Nick Taber

This makes understanding and navigating it confusing, difficult, uncertain, and potentially dangerous. These are not simply “trained professionals”. Don’t be naive.

Despite what people say, paychotherapy is not just like other professions. Because it deals with things like meaning, thoughts, feelings and relationships, it has extremely unique and strange properties.

Beneath the procedural warmth, there's a real anger at kids for suffering. We'd much rather them be totally ok with how they're being treated in our broken schools and families.

Probably 90%+ of our idea of childhood wellbeing is defined as adaptation to social environments that are bad for you.

The widespread misuse of the neuroscience of children really is akin to scientific racism. It’s like, no your problem isn’t an authoritarian, psychologically abusive environment, it’s due to an inherent defect in your brain.

One of the scariest things about the mental health field is that harm is very often invisible to the system. It gets reclassified as individual pathology, not counted as harm.

We forget that, much of the time, the phenomenon of kids labeled and treated for “mental illness” is another persecution story. Kids that are truth tellers in their families or schools being scapegoated for surfacing problems that the adults don’t wish to address.

Psychotherapy can very easily slip into being a coercive controlling relationship. And when kids are involved, it might be nearly inevitable.

Sometimes, psychotherapy is first and foremost an exercise of power.

It’s shameful the way we systematically use psychiatric drugs and non-consensual therapy to get suffering, victimized children to be more convenient.

The mental health industry’s idea of “compassion” is telling people that their suffering is due to individual biological/psychological problems so everyone can ignore the more difficult, often ugly truths.

This isn’t a “critical studies” issue only relevant to humanities departments. This problem is f*cking up people’s lives as we speak.

Because of mental health professionals’ interpretive power, they have basically unbounded latitude to define your life and mind in a way that serves their narrow self interest and the club they’re in.

Probably the biggest reason youth mental health treatment doesn’t face much accountability for the widespread harm it causes is because the kids are coerced into adopting the interpretive frame of the mental health professionals.

YouTube video by National Youth Rights Association Youth Rights Podcast Ep 2: Authoritarianism in Schools, Teen Mental Health and the TTI Ft Nick Taber

The third episode of the Youth Rights Podcast (Ep. 2 "Authoritarianism in Schools, Teen Mental Health and the TTI Ft Nick Taber") is out now w/ @nicktaber.bsky.social!
Watch on Youtube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxB3...
Watch on Spotify:
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The mental health profession really is like the new priesthood because it also claims jurisdiction over the soul.

Organizing mental health, an interpretation and meaning based domain, as a technical discipline is inherently dehumanizing and will predictably cause widespread harm. Not in every case, but regularly and predictably. It’s a category error with enormous consequences.

The line between excellent psychotherapy and dreadful psychological abuse can get very blurry very quickly.

Their anger is probably disproportionately small relative to how they’re actually being treated.

Teenagers/kids get stigmatized very often for being “angry”, like “oh they’re an anger person”. But let’s think about why they might be angry. They’re powerless to an environment that’s harming them, then they get told they have a made-up biochemical problem.

No I would say your ability to disagree with them is severely constrained even in the best-case scenario.

Even if on one level you sometimes technically have the right to disagree with a mental health professional, can you really disagree with someone who is the official state-backed authority on the mind, thoughts, life etc?

OF COURSE a situation like that will produce undesired behaviors and emotional responses. The problem is we really do make the behavior the central issue and intervene on that level. Which is why it’s so destructive.

It’s that they are downstream of other things like an emotionally abusive family system, an authoritarian school system, and an understanding at that time that I was being harmed by a broken environment and it wasn’t going to acknowledge the truth.

The whole idea of behavior problems in kids is very misunderstood by psychiatrists, psychologists, child experts, schools, parents, etc. Looking at my own experience, I certainly had a lot of energy and at times behaved in ways that could really bother people. It’s not that those things aren’t real.

Think about it, you’re told you have a problem, therapy helped with the problem, you’re better now because of therapy, if you struggle you need more therapy, and questioning therapy means you have problems. So there can be an indoctrination component that’s deeply intertwined.

The value of psychotherapy is upsold all the time, but I think it can be really hard to tell when and where therapy does actually have value because it justifies itself and creates markets by the way it shapes people.

I don’t think so. All that would do is increase tension between the kid and the people who have power over her. The therapist would pretty much have to gaslight the kid and cause useful trauma so that she adjusts

The premise behind therapy for children is nonsensical, as far as I can tell, UNLESS the goal is to condition them so that they fit into toxic or broken environments. Think about it, the kid is suffering in one of these settings, then the therapist provides genuine understanding?

At best, we’ll program kids emotional responses according to authoritarian institutional logic. At worst we’ll ruin their lives