Manufacturing Victims
According to the book Manufacturing Victims, the therapy industry operates under the same market economy as any other business: If the customer doesn't come back, it means you have failed. Thus, the ideal therapy is one that makes the patient dependent on the therapist rather than ready to move on with her life.
As a trope, this comes to play in the form of therapists who encourage patients to get stuck in their problems, or even get worse, rather than to move on and improve their lives.
In some cases, this malpractice includes a variant of Defiled Forever and/or false memories.
Please note that those who make a living Manufacturing Victims are not necessarily malicious: They keep telling themselves that their method is popular because it works, when the grim reality is that it's popular because it gets people hooked on it. Regardless, a large majority of training for therapeutic work attempts to instill the idea that this trope is bad, as making the person dependent on therapy just replaces the old problem with a new one. Unfortunately, there's generally no good way for an outsider to tell the difference between the actual use of this trope and the existence of a hopeless case that keeps coming back despite lack of improvement.
This trope is about getting people hooked on therapy, including similar activities such as self-help support-groups. Compare and contrast Withholding the Cure (where the villain suppresses medication that cures a problem so they can sell medication that merely treats its symptoms, or because they want people to die from it) and Poison and Cure Gambit (where the villain creates the problem in the first place).
No real life examples, please. However, media examples of how different real life therapies have been portrayed are, of course, welcome.
Comic Books
- Before she got her powers, Moonstone was an extremely unethical psychiatrist. One of her female patients was afraid her husband was cheating on her. When the patient started making progress with her issues, Moonstone telephoned the patient, disguised her voice to sound like a bimbo, and asked to speak to the patient's husband.
- Averted in Dykes to Watch Out For: As Mo turns into a therapy junkie as a way of avoiding dealing with her life, her therapist actually throws her out.
Film
- In the David Cronenberg flim The Brood, Raglan manages to get at least one patient addicted to his treatments.
Literature
- The books by Kevin Trudeau paints the entire pharmaceutical industry this way. He's also been accused of doing this himself.
Live Action TV
- Law and Order SVU has played this card a few times.
- There's a few episodes that deal with "repressed memory" therapists and the problems they cause, since "repressed memories" are usually false.
- The cast does it too, though. There are numerous incidents where a "victim" doesn't think she was victimized, and she is portrayed as being in denial. Which is possible, although in some cases it seems more like they legitimately weren't traumatized by whatever "should" have traumatized them.
- Penn and Teller Bullshit have an episode on 12-steppers, where they argue that the method is nothing more than brainwashing and religious indoctrination. It doesn't help at all against alcoholism, and at worst it gets people more hooked on the alcohol itself as well as getting hooked on the AA movement.
Video Games
- Dr. Fontaine in L.A. Noire, who turns artists and shell-shocked Marine veterans into addicts and serial killers.
Web Original
- Zinnia Jones: The episode I am not a symptom.
Western Animation
- South Park had an episode where Stan's Dad drank too much as was forced into the AA movement. He quickly got hooked on it, thus making his life miserable AND making his alcohol problem worse. It's implied that the other members of the support-group had equally dysfunctional relationships to the whole thing.
- Drawn Together (season 3, episode 13) has Foxy going into therapy. The psychiatrist implants a false memory of childhood sexual abuse, and this false memory takes over her life. Ruining her life, making her end up in jail, and make her murder a lot of innocent people—in that order. To be fair, the "specalist" was just another housemate.