What is the obsession with therapy/counselling?

It sounds like you are triggered because you would benefit from therapy.

I don't understand why everybody is obsessed with booze in this country. All problems seem to be sorted with a large gin. I hate gin and don't need it as I feel a quick chat with my therapist does the job rather than breathing my gin fumes and drunken unpleasantness all over everybody else.

I’ve had loads of therapy and it’s really helped. Talking about a problem with someone who listens and knows how to ask the right questions is a good way of coming up with solutions and also understanding what’s happened. It is known to be effective.

In my experience if you go through a major loss or difficult period in life friends are only around or understanding up to a point. And even then they aren’t trained therapists. I’m a big proponent of paying someone to listen to my shit rather than putting it on those around me. Grief counselling was invaluable for me after my mum died quite suddenly.

I read through some of this but just wanted to say that therapy has been life changing for my daughter. She’s autistic and finds much of the world pretty difficult but her CAHMS therapist has been great - really pragmatic, making suggestions that hadn’t occurred to me, homework each week with a specific goal in mind. She’s so, so much more settled now.

I completely disagree. I am the type of person who finds fun in every situation. I’ve developed a dark humour and there’s very little I won’t find a joke in. I was the typical class-clown to try and deflect people from the horrors of what was happening at home. I’m optimistic. I genuinely very rarely even thought about my past. I wasn’t the type of person to wallow.

I still needed therapy. You cannot laugh off decades of trauma. Unfortunately I was in my 40s before I found a fantastic therapist who dug and forced me to look honestly at myself and identify how I’d been fucking my life up for years because I was stuck in old patterns.

Trauma isn’t ’being miserable’. It’s not ‘wallowing in self-pity’. It’s about accepting you have been damaged, and making changes to stop you from continuing to damage yourself and others. It’s not about expecting to be happy all the time. It’s about finding peace.

Some lucky people already have peace. Don’t begrudge it of everybody. We all deserve it.

I have never seen people being obsessed with it. One only recommends it, if someone really is in need of one.

This is complete and total bullshit

I studied for 2 years to do a masters in psychotherapy. I'll be honest some of the people on the course had zero self awareness and weren't particularly effective in their communication styles.

Kind of put me off. I've also had 2 unsuccessful attempts at counselling and CBT myself.

However I also worked at a university counselling service and the therapists there were amazing, intelligent and powerful communicators so I do believe there are effective therapists out there.

I need a ton of therapy for past traumas but it never seems to get off the ground, I think I'm not ready to put the work in.

This is such a smug, able-bodied fantasy of how overwhelm actually works.

You’re listing “alternatives” like everyone still has full control and is just choosing to be dramatic. That’s not reality. When people are actually overwhelmed—mentally or physically—there isn’t a neat list of options. Sometimes it’s simply: you can’t function.

I have MS. On a bad day, the “alternative” isn’t some moral debate about being fair to colleagues—it’s whether pushing through is going to make things worse. Your checklist doesn’t even begin to apply.

And therapy isn’t a luxury indulgence—it’s often what keeps people from falling apart when “just get on with it” stops working.

So no, the alternative isn’t your tidy little list. Sometimes it’s rest, support, and accepting that not everyone is operating from the same baseline—even if you’d prefer to pretend they are.

Agree.

I’ve felt so bad at points (suicidal) I would have tried ANYTHING to take that feeling away. Therapy seemed like the most sensible approach.

It’s not always about effort or mindset, and that’s where your argument falls down.
My own child is a perfect example. Confident, happy, competes in front of hundreds, wins medals. Then she got stuck in a lift.....once...for 5 mins.

That’s it. One incident.

To you, that’s something you just move on from. For her, it escalated into something that affected daily life. It didn’t stay as lifts either, it spread.
Situations where she felt trapped or out of control suddenly became overwhelming.
It was like her brain flipped into “keep her safe at all costs” mode. Not a choice, not something she could just snap out of, and not something a hobby fixes or a long walk or a cup of tea.

It was debilitating for her.

So what would your advice be there? Just tell her to get on with it?
That’s the flaw in what you’re saying. You’re assuming everything is within someone’s control if they just try harder. It isn’t.
Therapy isn’t about talking for years for the sake of it.

It’s about giving someone the tools to stop something small turning into something that takes over.

Obviously, you never had depression or a mental health issue that you can’t solve by saying what’s the alternative.

Bollocks!

Evolution doesn’t have a thought process, or a moral worth, evolution just is.

And if we’ve evolved to the point where we can start thinking about our happiness and find ways to pursue it, that’s real too. There’s no good evolution and bad evolution, or real and fake evolution.

Plus some people believe in either a deity or some other spiritual force that could well have started a process (either in a sentient way or otherwise) that resulted in humanity’s existence and inevitably led us to start pursuing happiness. Maybe happiness is why the universe exists - we don’t know either way.

Whatever else is true or not, there’s nothing wrong or invalid in humans seeking happiness or something more than simply reproduction. It’s not morally wrong to do so. It’s not morally wrong to act outside of our evolutionary “purpose” either.

Edit - I realise therapy isn’t specifically about happiness but just taking about that as that was what the poster raised.

This

Evolution doesn’t programme anything. That’s not how evolution works.

Therapy isn’t about being happy.

Bertrand Russell also said that philosophy “removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt”.

Allow yourself some liberating doubt, @Dappy777 . You might be mistaken.

you’re a therapist but no longer believe in therapy? Private or public sector?

This is so true

Not sure what you imagine is discussed in therapy - good therapy is not about 'being happy'!

You must have had a much better therapist than me then. I’ve tried about 6 different therapists in my life - all of them I stuck with it for a reasonable amount of time, some of them did help me reach conclusions about things and understand & make peace with life events I struggled with. None helped me make any real long-lasting positive changes though. That came from within (and no, the therapist did not help get me to a place where I was able to make those changes) I hadn’t had therapy in years before i decided to make practical changes to my life to improve my MH. I realised I could rely on no one but myself so stopped asking for or expecting help from anyone, cut everyone who brought negativity to my life out, left my partner, moved to a different town, swapped drinking and partying for book groups, team sports, and walks in nature with my kids, started exercising a lot and generally massively simplified my life. The only person who can solve your problems is you (yes I know this is what therapists believe also, and their job is to help facilitate that) but the way therapy is suggested as a fix-all solution to anyone who’s having a tough time/has MH problems/has been through trauma, suggests that most people think it IS the job of the therapist to ‘fix’ you. That can be a dangerous assumption to make, because people then put all their hopes into this one thing and when they realise that’s not how it works it can be devastating

We’ve adopted the American belief that you’re supposed to be happy and that if you’re not you need ‘fixing’. In reality, life is unbelievably painful and hard. We’re not ‘meant to be happy’ at all. Evolution programmed us to be pregnant at 15 and dead by 30 or 40.

Most of us would be happier if stopped pursuing it and stopped expecting so much of life. Bertrand Russell once said that the secret to happiness is to accept that life is “horrible, horrible, horrible.” Personally, I find reading the classics helps me far more than self-help books or therapy. Dickens, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh etc overflow with wisdom. Reading P. G. Wodehouse out loud is the best therapy I know.