a freedom of choice but then takes it away! Can I choose to be inherently weak...please? Would Wolfi frown upon a person broken down by being raped saying to be broken down is your choice! The raped person could be chipper and get on with living??? That no matter what happens to a person, it is up to that person how to respond? Grow up, be an individual you sap, is that it? Whether talking to friends and/or a professional is what we do, always have done. Therapy is acceptable IF the therapist is a competent therapist. A friend is acceptable IF the friend is a competent friend.

The repellant posture that "there can be no obligations" is the illusory autonomy of the womb, of Margaret Thatcher, of the fossil fuel industry -- or long term SSI recepient-hood. Humans are social animals and owe obligations to one another simply by virtue of being alive.

What passes as mental disorder today, covers mainly a range of differences which prevent integration in capitalist networks of production, reproduction and consumption (the definition in DSM is based on this, in the euphemised language of everyday functioning). DSM includes everything from being transgender or being into BDSM, to a list of “personality disorders” (being too self-centred or too other-centred, too impulsive or too rigid...) and neurological differences such as autism, which become “disorders” because the system won't accommodate them. “Mental illness” has always been used to cover political/everyday deviance, but this has escalated recently, with the classification of resistance-based thought-patterns as distorted and unhealthy. Levine's work:
https://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagnos...
is particularly relevant here. The category of ASPD covers most kinds of punk-style anarchism, and if we also consider things like ADHD, high-functioning autism, and other personality disorders, then most of the traits associated with the counterculture from the 60s/70s onwards now fall into one or another clinical bracket. Being recognised as “different” is not necessarily a bad thing (this was the first step towards gay liberation for example), but today, being “different” means being risk-managed, and subjected to more-or-less coercive “therapies” to produce social compliance. This is clearly one of the reasons that the counterculture is weaker than it was.

What passes as mainstream therapy today is a naïve mix of behaviourist social control, cognitivist thought-policing, and biomedical manipulation using drugs and neuroscience. Behaviourism is ineffective because it relies on a fallacious view of human nature as rational and utility-motivated. Cognitivism wrongly asserts that thoughts cause (rather than expressing) feelings, and is mainly effective (if at all) in increasing psychological repression. Drugs have mixed effects and help some people in a similar way to painkillers. But ultimately, they control symptoms rather than removing root causes. In bourgeois psychology, a healthy person is a rational instrumental self-controlled subject acting in a world of similar subjects. From this point of view, humanity as such is “mental illness”, because it deviates from this model. Most therapy exists to help people to keep playing a false role. Even if one accepts the goals of therapy, the effectiveness of these approaches is overplayed – but they're very good at providing an infrastructure for a machinery of repression and prohibition. For instance, I've seen widespread self-policing and mutual policing of “healthy” thoughts on social media, psych forums, self-help groups and so on – and it always enforces standard neoliberal dogmas and prohibits anarchist and other dissident positions.

In bourgeois psychology, to think “healthily” is to deny the existence of an overarching system, to not nurture anger or grievances, and instead to think in myopic terms of individual life choices, profits, and risks. To recognise social reality – for instance, the fact that many people are subject to unbearable stress, and this causes outbursts of anger or despair – is taken to be toxic thinking. It's prohibited because it “causes” deviance. Thought-crimes are real today: do a google scholar search on “criminal thinking”, this is actually a serious topic in mainstream psychology. Anger in particular is prohibited, particularly “upwards”; oppressed people are constantly dealing with barely suppressed rage, stemming from the desire to refuse or reciprocate the humiliations and indignities imposed “downwards” on them, as Fanon and James Scott have shown. Both expressions of “upward” anger, and displacements of the resultant pool of aggressivity (such as depression and anxiety), are pathologised, without the social causes being recognised. Over the last 20 years, Elias' “civilising process” has sped-up in relation to overt anger. Types of angry speech which were normal 20 years ago are treated as prohibited abuse today. This is accompanied by an explosion of depression (anger turned inwards), anxiety (about suppressed anger getting out), passive aggression (disavowed anger), and explosive outbursts of formerly suppressed anger. It's interesting to read Leo Abse on the “Politics of Perversion” - he has captured the psychological structure of the mainstream pretty well in my opinion.

