There Are No Therapists/Headscratchers

• It Just Bugs Me that this page assumes that getting professional therapy is the only appropriate response to a traumatic incident. This trope makes sense if we're talking about an organization like the police or something where you'd expect a certain level of mandatory therapy after being shot at or something, but the general tone of the examples seems to be that anyone who goes through a trauma should get themselves into a psychiatrist's office, stat. It seems to ignore the possibility that not everyone who goes through a rough patch in life needs, wants, or can afford a paid professional to talk to. Isn't that partly what True Companions are for?
  • That's one way of looking at it. Or it could be that the examples are either A) There's supposed to be some sort of structure to address this sort of thing and there clearly isn't or B) the characters are clearly hurting - to the point where Everyone Can See It - and no one even makes a serious effort at even talking it out with them.
    • But in a lot of these cases the characters do talk about their problems with each other.
      • • Part of the positives of therapy is that it provides a space to talk about ones feelings to someone who isn't involved, or who won't get their feelings hurt.
      • The OP assumes everyone has a Nakama. What about the people that don't? He also assumes therapy costs money. In many places (like Britain, with it's poor benighted NHS) this is not the case.
      • True, but again it depends on the setting of the story and the like. In a fantasy or science fiction setting it is possible that therapy isn't accessible somehow or that there are alternate methods used, however there are some cases when the story is in a time and place when a character would normally be sent for therapy whether or not it would help (in Dysturbia for instance, Kale would have almost certainly been sent to a therapist if not immediately after watching his dad die, then after the first time he attacked someone and began showing obvious signs of depression).
  • It's also true that not everyone goes to therapy to deal with trauma. Some people get better when they go into counseling, other people talk stuff out with others. I think "there are no therapists" applies more to situations where someone decides that the ONLY solution to pain or distress is something drastic like killing people or revolutionizing the world instead of considering talking to someone.
  • You could always go the shounen route. Everything from a nervous breakdown, shock from witnessing your entire family killed, severe depression, to suicidal tendencies can all be solved by a punch or slap from the hot-blooded lead and being ordered to man up. "Macross 84: DYRL" was probably the funniest example of this.
    • Real militaries often think like this unironically. PTSD is the result.
  • The (darkly) amusing thing here is that everybody except maybe the original poster is missing an important point: some people are not helped by therapy. There's an entire family of conditions--personality disorders--where, frankly, therapy makes it worse. There's also the simple fact, which is supported by some interesting peer-reviewed studies, that forcing therapy onto people can actually be worse than not having any. The optimum results actually come from having therapy available, but not required. In fact, allowing the person to choose their therapist is also likely to result in better outcomes. (There's several reasons, ranging from the fact that the chemistry between a therapist & client is highly important to the outcome to the very simple fact that it's miserable to find yourself stuck with a therapist whom you know is a quack.^[1])
    • As someone who's been forced to endure 11 different psychiatrists/psychologists/therapists over the past 10 years (mainly in order to obtain what I actually need: DRUGS), with only 2 of them being not horrible (neither of which licensed to write prescriptions, of course), all I have to say is: THANK YOU.
    • Personality disorders are highly difficult to treat. The reason for this is because it's not a physiological issue due to chemical imbalance. It's the core of the person that is the problem, and they have to be retrained from the ground up as though they were being raised all over again. The professional ends up standing in as the patient's parent. Mental health professionals detest treating personality disorders because it's so difficult and time consuming, and the chances of relapse are high. They would rather harass a patient suffering from personality disorders into leaving their office, or diagnose them with some similar mental disorder, which can be easier to treat.
    • Key word is forced. Any competent therapist will tell you that any treatment begins with a patient acknowledging that they have a problem, want to fix it, and are willing to talk to the therapist about it. Other key word is 'not licensed'. Other other key word is that there are a handful of therapies that actually -aren't- in anyway therapy or even qualify you as a doctor (because they aren't). And some therapies are surrounded by misperception that the ones that practice them legitimately are overshadowed by the ones who present them as some miracle cure (hypnotherapy for one).
  • However, it should be noted that personality disorders can be treated, and that there are many professionals who feel compassion rather than annoyance at sufferers. As more and more discoveries about them are being made, they're getting easier to treat. Yes, some therapists are terrible. It doesn't mean the entire system is corrupt. (From my own experiences, I have BPD, I've been in therapy, and it HAS helped.)
  • It could also be said that "therapists" and "counseling" could be shorthand for "any psychiatric help whatsoever". It is rare to see anyone getting those drugs either. It is also not a case of "if there were therapists, this plot would have been resolved" but "in the real world, someone would have at least thought this person would need psychological counseling".
• Where would this example fall under this trope? A guy has a traumatic event happen to him. Unfortunately, he's a recently-released former domestic terrorist who is currently working for a crime syndicate/black ops THING (it wasn't really cleared up which one it was), whose usual therapist is a) insanely busy b) his landlady and c) the mother of his partner, who went through the same traumatic event, and is therefore WAY too close to the problem. So instead, he's sent to someone else who works for the same group but has no counseling training, and never really told that it's for therapy, but it ends up being therapy anyway.
  • Zig Zagged

1. ↑ I've never had that inflicted upon me, which is good, because I would be rather pointed about wanting the quack away from me.