The Matt Walsh Show - February 03, 2024


This Is What I Would Do If I Was A Therapist [Weekly Walsh Original]

Hosted by
Matt Walsh
Mentioned
Hallow Jim Caviezel Kevin
Ep. 1307 - Democrats Courageously Defend The Rights Of Illegal Immigrant Drunk Drivers Ep. 1308 - An Outrageous Betrayal On The Border

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

201.63

Word count

1,529

Sentence count

149

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Matt Walsh explains why he thinks therapy is overrated, overused, and not nearly as effective as people seem to assume it is. And why you should stop complaining about your problems and just do something about them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Towards the end of last week, I found myself in the middle of a social media firestorm, if you can believe it.
00:00:05.000 Now, I'm not usually the sort of guy who makes people on the internet mad.
00:00:09.000 In fact, I think this might be the first time in my life that such a thing has ever happened.
00:00:13.000 Sometimes I don't know when you're kidding.
00:00:15.000 I was trending on Twitter for a few days because of some comments I made about therapy, mental health, and depression.
00:00:19.000 Now, to be clear, therapy is overrated, overused, and not nearly as effective as people seem to assume.
00:00:24.000 Sounds good. Doesn't work.
00:00:26.000 I will just mention this one response from a child therapist on TikTok who was offended by my therapy skepticism.
00:00:33.000 So, let's just watch that.
00:00:35.000 I'm Matt Walsh. What's wrong with you?
00:00:38.000 Uh, yeah, I saw your Psychology Today profile. Is it true you can help me in only five minutes?
00:00:44.000 Yes, that's all the time I need to fix you.
00:00:47.000 Uh, okay. And you take insurance, right?
00:00:50.000 Of course, but only if they're owned by private equity.
00:00:53.000 The government can't take away my right to choose your health care.
00:00:57.000 Great. Is it okay if I let you know what's going on?
00:01:00.000 Yeah. I've already started the meter, so you better make it quick.
00:01:04.000 Oh. Oh, okay. Um, I'm lonely, I don't know how to make friends, everyone keeps making fun of me, and I don't know how to talk to females. 0.89
00:01:14.000 Okay, okay. Stop whining. I know what you need to do. You're gonna want to write this down.
00:01:19.000 All right. Great. What is it?
00:01:21.000 Stop it.
00:01:22.000 Um, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that.
00:01:25.000 Just stop it. Stop looking like an idiot and make some friends. 1.00
00:01:28.000 I mean, I gotta say, the acting and writing could use a little bit of work, but other than that, pretty spot on. 1.00
00:01:32.000 I mean, that is unironically not far from how my therapy practice would work if I had one.
00:01:37.000 I don't know why he had his eyes closed the whole time as, like, as the idea that I was falling asleep.
00:01:43.000 You know, I wouldn't make it through a day. I would not make it through a day as a therapist.
00:01:46.000 But if I was a therapist, it'd be pretty similar to that.
00:01:48.000 Although, I'd probably model it more after this scene from an obscure HBO show nobody watched 10 years ago.
00:01:54.000 But I like this one scene anyway, because, like, this is what therapy would be like if I was doing it. Here it is.
00:01:59.000 So, I'm not the kind of therapist that pussyfoots around. They like to dig in fast and I give feedback.
00:02:04.000 Stop fidgeting. What are you doing with your arm?
00:02:06.000 Nothing. I'm just nervous.
00:02:07.000 Put your hands in your lap. Focus. Sit up.
00:02:10.000 Good posture sends positive messages to the brain. We're here to work.
00:02:13.000 So, what are your issues? Give them to me.
00:02:15.000 Well, I am sad about this breakup I just went through.
00:02:19.000 She left you? 0.86
00:02:20.000 Yes.
00:02:21.000 And now you feel rejected and unlovable and you can't understand why she no longer loves you?
00:02:24.000 Yes.
00:02:25.000 You do know that she's not the only source of love for you in the world.
00:02:28.000 But I want her love.
00:02:30.000 We don't get everything we want in life.
00:02:32.000 You don't get to have her love.
00:02:33.000 That's it.
00:02:34.000 End of story. Next issue.
00:02:36.000 Again, unironically, that would be good therapy.
00:02:38.000 One of the big problems with therapy is that, in its least effective forms,
00:02:42.000 it gives people a forum to whine and talk about themselves in a way that feeds the meter for the therapist
00:02:47.000 and gives the client an excuse to be narcissistic and self-indulgent, but does not lead to action or change.
00:02:53.000 In fact, the therapist is incentivized to not spark any lasting change because that would interrupt the cash flow.
00:02:58.000 This is a **** of a thing to say.
00:03:00.000 The fact is that for most people in therapy, the source of their problems is not some complex, deeply hidden trauma they need to, you know, have years of discussion to identify and unpack.
00:03:10.000 But if therapists give simple answers, again, they'd be out of a job.
00:03:14.000 What a lot of people really need is to be told exactly what you heard in that clip, which is,
00:03:18.000 this is the way things are.
00:03:19.000 This is life.
00:03:20.000 You can't always get what you want.
