The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1810 - This Insane New Therapy Trend Is DESTROYING Families

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

The WSJ just released a report on therapy that exposed a massive, unspoken problem. We will discuss in detail today. Ep. 1810 - - - Today's Sponsors: Leaf Filter - Help protect your home today with LeafFilter. America’s #1 Gutter Protection System.  Schedule your free inspection today at https://leaffilter.com/WALSH for a quote that’s good for one full year. And right now, you can get up to 35% off PreBorn! - For $28, you can provide an ultrasound and help parents see their child, hear the heartbeat, and choose life. Dial #250 and say "BABY" or visit https://Preborn.com/WALSH Grand Canyon University - Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Visit https://GCU.edu to learn more. - - - Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://dwplus.watch/MattWalshMemberExclusive - - - DailyWire+ 🎆 🇺🇸 Our America 250 SALE is still available! Get 3-Months of DailyWire+ for just $17.76 📜 Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In today's uncertain economy, American financing is helping families find a way out of the high interest trap. We're heading into summer, but the economic clouds aren't clearing for most middle-class families between persistent inflation and the cost of daily life. You're likely feeling the pressure. You've worked hard for your home, probably have more equity than you realize, yet the summer surge is forcing many to rely on credit cards. It's an exhausting cycle, but American financing understands that 2026 requires a real strategy. That's why they have salary-based, mortgage consultants with mortgage rates in the fives. Their customers are saving an average of $800 a month by wiping out high interest debt. That's money that stays in your pocket to fight

back against rising costs, no upfront fees, no pressure. And if you start today, you could delay two mortgage payments. Call American Finance today 866-5694711. That's 866-5694711, or visit Americanfinancing.net slash walsh. We learned late last night that Shiloh Hendricks was convicted of one count of disorderly conduct for the crime of being robbed by a Somali child and then saying unkind things to a Somali man who berated her. She received a jail sentence of 90 days, which was stayed, along with a $1,000 fine and in order to perform 200 hours of community service, all because she used words that offended a Somali invader in her state, which is apparently now a crime. Now, she didn't hit the man, she didn't assault

him, she didn't threaten him. She verbalized her frustration with the fact that Somali Mollies have taken over Minnesota, which they have, to the point that they're terrorizing her and her child in public parks. She defended her child from a hostile foreigner who was clearly antagonizing her. Yes, she used a naughty word, God forbid, but this is not North Korea or Canada. We're allowed to say naughty words, or at least we used to be in this country, because we understand that words are not tantamount to violence. No harm of any kind will befall anyone because they heard someone say a word, especially a word that the very community claiming to be offended by it uses themselves with significant frequency. So for now, unless this verdict is immediately overturned,

we could say definitively that the First Amendment in every relevant respect has been suspended in the state of Minnesota. If this is not a First Amendment violation, then nothing is. Really, that is that simple. This is a case that raises many issues that we will be delving into next week. I wanted to mention it at the top because it's an important story. In many ways, a landmark free speech case that just broke late last night. In fact, I believe the verdict came in at like 10 o'clock last night, which is weird, too. When's the last time you heard of a verdict coming in in a case at 10 o'clock at night? So we'll have to look at that as well.

But also in a somewhat circuitous way, you could also see a connection to the topic we had planned for the show today, in which we're still going to talk about. as it indirectly highlights a broader issue, which is that the leftist mission of destroying American families, of punishing parents who defend their children, has not gone anywhere since the BLM mania of 2020. If you remember in 2020, we heard again and again that the nuclear family is a racist vestige of white supremacy and that students should effectively be raised by the school system rather than their parents. Now, this is nothing new for communists, as we discuss in our most recent episode of real history, but it would be naive to think that the left has abandoned the same objective in this country. They haven't. They're not backing down at all. In all aspects of

civil society, their goal is to drive a wedge between parents and their children. And today we're going to focus on one front in this war, which we've talked about many times in the past for good reason. It is the field of psychiatry, a discipline that demands to be taken seriously, even though it has achieved precisely nothing. I mean, think of it this way. Over the the past 100 years, cardiologists have invented open heart surgery. Infectious disease doctors have started prescribing penicillin. Dentists have developed all kinds of new and effective ways to advance dental health and hygiene. Neurologists have come up with new treatments for Alzheimer's. Dermatologists have made many advances in tackling acne and other skin conditions.