In terms of alternative approaches. Different psychological theories and therapeutic approaches have very different definitions of what counts as “sickness”, “health” (or equivalents) and the means from the former to the latter. In this, there's a rough equivalence between therapy, self-help, education, and religion, which all rest on a definition of (undesirable) A and (desirable) B and a passage from A to B. The problematic aspects of the model in terms of power are 1) the decision to classify A as deviant, which might override the will of the classified person, stigmatise them, and aid social control, 2) the decision to classify B as healthy, when it might also cause suffering, complicity etc, and 3) the assertion of authority to name A and B and oversee the transition from A to B, which incurs discursive and often institutional authority. Much of the “soft power” of civil society is rooted in variants of these strategies. However, it is possible to define A, B and the process in ways which are compatible with anarchism. For example, if we define A as civilised humans, B as wildness and the process as rewilding, we have a primitivist “therapy”. If we define A as submissive sheepishness, B as assertive egoism and the process as self-empowerment, we have an insurrectionist “therapy”.

Activists have started taking psychological suffering more seriously lately – but sadly, often by importing mainstream and idpol assumptions which are utterly ineffective. IMO we need to attack the dominant CBT/DSM paradigm and insist on some kind of autonomous alternative. Today there's a lot of talk about trauma and healing. The rhetoric of “healing” in identity politics is annoying, because it's so closely tied-up with self-help rhetoric. Personal “healing” is conflated with self-assertion as a rational subject and assumption of power within broadly conventional frames. Most of the people taking this stance do not seem very “healed” to me, but rather, have a complex mess of scattershot anger, disavowal of this anger, disavowed complicity, emotional hypersensitivity, and enforcement of a persona or image of a “healed” liberated subject which conflicts with their actual emotional state. They also tend to conflate “healing” with group liberation (e.g. decolonisation) in a way which downgrades the social and revolutionary aspects of the latter. Most often they're legitimising their own partial conformity and using psychological rhetoric to keep themselves unconscious of this process of rationalisation. This isn't to say that there's nothing to their ideas. It is true that “speaking truth to power”, successful protest, and activities such as feminist consciousness-raising have always been known to have empowering, psychologically beneficial effects for participants. See for example:
http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Passionate-politics.-Em...
(Chapter 15) and:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00287307
However, nobody would term these activities primarily “healing” until recently. Anyone who's experienced anarchism at its best – a really successful riot, say – has felt the liberation which comes with shaking off the shackles of oppression. But, this experience only comes in moments of successful revolt. Twitterstorms against other radicals or harmlessly calling a few politicians racists is a poor ersatz substitute for this kind of liberation psychology.

Unfortunately I think we're seeing an importation into activism of the Third Way tactic of supplementing the system with therapy, education, self-help, ethics, and/or spirituality as if this will solve its root problems and render incompatible visions compatible. We're not allowed to talk about the system – that's a thought-crime, there's a denkverbot, an order not to think, against it. Therefore, the problems arising from the system – and desires and demands contrary to the system (for ecological sustainability, gender equality, an end to poverty, welfare provision, and so on) are actually compatible with it. They're problems of secondary, mostly top-down, modification of the system so that it produces slightly different effects. Problems of “culture”, with “culture” conceived in cognitive-behaviourist and rational-choice terms, as a kind of balance of trust, social capital, and opportunity-structures. Idpol is doing some weird thing where it kinda semi readmits talk about the system provided it's named as primarily a discursive hierarchy (“white supremacy”, “patriarchy”) and theorised as a “culture” in the Third Way sense, rather than a socio-economic structure or a regime of elite power. The resultant “therapy” is not therapeutic because it leaves the core blockage (the inability to name, reject, and fight the real oppressor) untouched.

