.  

Life is hard.

No harder than my dick! I'm lying. Sad.  

But if we could transform the soil, access sunlight, nurture our interconnected roots and have room for our leaves to unfurl, wouldn’t life be a little more livable?

Not for me. For life to be livable for other peeps, I'd have to stop being such a flatulent waste of space. Could therapy help me be a better person? Sure. But Religion would be more effective. It doesn't matter if everybody thinks you are a smelly old cretin so long as you know that God has Love for His Creation. Meanwhile the cobbler must stick to his last. Doing your own job well without feeling envy of those with the skills to do more significant word is all it takes to achieve Moksha- that is Liberation. The paranoid too may have moments when they feel at one with the Universe or see a vision of an Earthly paradise. But that 'Oceanic experience' is delusive and mischievous. Psychiatrists who get a Messiah complex ruin lives even if they themselves manage to set up a cult from which they gain money and perverted sex. Ahsan's crazy cri de coeur reminds us of the Biblical admonishment 'Physician, heal thy self!' By contrast, Lawyers are told to go fuck themselves when they inquire to whom they can send their bill for professional services.