Eye doctors learned how to perform surgery on the cornea. Mostly by accident, it's actually a remarkable story. As a side note, in the 70s, a kid in Russia got into a fistfight in which he was punched in the face and pieces of his glasses ended up in his eye. And after removing the glass, the Soviet eye doctor realized that the child's vision had actually improved. So the doctor got the idea of cutting the cornea to improve people's vision. And a few decades later, LASIC was born. So in short, some of the major, most of the major medical specialties have done something new and noteworthy within the past century. There are marked improvements in their areas of health, which can be directly tied to these advances.

A lot of these, many medical specialties have also done horrible things over the last 100 years, but there have been advances. So if you ask the typical doctor, what has your particular branch of medicine accomplished since the early 1900s, you'd get a laundry list of accomplishments that have impacted millions of lives. But there is at least one notable exception, and that is the field of psychiatry. Okay. Psychiatry. Okay, psychiatrists, therapists, mental health professionals are the only doctors who cannot point to a single quantifiable achievement in their entire field since its inception. There has never been a documented, verifiable moment in which psychiatrists have ever made a true measurable advancement. They haven't stumbled into any major discoveries, all of their alleged breakthroughs, particularly the discovery of ADHD, the closure of the asylum.

all the gender derangement, the rapidly increasing list of mental health, of mental illnesses that they're constantly inventing as the DSM expands and expands and expands, the mass prescription of SSRIs and hormones and speed. These have all turned out to be counterproductive, to put it mildly and dangerous, particularly for children. They told us that depression was caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain, only to admit decades later that they had no idea what they were talking about. But by the way, they still prescribe SSRIs. which have no effect, which have an effect but aren't going to solve the problem, their primary achievement is not finding new ways to cure or treat diseases,

but inventing new diseases that cannot be cured or treated at all. And most importantly, as we will discuss, by every measure, okay, their area of health, mental health, has declined rapidly and catastrophically as the field has become more powerful, more pervasive and better funded. So as the mental health industry has expanded, mental health in our society has plummeted. And yet the industry is never held accountable for this. These dots are rarely connected. We never stop and say to these people, hey, what exactly have you people done for us?

What have you done? Certainly the drugs have been a total bust, and therefore the only tool that's left in their arsenal, the only way for a mental health professional to discover a breakthrough in the field, aside from coming up with a new drug for a new fake mental health condition, which they do all the time, is to experiment with new methods of talk therapy. And that's really all they can attempt to do, just talk to people in different ways and say different things

in the hopes that they'll somehow fix their patient's problems. Now, in other areas of medicine, finding a major breakthrough means conducting lab experiments and high-stakes procedures. In the field of psychiatry, finding a major breakthrough means having a different kind of conversation with your patient and sort of hoping for the best. And unlike the legitimate fields of medicine, the breakthrough is not measured in any kind of objective, verifiable way. There's no subjectivity to the question

of whether or not your heart medication is working. It's either working or it isn't. But the success of psychiatric treatments is entirely measured by, first of all, the subjective judgment of the patient who is in the treatment in the first place because they're troubled and mentally unwell and therefore perhaps unreliable narrators about their own mental health, and by the psychiatrists or therapists who are, of course, very incentivized to count their own methods as successful. Now, if you read the Wall Street Journal recently, if you have read it recently, you might be aware of the latest conversation that therapists are pushing increasingly. Therapists are telling their patients to cut off contact with their own family members as a way of,

quote, protecting their health and, quote, allowing for emotional growth. And the numbers here, as the Wall Street Journal tabulates, are pretty staggering. Quote, about 25% of the U.S. population is estranged from or has cut ties with a close relative at any given time. And 10% is estranged from a parent or child, according to research by Carl Pillimer, a family sociologist professor of human development at Cornell. Among some 7,000 estranged parents surveyed in April, a third believed their adult child's therapist, had influenced or recommended the decision to end the relationship. So yes, one third of estranged parents believe that a therapist convinced their adult child to cut them off. And a quarter of the population is now estranged from somebody in their family.