Should there be an anarchist therapy? In my view, yes, but with qualifications. There are certainly cases where people are classified as “mentally ill” or problematic, when they're actually engaged in politically disapproved deviance. Kids being drugged because they hate school, Soviet dissidents being sent to mental asylums, “criminals” being “risk-assessed” based on psychological criteria, people's political cynicism being treated as paranoia, their anti-authoritarianism as ASPD, and so on. There's people with conditions like schizophrenia and autism, who want to be recognised as different, not to be “cured”.

But I don't think this means “no therapy” full stop. The problem is that psychological distress is real, and it's becoming more pervasive. Showing that it's constructed, or that dominant models of health are just models of conformity, doesn't necessarily reduce the distress. For instance, we have lots of cases of activists suffering trauma or burnout, which means they can no longer be as active as they want to. This isn't a case of the system telling people their deviant self-expression is a “disorder”, it a case of people blocked from acting the way they want. The same with effects of poverty, racism and so on. There's people growing up with trauma and despair, for whom it isn't a desirable difference, it's a painful blockage. So, we need ways to untie knots and clear blockages to free up active forces and flows, and allow people to become anarchic, liberated agents of the kind people like Landstreicher value. These processes need not necessarily be performed by specialists, or under the name “therapy”. They can occur at a small-group level or peer-to-peer, or even spontaneously, in events such as riots. But we should be looking at how the knots can be untied. The point is to free each unique individual from reactive entanglements and “wheels in the head”, not to mould people in line with an ideal of how they should be.

Some other critical approaches which might be of use:

Psychoanalysis focuses on the origins of psychological problems in early childhood. There's complex theories of child development which vary between different schools. The techniques use liminal procedures (free association, dialogue, dream analysis, slip-ups...) to reconstruct and untie the knots existing at an unconscious level. The idea of the unconscious is in my opinion absolutely vital to any anarchist psychology – people are not unitary rational subjects and a freely lived life is lived according to desires which do not have a rational origin.

In particular, there's a “left” (Freudo-Marxist) strand to psychoanalysis which is potentially useful to anarchists, in the work of scholars like Reich, Fromm, Marcuse, Castoriadis, Deleuze/Guattari, and the Situationists. It's inspired things like Somatherapy (advertised as an “anarchist therapy”) and Lowen's bioenergetics.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/irrational-politics.htm
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-the-book-of-pleas...

Jungian psychoanalysis/analytical psychology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung
Spin-off from Freudian psychoanalysis which posits a “collective unconscious” - a store of myths and archetypes from which people draw. The purpose of life is the emergence of a higher, transpersonal self through a process of psychological journeying. Different symbols appear in someone's life as part of this process. The politics of Jungian theory is ambiguous. It's used by progressives such as Clara Pinkola Estes, Starhawk, and James Hillman, but also by some very reactionary people such as Jordan Peterson.

German critical psychology
http://www.yorku.ca/tteo/Teo2000Holzkamp.pdf
Radical, socially-rooted critical psychology linked to social constructivism.

Anti-psychiatry and Mad Liberation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry
http://asylummagazine.org/
Movement to reject psychological labelling, sometimes by “mad” people themselves, sometimes by critical psychiatrists. Linked to existentialism.

Marxist critique of psychology/critical psychology, e.g. Mark Fisher and David Smail
https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841
Psychological problems are actually side-effects of social structures. They are wrongly psychologised to displace blame onto individuals. It's better to accept that these problems are insoluble effects of structures and fight to change/overthrow the structures. Particular critique of “magical voluntarism” - the idea that people can overcome fundamental problems through heroic acts of will or good choices.

History of madness
https://monoskop.org/images/1/14/Foucault_Michel_Madness_and_Civilizatio...
Foucault in particular shows how “madness” is a category for classifying and segregating or excluding forms of being incompatible with capitalism. Other relevant works include Roy Porter's history of madness.

Consciousness Raising
https://womenwhatistobedone.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/notes-from-the-s...
Classical feminist technique, widely used in the 1970s. Small-group discussions focused on particular topics are used to produce a “click” in which personal problems are seen in social terms and blame is shifted from individual failings to social structures.

