Anecdotal obviously, but from my experiences and those in my friend-group, therapy seems actively harmful in many circumstances. Therapy can be an enabler of bad behavior, helping to build a new fancy framework of excuses just as easily as it can help you land somewhere better. How long has it been since you've seen something bad (maybe it was just slightly selfish, maybe it was something worse and chronic) waved away as "self-care"? Or if you've lost faith in people or communication generally, then you're not going to feel better by going through many rounds of therapist mismatch and at some point you've aggravated problems rather than fixing them. Fortunately for the industry, measuring the harm is just as difficult as measuring the benefits. The advice to "just exercise more" may not help, but at least it really can't hurt.

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chrneu a day ago | parent [-]

> Therapy can be an enabler of bad behavior

Be aware that a lot of therapists are aware of this and actively try not to do this.

Unfortunately, services like BetterHealth allow clients to select their therapists in ways which results in people doctor shopping to get what they want. Doctors want to get paid so they'll say/do whatever to keep clients.

It's like the antibiotic issue with internal medicine. People will see a bunch of doctors until they get what they want.

	▲	throw128 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yes but isn't this pretty fundamental to the process? You could look for more qualified/expensive people, but even if it were free and everyone was extremely qualified then there's still customer-satisfaction metrics to try and game. To bring it back towards exercise, it's fair to say that it literally cannot hurt and might help, which is more than you can say about therapy. And at least it is very, very telling whether a therapist is working questions about sleep/exercise into the very first interactions. Anyone who does not is definitely a quack.