Now, this is what they call going no contact, which is a phrase you've probably heard. It's becoming increasingly popular. I never even heard that phrase until a few years ago. And now it's everywhere. You know, you'll go on TikTok or, you know, you'll find Instagram. find Gen Z and millennials constantly talking about, well, I decided to go no contact. Have you gone no contact yet? It's like a coming of age ritual for Gen Z and millennials. The day when they decide to go no contact, which is cut off their own family, isolate themselves even more.

And a huge number of them, as the Wall Street Journal has found, have decided to go no contact from their parents. And, you know, we have the mental health industry. largely to thank for that. Now, obviously, there are certain situations before people jump down my throat, there are certain situations that would justify cutting off a family member. No one is claiming that it's always wrong to cut off family. If your parents are actually abusive monsters, I mean actually, who are destroying your life in some tangible way, then cutting them off is totally justified. I'm not going to say that people have an obligation to endure relentless abuse just because they're related to the abuser or they have an obligation to maintain a relationship with a parent

who abused them as a child. But that's not what we're talking about here. You know, we're not talking just about parents who were legitimately, genuinely abusive and were rightly cut off. What's happening in these cases very often is quite different. Therapists have their clients icing out family members, cutting them off completely, essentially disowning them for reasons that often have nothing to do with actual abuse. Now, in many cases, therapists are simply affirming whatever their client tells them without questioning whether that person is telling the truth. In other words, instead of functioning as an independent advisor, therapists are acting like yes men, which is what they usually do. This is one of the fundamental problems in the entire industry. It's the affirmative model of therapy, which has been a catastrophic disaster across the board, where they will just basically agree with whatever. The person, they will affirm their feelings. If the person sits down and says, I feel this way, this is how I feel about my parents.

Well, then for a lot of therapists, God forbid, they're not going to tell, they're not going to suggest that, well, you know, maybe your feelings are wrong. Maybe you're wrong. You ever think about that? You know, you have this feeling about your family member. Maybe you're, maybe you're the jerk here. Have you ever considered that? It might be you.

That should be like the first thing a therapist says. First thing should be, okay, let's look at this and find out if maybe you're the problem. And very often, that just doesn't happen. So if a client is delusional or self-centered and wants to cut off his family for a dumb reason, the therapist isn't going to stand in the way. Quote, going back to the article, a lot of therapists are taught to believe whatever the client is saying at face value. Says Peter Anderson, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Beverly, Massachusetts, who helps families with estrangements and conducted the surveys. They're forming conclusions based on one person's account.

People are coming into a therapist's office and parroting what they hear on social media. Anderson says they're looking for affirmation for a decision they've already made. Now, there are also, which by the way, that's another problem. That's a problem that even real doctors across every medical field deal with now. That's part of the consequence of allowing direct consumer advertisement with pharmaceuticals. and now AI and Google diagnosing people, WebMD, people go into the doctor already having decided what their problem is and they're just looking for a doctor to affirm it and give them a drug. And again, a real doctor, a good doctor is not going to do that.

But in the therapy field, most of them, that's exactly what they'll do. Now, there are also many cases in which therapists take a more direct role and try to plant memories of abuse or trauma, quote unquote, in their client's head. And if that sounds implausible, you should know that there's a long history of therapists and psychiatrists doing exactly that, convincing people they were abused when in fact

they were not. You could go all the way back to, you might remember, or maybe not, the repressed memory scam of the 80s and 90s when it became fashionable for people to concoct narratives long after the fact, often with the help of their therapist,

this became a epidemic. where people were going to therapists for some problem, and then in therapy discovering, oh, yeah, actually I was abused. I never remembered that until this very moment. Lots of lives were destroyed because of that for these memories. It ended up being false memories. It didn't really happen. You just convinced yourself of it or did a therapist help to convince you of it?