Precarity Consciousness Raising
http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Iss...
An anarchist attempt to revive CR around issues of precarity and neoliberal personalisation of responsibility.

Existential therapy (Rogers, Maslow, Frankl)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_therapy
http://www.fablar.in/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Mans_Search_for_Meanin...
Based on existentialism, which rejects the idea of predefined social purposes and insists that people have basic existential freedom and responsibility to find their own life-path. Sees most psychological problems as effects of this existential situation, and the struggle to find a life-path/ Generally focuses on finding purpose in life, rather than particular symptoms. (I believe existentialism is a major influence on insurrectionary anarchists such as Bonanno, and also on Hakim Bey's idea of peak experience, so it's a good fit with anarchism, though it neglects the unconscious).

Lacanian psychoanalysis
http://nosubject.com/Main_Page
A later, French spin-off which combines Freudian theory with structural linguistics, and attributes psychological problems to difficulties arising from the insertion of a self in language, the necessary incompleteness of self-definition (which depends on an “extimate” Other) and a resultant desire for, and impossibility of, immediate desire and enjoyment. Different variants; generally conservative (the goal is to reconcile people to “lack” and “castration”, to have them stop seeking justice in the outer world) though there are people who take it in a more radical direction – most postanarchists are Lacanian-influenced (Roussell, May, etc) as well as people like Zizek and Badiou, and feminists like Irigaray and Kristeva.

Reich/Lowen Tradition
http://www.reichandlowentherapy.org/
Based on Reich's approach, seeks to create a particular bioenergetic balance of a self-directed and productive person, focuses on breaking down various kinds of character-armour which block energetic flows.

Internal Family Systems Therapy
https://www.psychotherapy.net/data/uploads/5113ce91c0a4d.pdf
One of several approaches which theorise the psyche as composed of multiple “parts” rather than a unitary self (an idea also present in psychoanalysis). While its goals are reformist, the political implications of viewing the self as fragmentary in this way are often progressive.

Schizoanalysis
https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/how-does-sc...
and
https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf
section 4. A French variant of anti-psychiatry or Freudo-Marxism, based on the idea of releasing repressed flows from blockages.

Eco-therapy
http://www.fraw.org.uk/library/neoluddism/glendinning_1995-2.pdf
Alienation from nature as the root of psychological problems. Similar to anarcho-primitivism.

Psychedelic therapy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_therapy
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/magic-mushrooms-show-groundbreaking-psyc...
http://time.com/4573129/marijuana-cannabis-mental-health/
https://www.inverse.com/article/11958-the-benefits-of-lsd-will-change-th...
Growing evidence that drugs popular with the counterculture, such as marijuana, ecstasy, LSD, mescalene and psilocybin, have beneficial psychological effects – including producing more anti-authoritarian personality-structures. Some radicals have started using the term “biosyndicalism” for self-determined self-transformation using drugs, as opposed to coerced medicalised drugging.

Kundalini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini
Asian-origin bioenergy approach, views disturbances of mind and body in terms of blockages of energy flows, uses techniques including yoga and visualisation to clear blockages.

Transpersonal Psychology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpersonal_psychology
Seeking transcendent peak experiences or mystical experiences as a way to “heal” problems rooted in the ego. Similar to Buddhism/Taoism.

Duran and Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology
http://thetrustingheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/E.-Duran-Liberati...
Uses the idea of the “soul wound” of historical trauma, plus Jungian insights and traditional Native American approaches. Situates problems in Native American communities in terms of colonialism and power. Slightly idpol-ish but not pure idpol by any means.

Liberation Social Psychology
http://www.e-space.mmu.ac.uk/e-space/bitstream/2173/14582/2/liberation%2...
A Latin American movement focused on social causes of psychological distress. Interested in trauma caused by states.

Ayurvedic medicine
http://ayurvedicsolutions.com/media/commom_affective_disorders.pdf
Traditional Indian approach, based on ideas of balancing biological forces.

