You quite good at analyzing things generally, except when it comes to seeing yourself. You are very cerebral in the sense that you intellectualize your feelings away and for the same reason intellectualize psychotherapy away. You see it as a joke because you don't need to undergo it to understand the threat it poses. You already know that it could not help you as you are quite content with how sick you are.
With that, my personal opinions observing how you roll, let me tell you what I think explains what you see. People don't go into psychotherapy to get well, they go into it to become better at being sick. You are pleased enough with yourself not to need that but the down side is that your contempt for the practice in not so much that it fails so often. For you that's quite a relief. The real rub for you is that the subject matter is terrifying, all that crap about knowing what you feel. No thanks to that right. You are just fine.
None of that has anything to do with the issue.
People often go into psychotherapy because they lack sufficient power to do anything to actually change the world, which is often the real source of the problem.
The underlying premise of the mental health industry is both idealist and Panglossian - it's the belief that the world is the most perfect of all possible worlds and any suffering must therefore be caused by the wrong ideas in the minds of the sufferers.
Under no circumstances can the source of a problem ever be considered to lie outside the sufferer's mind, in the real material world - because that might involve an imperative to change the external world, the world that gives the mental health professional their comfortable bourgie lifestyle, and which they find perfectly fine as it is, thanks.
That often involves a failure to challenge things like class inequality, racism or patriarchy, but in my case, for example, it was simply because I couldn't get an underfunded NHS to do the necessary test to diagnose the actual problem, or the overconfident doctors to actually think about the problem.
Just look at the pure God-of-the-Gaps reasoning implicit in this official position of the Royal College of Psychiatrists on "medically unexplained symptoms"
This information is for anyone with physical symptoms without an obvious physical cause. It explains what you can do to help yourself and what treatments are available.
www.rcpsych.ac.uk
It clearly takes as an unexamined underlying assumption the belief that medical knowledge is complete and doctors omniscient. Ergo anything they can't diagnose must therefore be due to the sufferer's "wrong thoughts".
Then contrast that with the actual medical literature on, in particular, neurological and auto-immune conditions (both of which I ultimately turned out to have, when I _finally_ got them to do the correct test).
When you look into it you find conditions like multiple sclerosis or hydrocephalus are very poorly understood and frequently mis- or undiagnosed. Which is hard to reconcile with the complete lack of recognition of such limitations in medical knowledge by the psychiatrists.
(Who I suspect are largely engaging in empire building and securing new revenue-streams, when they come out with stuff like this).
Also, you keep banging on about "liberal orthodoxy", when in fact liberalism is the philosophy of the professional-managerial technocrat class - such as the mental health profession. I'm not, and never have been, a liberal.
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