There are notable cases of this famous case. It's probably the most famous case involved a woman named Eileen Franklin Lipsker, who became something of a celebrity in 1989. Eileen alleged that she had suddenly recovered a repressed memory of seeing her father, 51-year-old retired firefighter George Franklin, sexually assault and murder, an eight-year-old named Susan, who lived next door. And the alleged memory was more than 20 years old by that point. The killing had happened in 1969. But the media took Eileen's claim seriously, and so did the prosecutors.

Watch. In California, Eileen Franklin says, just one look from her six-year-old old daughter jarred a memory so terrible she repressed it for 20 years. All right, listen to this one. Meet Eileen Franklin. Eileen Franklin was the center of a very important landmark case. The murder she witnessed happened 20 years ago, and the murderer was her father. Reporters literally fell over each other. The story Eileen Franklin told in court in 1990 happened when she was a child.

The way I remember it is that I was eight years old and I was in my father's Volkswagen van with him. And we drove around the corner from my house and I saw Susan playing outside. And I got really excited and I asked my dad if Susan could get in the van with us. And so we stopped and Susan got in. And in the back of the van there was a bed. And Susan and I were bouncing up and down on the bed and my dad drove us out to an area that's wooded, and he pulled over to the side of the road, and Susan and I were playing on the bed, and he came back into the back, and I went up into the front, and when I looked back,

he had Susan's arms pinned above her head, and he was on top of her. horrible details you hear there that were entirely made up. One of the details that Eileen provided as part of her newfound recollection of events was that a ring had been smashed at the crime scene. The authorities took that claim as proof that Eileen's memory was accurate since a ring had indeed been recovered in the investigation. Defense lawyers attempted to point out that several media organizations had reported on the ring back in 1969, meaning it's possible that Eileen was simply remembering news coverage that she had seen. well, the judge didn't let the defense lawyers make that argument in front of the jury.

Not that it would have mattered. By all accounts, the jury had fully bought into the idea of repressed memories. As the LA Times reported, quote, Frank O'Lipsker's story shifted and changed. In one account, her sister Janice had been in the van and another she wasn't. The murder was in the morning, then in the late afternoon, but the contradictions did not cause jurors to disbelieve her, said Harry McLean, who wrote about the case in the book, Once Upon a Time, a true story of memory, murder, and the law. The problem was the jury sat there and took that as evidence of how Dan she was from having George Franklin as a father, McLean said. It was making her more sympathetic. Now, the prosecution was also assisted by quack experts who went on national TV to push this

narrative of repressed memories. Watch. Why did she wait 20 years to report it? She had repressed it. So why is it that some people can remember beginning at age when you do remember things, you know, seven, eight, and nine? And other people absolutely do not. psychiatry we call these things dissociation which is to separate yourself from what's going on to feel unreal dr lenoir terror a psychiatrist and expert witness for the prosecution explained on television what she presented to the jury a theory of repressed memory that would be further popularized in a television movie about the case you know what that would cost this whole case depends on proving repressed memory according to dr tear dramatic repression is substantiated by repeated violence in childhood

But in order to fit Dr. Ter's theory that repressed memories involved repeated violence in childhood, Eileen had to come up with other violent experiences that she had repressed. And then my father helped me down on this table. She recalled repressed memories of sexual abuse by her father. At least she said so. Traumatic repression. So this was, you know, one of the reasons why we're kind of harping on this a little bit is because this is the, this is the pattern for the psychiatric industry that I've been doing this for decades.

They just make things up. Just, you know, you have some weird guy who's sitting around and, you know what, that sounds right. I bet there's traumatic repression. I bet your mind is like a box and you store in it like things that are really bad that happened to you that you can't remember. And then you got to go to a therapist and they'll give you the secret key to unlock the box. That sounds right. It's never based on any data, anything, just this guy thought of this. And then it takes over the entire psychiatric industry and lives are destroyed.