Traditional indigenous healing, and shamanism
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8429805_Traditional_indigenous_h...
Often based on creating liminal zones (temporary spaces of altered consciousness where identities and hierarchies break down), and using these to shift personalities and/or social relations. Often focus on healing relations among people, rather than individuals.

New Age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age
Based loosely on indigenous and Asian traditional approaches. Use of energy healing, rituals, resonant objects etc, to produce supposed healing effects. In practice, sometimes serves either as magical thinking about the status quo or alternative methods to standard therapeutic goals (self-control etc). But, also associated with drop-out movements which reject consumerist and capitalist life-goals, such as New Age Travellers.

Au contraire, Ritalin-head; Thatcher said that society does not exist. This dove-tails well with your specific brand of self-involved exhaustive prolixity.

The cool thing about therapy is that it can help you get on SSI -- then you can write stuff like, "...there can be no obligations..." 'cause the bourgeois state is carrying your weak, dependent, inadequate ass. Long live anarchy!

I did quite well in my latter teens self-administering Soma-therapy via its various methods and am a recognized self-taught Soma-tberapist who is always in demand from folk who have totally fucked-up values and relationships,..

i have a gluten-induced autoimmune disorder that throughout my life, before i understood this and started treating it as such, led to me being diagnosed with ADHD, bipolar depression, major depression, anxiety disorder and autism spectrum disorder. i still have a lot of issues around this type of stuff, it doesn't just go away, but it has gotten much better since fixing my diet. mental health professionals have done a great deal of harm to my life, dosing me with toxic drugs and essentially telling me that my beliefs and lifestyle as an anarchist were evidence i was crazy, which made me so angry i just threw it back in my faces and told them there was nothing wrong with me, just society, but this wasn't true either.

yes, the "science is still out" and i know it sounds like woo bullshit to some people, but it is increasingly being seen that brain inflammation is a physical basis to a lot of mental health problems (autoimmune disorder basically means excessive inflammatory reactions, which become chronic and systemic), and that what happens in the gut has a lot to do with what happens in the brain. anecdotally there are a lot of stories out there of people stumbling across this treatment in one way or another, i think i've even seen someone else mention on here how gluten free/casein free diets are increasingly recommended as a trial therapy for children with all kinds of mental health issues and its doing wonders, as these are two of the most common and severe autoimmunity-triggering proteins. autoimmune disorders are also understood now to be a lot more prevalent than we once thought.

the person who pointed me towards cracking my own health health puzzle used to say that food is one of the main, if not the biggest ways that people are controlled in society. i used to think that made some sense, but maybe she was exaggerating or projecting a little because she also was dealing with a similar situation where a careful diet was key to managing her health. lo and behold, me too...and having gone through all this i agree with her way, way more now. body and mind are one system and ayurveda in particular (the millennia-old "science of life") has a lot of really interesting stuff to explain why that is and how to deal with it. for instance in ayurveda, the immune and digestive systems fall under "pitta" the "fiery" force in the body, which is aggravated by stuff like sugar, dairy and alcohol, and correlates behaviorally/psychologically with anger, self-righteousness, high sex drive, impulsiveness...looking back it is easy to see for many reasons that my pitta was running amok. i mean, take it with a grain of salt to speak, but seriously, read about ayurveda. western civ is really proud of its smallpox vaccines and spaceships and crap, but it's pretty pathetic when it comes to figuring out what's good to eat and other really basic stuff we should pay much more attention to as living beings.

anyway i try to stay pretty far away from all of that fiery pitta these days, as well as taming my constitutive "vata" tendency to drift and depression, and it has done wonders for me. i really can't handle activism anymore because of it - keeping up with the news/internet riles me up bad enough as it is - and i have a lot less hope for the world. we have a country full of people living off of corn syrup, uppers and factory-farmed torture....it's no wonder most of them can't string two fucking intelligent thoughts together. our the orange fuhrer himself lives off of fast food; makes sense to me. it's a level of "material conditions" that is super hard to address: you can't reason with a gut, you can only put different stuff into it, and most people react with such horror, defensiveness and even rage when you suggest this to them. you might even be feeling pretty defensive right now reading this....ask yourself why? the human body, like any living organism, tries to adapt to its conditions. when something creates an extreme adverse condition, the body will try to adjust to living off of it and even form a dependency on the very thing that is hurting it. paradoxical and sad but deeply true in my experience. it also tends to get fixed very early in life, because of the body's natural habit-forming tendency, because of social conformity pressures and because of trauma (from people, from bad food, from whatever else) that makes us get mentally/physically "stuck" in time and denying it. bla bla ok im done with my woo rant. be health yall.