00:03:21.000 Deal with it.
00:03:22.000 Stop complaining.
00:03:23.000 Move on.
00:03:24.000 I mean, that is the answer to like 99% of the emotional complaints that you have.
00:03:30.000 Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter, starts on Ash Wednesday, February 14th.
00:03:34.000 This is a time of intense prayer, fasting and giving.
00:03:37.000 Hallow's annual Pray 40 Challenge is one of their most popular.
00:03:40.000 Last year, over a million people joined.
00:03:42.000 This year's Pray 40 Challenge focuses on surrender and includes meditations on the powerful book, He Leadeth Me.
00:03:48.000 This is a story about a priest who became a prisoner and slave in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
00:03:52.000 His story is one of ultimate surrender, and we are called to offer up our own worries, anxieties, problems, and lives to God.
00:03:58.000 There will also be Lent music, Lent-specific Bible stories, and other Lenten prayers, like The Seven Last Words of Christ with Jim Caviezel.
00:04:04.000 You can download the app for free at hallow.com slash mattwalsh.
00:04:07.000 The app allows you to set prayer reminders and track your progress.
00:04:10.000 Hallow is truly transformative and will help you connect with your faith on a deeper level.
00:04:14.000 Download the Hallow app today at hallow.com slash mattwalsh.
00:04:17.000 That's hallow.com slash mattwalsh for an exclusive three-month free trial.
00:04:22.000 This led, after a couple of the steps, into a discussion about depression.
00:04:25.000 I'm just tired. The days are short. I don't know. Maybe I'm depressed.
00:04:29.000 There is a difference between sadness and depression, but it is one of degree, not of kind.
00:04:35.000 Depression is a deep, persistent sadness. It's like the difference between being hungry because you skipped lunch and being hungry because you haven't eaten in two days.
00:04:43.000 They're both forms of hunger, but one is more severe and more debilitating than the other.
00:04:47.000 So it's just a matter of degree, and the same is true of sadness and depression.
00:04:51.000 Depression is sadness to a much greater degree.
00:04:54.000 I am dead inside.
00:04:55.000 Now, it seems like there's no reason why this point should make people so angry that they call for me to be deplatformed and fired for my job, but that's what happened.
00:05:05.000 The reason that it gets this reaction is because most people are programmed to lash out at anyone who says anything that appears to fall outside of the orthodoxies and teachings of the psychiatric industry.
00:05:16.000 What?
00:05:17.000 Don't ask questions.
00:05:18.000 So, for example, one of the many clinical mental diseases that psychiatrists have come up with is something called oppositional defiant disorder, which is a disorder characterized by a child acting oppositional and defiant.
00:05:31.000 Now, it's definitely true that some children, many children even, all children to some extent, do behave in oppositional and defiant ways.
00:05:39.000 That is very real.
00:05:40.000 But it's not a disease. 0.99
00:05:41.000 Kevin, you're such a disease. 0.97
00:05:43.000 Sure. 0.98
00:05:44.000 But this is what these people have done.
00:05:46.000 Every difficult human emotion or experience has been arbitrarily and entirely subjectively recategorized as a clinical problem.
00:05:53.000 And if you think I'm making that up, you can go, you can find the DSM, you can find it online, you can go through it.
00:05:58.000 And I guarantee you, literally every negative emotion has multiple diseases for it.
00:06:04.000 And this is what has happened with depression, in my view.
00:06:07.000 Depression is real.
00:06:08.000 It is serious.
00:06:10.000 I do not believe that it is a disease, however.
00:06:13.000 Depression is despair, which itself is, again, essentially a much more persistent, deeper, more encompassing sadness.
00:06:19.000 I prefer the word despair.
00:06:21.000 So despair, I submit, is not a disease.
00:06:24.000 Because it is a completely natural, even fundamental aspect of the human experience.
00:06:29.000 It's called being human.
00:06:30.000 As we disease-ify and medicalize all of these difficult human emotions, what we find is that year over year, the problems get worse.
00:06:37.000 Suicide becomes more common.
00:06:39.000 People become less able to cope with the challenges of life.
00:06:43.000 The strategy isn't working.
00:06:45.000 And it isn't working because it's based on a lie.
00:06:47.000 And it's a lie that makes people feel powerless.
00:06:50.000 That it, in fact, trains people to take comfort and seek respite in their powerlessness.
00:06:56.000 So I am suggesting that it may be time to stop.
00:06:59.000 Analyze some of these basic presuppositions.
00:07:01.000 Realize that this is a field that has been extremely, disastrously wrong about a lot of things.
00:07:08.000 That's all I'm trying to say.
00:07:09.000 And I will keep saying it, no matter how angry people are about it.
00:07:12.000 And it's why that industry is today, once again, finally, canceled.
00:07:18.000 And we worked all day at the best job after.
00:07:22.000 We knew every drug.
00:07:24.000 And we all remember the proper dose of the mess and how you feel better.
00:07:30.000 Cause we studied pharmacy at the best school of earth.