And we've seen this same pattern is played out with the gender stuff, with depression, SSRIs, ADHD. It's just them inventing things with no data and then lives are ruined. And then eventually they say, yeah, maybe we were wrong about that and they just kind of move on. There's no accountability. Now, in the end, despite the total lack of physical evidence tying him to the murder, George Franklin was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The judge said he regretted that he couldn't hand down a death sentence in the case. And after he served more than six years in prison, Franklin was released. A federal judge overturned his conviction saying the trial court

had made several errors. And shortly afterwards, Eileen's sister admitted that Eileen's repressed memory had been unearthed via hypnosis. It wasn't really a memory at all. It was suggested to her. that Eileen torpedoed her credibility further when she announced that she had yet another repressed memory of her father committing a separate murder. But that claim didn't go anywhere because DNA evidence proved her father was nowhere near the murder scene at the time. Now, the saga of this particular fake repressed memory led a memory scientist named Elizabeth Loftus to conduct an experiment, which was published in 1995 in the journal Psychiatric Anals. In this experiment, researchers assembled a pool of test subjects and then interviewed their family members to learn about three real events from

their childhoods. Then the researchers told the test subjects about four events from their childhood, three real and one that was made up. In every case, the made up event was the same. The subjects were told that they had been lost in the mall when they were young and were rescued by an elderly woman. Now, in the experiment, 25% of participants said they developed partial or complete memories of the fake event that never happened. In later experiments, test subjects became convinced of other events in their childhood that never took place from dog attacks to near drownings. 25%. That's an incredible number. It just shows you how kind of naturally malleable and gullible people are, especially when they're going into therapy. These are extreme examples, but there's

no reason to believe that the psychiatric industry has changed to any significant degree. These are people who will happily tell children they're born in the wrong body, sign them up for a lifetime of hormones and chemical castration, if not outright mutilation. To this day, all over the internet, you'll find videos from alleged experts about how repressed memories are supposedly real, even though it's been debunked for decades. For example, here's licensed therapist Elizabeth Capoletti on this point. Watch. Repressed memories are a real thing. And basically what that is, is we've had things happen in our life, usually pretty traumatic, that our brain just, do, do, do, do, it buries. It's like it never happened. And if you look at that,

you can realize like the benefit of that, so I don't have to keep thinking about this thing all the time, but it doesn't mean it's not affecting us. And the crazy part is, is we can have these memories lying dormant, like totally out of our awareness for years, decades. And sometimes they stay buried and sometimes they don't. Sometimes what will happen is something will trigger us, and all of a sudden some of these memories start popping up. This can obviously be very disturbing, very distressing, very difficult. And I just want to say to you that you are not alone if that's something that's happening for you. Sometimes if we have kids, when our kids had a certain age, maybe about the age where we experience that, that can be part of what triggers it.

I mean, there could be umpteen reasons of why that might be. Okay, so this is a current licensed marriage and family therapist. With junk science, this is a woman who gets paid. People pay her a lot of money. I don't know how much to solve their problems and their marriage problems. and what she's saying is junk science, it's debunked, it's not true. Nothing she said is true. It's actually not, this is, it's not real, okay?

Now, you can certainly be reminded of things that you haven't thought of in a while after encountering some kind of relevant cue that happens all the time. That's just called remembering something, okay, that can happen. But the idea that you can have a deeply repressed memory of a highly traumatic event for decades that you don't remember at all, like it never happened, and then one day it's triggered and comes rushing back or your therapist figures out the secret key to unlock the hidden memory and the hidden memory compartment in your brain is complete nonsense. I mean, if you suddenly remember something awful that happened to you 30 years ago,

it's much more likely that the thing didn't happen and you're imagining it. If you never remembered this thing for 30 years, let's say, and now one day you're 37, you're like, oh, yeah, oh, that much, the much more likely scenario is that you're imagining. that you got that from a combination of suggestion, a movie you saw, a dream you had, whatever. Now, if anything, based on all the people who say they have PTSD, the problem with traumatic memories, normally, is that they don't go away. It's not that they're buried for 20 years in some kind of secret compartment in your consciousness that no one can identify. They stick with you. And that becomes the whole problem, is that you think about them too much, not that you're not thinking about them at all.