The larger story here is that the anarchist subculture attracts victim types who are preoccupied with their own problems.

Some recent research by psychoneuroimmunologists indicates that diet plays a major role in mental health and I posit that the carnivorous Homo Sapiens waged a genocidal war against the vegan Neanderthals using their advanced hunting and killing weapons to dominate other species. It may have been that if Neanderthals had been the only hominid species on Earth that civilization and the Empires which were spawned out of domination would have never risen out of the primeval wilderness.

Academics are teaching complete idiots how to destroy the entire planet, then complaining about the results, and insisting many anarchists need therapy. One in five Americans insists the sun revolves around the earth, and they diligently do their patriotic duty by voting for whoever advertises the most. When academics acknowledge that they are doing most of the talking and nobody is listening, I'll be here to provide therapy for them.

All politicians need electric shock therapy to eradicate power addiction syndrome P.A.S and obsessive dogma syndrome O.D.S originating in the right frontal lobe ;)

While I could not fight my way out of a wet paper bag myself, I have many yang brothers, including one who killed a man at 13 years old. Just because you might have a temper or whatever, doesn't mean you have to be an asshole. Something anarchists need to remind themselves, by cultivating learning to be still, embracing the silence as golden, and remembering that what comes around, goes around.

I've been looking into queer theory...fluidity of gender as described by Judith Butler. Identifying female (psychologically) while remaining male (physically).Very interesting in my opinion. This has certainly challenged my outlook and expanded my understanding. Then Rachel's narrative appeared in my searching: born white now identifies as black. Therapy and fluidity. Fluidity of therapy. The straight-jacketing of identity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvay6gSNOOI Indeed anarchists check this out.... fuck the therapy and fight back as Roger Hayes does.

Natural Law? Is that like a Barbie doll? You know, the immortal perfection and ideal? If so, where I can buy some?

I will have to read the book to understand broader context in which this is said but I'd like to respond to some of the passage that was shared as this provides the groundwork for what follows and embodies much popular criticism of psychology, which I find to be problematic and reinforce victim blaming stigmas, which prevent us from both getting strong AND breaking chains, as the two are not exclusive. Chains dont just hold us down, they make us weak, some of us are in fact weakened by our struggles, through generational traumas, internalized oppression, social, economic, phisical and intellectual atrophies, nature as well as nurture. everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, as well as different length and strength chains.

“Freedom belongs to the individual — this is a basic anarchist principle" It is a common truism that anarchists and classical liberals cite yes, but I believe our principles go beyond the individual, to eroding the antagonistic relationship between the individual and the collective, through non hierarchical social relations, if freedom belongs to the individual, then individuals have a dominant relationship over collectives in regards to matters of freedom. This concept of belonging itself is problematic, individuals must be free, as must collectives, this does not require claiming any concept of freedom for oneself, and does indeed require developing(not all at once as this is impossible and would result in backsliding and reaction) a freedom practice that is mutually non antagonistic, to other individuals, as well as collectives.

" — and as such resides in individual responsibility to oneself and in free association with others." The concept of free association is important, but cannot be practiced 100% as in terms of conflicts, as there will always be, at times, people need to intervene in others lives, for all sorts of reasons, and this is a good thing. i think the issue here is "responsibility to oneself" we are all responsible FOR oneself, for ones actions, but TO one another. we are free to intervene in matters that we see needing such intervention, but also responsible for our choice and methods for intervention, we are all responsible to eachother.

