Beware psychotherapy most when it works

"Jaundiced perceptions aside, [psycho]therapy’s role in modern life is no joke.... Nearly a quarter of America has been in therapy in the past 12 months ...
    "[P]sychology’s efficacy is a matter of some importance. Yet this is where we encounter an irony—it may be that psychotherapy is most dangerous when it works....
    "The most eyebrow-raising trend in modern counseling might be termed ideological therapy, wherein social justice bleeds into psychology (as it seems to bleed into everything these days). Members of this counselling camp vow to help members of this or that identity group cope with racism, sexism, or other grievance-based identitarian concerns. This, of course, presupposes that society is patriarchal, racist, and/or otherwise riven, and that the need for change resides structurally in society and not in the mind of the patient.
    "In this instance, therapy not only lacks a social conscience, but actively sells the message that society is the oppressive root of all evil....
    "The minute therapists 'put their own ideological biases ahead of the client, they become activists, not therapists,' [academic psychologist Matt Grawitch] tells me. In the process, they do their patient a disservice. Are you better off acquiring the coping skills to deal with the giant rabbit that visits your room at night ... or being led on a process of discovery that reveals it to be an illusion? ....
    "To believe that psychotherapy is working as advertised would require us to believe that the nation’s unprecedented mental-health challenges would be much worse were it not for therapy. That seems a stretch."

~ Steve Salerno, from his post 'Beware Psychotherapy That Works'