"Thus, there can be no obligations, no debts, only choices of how to act."
There are always obligations/debts, whether or not there is discussion/agreement on if/what these are or if/how they are to be facilitated/enforced. There is choice, and then sometimes there is not. If you have ever been extremely hungry or thirsty with no access to food or water, or extremely tired with nowhere to go, you will recognize your capacity for choice is eroded by your instincts to aquire what you need to go on, to mantain your capacity for future choice, that is your life, your agency, under attack by nerve damage and phisical atrophy, and hundreds of thousand years of regression into an instinctual response to environmental stimuli. where there is food, or space to rest, you take it, and while noone necissarily owes you a debt, or is obligated to provide it, you will take it nonetheless. obligations and debts are useful for facilitating this process, for encouraging autonomous seizing, as it allows people to take what they need LONG BEFORE this kind of emergency occurs, and we are able, consciously and subconsciously, to manage our affairs as a society, as communities, as peer groups, and better respond to needs and hold one another mutually accountable. as graeber describes in "5000 years of debt," the very social fabric is countless infinitesimal debts that can and should never be balanced.

"The therapeutic approach to social problems is the very opposite of this.." we are doing therapy now, and it is the opposite of the opposite here being described. transforming the nature of therapy, the context in which it occurs, through the ablation of psychological theory and practice in every day life and identity will help so that therapy can be made a part of our lives instead of something enforced or coerced when overt problems are recognized, or our behavior becomes a problem for others.

"Basing itself in the idea that we are crippled rather than chained," chains have been known to cripple. some of us would have been crippled otherwise. having been born into chains, it is impossible to know human potential except as the primitivists do, great leaps and bounds of logic ignoring tens of thousands of years of evolution, and the natural impulses that drove us in this direction for some natural reason. was it not some sort of weakness that allowed us to be chained in the first place? some unmet need that we turned to a more domestic way of life, accepted some sort of chain, like people rescuing eachother from a flood, or climbing a mountain may do, for mutual safety, as well as accepting some mutual risk?

"inherently weak rather than held down" it does no such thing, if we are inherently weak, then therapy would be arbitrary. it assumes we are capable of growth, the sources of any presumed weakness are topics of great study and debate, the social cause is not left out of those debates.

"it imposes an obligatory interdependence,”" it presumes a natural and necessary interdependence(whether or not this is natural or necissary is arguable), and the nature of that interdependence is heavily influenced by social norms and structures, specifically the relationship of the therapy industry to broader society, those they serve, and those they are accountable to. again ablation of therapy theory and practice into every day individual and communal life will address these concerns. many extreme schizophrenics have been able to rationalize their dillusions and live a healthy life, how? education and practice. this was not a result of strength necissarily, but acknowledging and learning about weakness. the presumption of strength is where a great deal of mental illness becomes dangerous when people over extend themselves, and crash head first into their cognative limits, or beyond, hurting themselves and those around them, rather than admitting they need help and reaching out.

"a mutuality of incapacity, rather than a sharing of strengths and capabilities.”

We are mutually incapacitated, this is what the chains as well as our weaknesses chained or not implies. We can get out alone, maybe, we can get out together, maybe. But even if you intend to get out alone, you will do so by the sharing of strengths by others, knowledge, and practices, developed in part, by others. It is through this sharing of strengths and capabilities, learning from one another that different paradigms of therapy have been, and will continue to be developed. This thread itself is a perfect example of that. Even in challenging percieved forced interdependence, we are acknowledging our defacto interdependence, forced or otherwise.

I dont see a need in framing it in any of these terms, except for riling up the passions(perfectly legitimate there is much to be passionate enraged and afraid of continuing or worsening in these industries). When it comes to informing a better theory and practice, imo the ablation of therapeutic theory and practice, we will need to acknowledge our weakness, regardless of our views on their sources. If its the chains, then we need to acknowledge our weakness to break the chains. If its nature, then nature is the chain, then testing the limits and figuring out how to work together within those limits, will take collaboration.

Either way, the practice is the same, work together, share resources, support one another, question everything, and dont be afraid to ask for help, and if you see someone struggling alone, dont be afraid to ask if they need help.