And the point is this woman is not an outlier. She's very representative of the therapy industry in that her job is to mislead her clients with fake science and voodoo. If you go into her office and conjure up a repressed memory of your father doing something horrible 30 years ago, she's not going to tell you that you're making it up or that it seems dubious. She apparently won't even say, you know, okay, it's possible you're just imagining this if you just remembered it now 30 years later. But that's a possibility at least. Let's look at all the possible. She won't even do that.

Oh, well, popped into your head now, it must have happened. It must be true. It must be real. She'll affirm it, and she'll encourage you to cut your father out of your life. That's how this works. One of the reasons why this no contact thing is becoming so popular. Even though the repressed memory idea has been thoroughly discredited and debunk for years now, still, this again is a theme in the psychiatric industry.

The industry invents myths like repress memories, chemical imbalances like gender identity, and even after those myths are exposed and debunked and proven not only false but disastrously harmful, still the industry will keep peddling them. And millions of hapless people will keep paying thousands of dollars to the purveyors of these discredited, harmful myths. Every homeowner has that one project they've been meaning to deal with. Sometimes it's not even a difficult one. It's just not at the top of your list. But inevitably, one day it decides it's not going to be ignored anymore. usually at the most inconvenient possible time.

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informing children that if they don't want to be associated with their parents, then it's automatically their parents' fault. You don't need to do any kind of analysis or engage in any amount of introspection or even communication. If a child cuts off his parents, then by definition the child is justified. This is the more common scenario. You know, it's more often, rather than someone going to a therapist and inventing some memory of being abused from 30 years ago, what more often happens is like they just have a litany of complaints about their parents, most of them quite petty, and all of them for many years ago. And they just feel like, okay, I don't want to talk to them anymore. And the therapist will, from the therapist's perspective,

if you feel that way, if you feel like you want to just cut your parents out of your life entirely, then it must be. The very fact that you feel it means that it must be true. That's really what they think. That's what they teach. For example, watch. If your kids no longer want to speak to you when they become adults, that's 100% your fault as the parent.

What most parents don't seem to understand is that the parent-child relationship is not the same as the adult-to-adult relationship. So if you raised your kids and you think, well, I put a roof over your head, I paid for you to have food, and I provided for you, that's the bare minimum. And if that wasn't enough for them to want to continue a relationship with you as an adult, chances are there were some significant problems within the household. How you treated that kid, what your expectations were of that kid, or what they are of them as an adult, are probably completely misaligned. So you either didn't treat the person well. You were either trying to take advantage of the person through making them parentify by watching a bunch of other children, forcing them to work, turn over part or all of their paycheck. You tried to force your political and religious opinions on them. Whatever it happens to be, there is a break in there somewhere that you have responsibility for.

And if you think to yourself, oh, I have no responsibility for this, I guarantee you're the problem. if you're a little bit more on the side of common sense and you go, you know, there was probably some things that I really didn't do right that I may need you apologize for and tell him, hey, it's the best I could with this, but that's enough of this guy, bloviating. Oh, yeah, yeah, if you force your kid to do some work. Oh, no. Oh, no, you force them to like contribute. Well, you're a bad parent. Yeah, if your adult child at the age of 32 wants to cut you off because when you were 16 you made him get a job. It must be your fault. No, it's not that that 32-year-old is like a spoiled little punk that needs to get over it. It can't be that. It can't be that the 32-year-old

is an egotistical, arrogant, ridiculous, petulant brat that needs to grow up. That can't be it. That can't be it. It's got to be, no, no, no, because he's in therapy. So whatever he's, everything he feels is good. Everything he feels is valid. And God forbid you force your religious opinions on your child, otherwise known as raising them in the faith, in your faith, which is what, I don't know, every generation of humans have done since the beginning of human civilization. But by this guy's telling, and according to many other people, especially therapists, if you were raised in a way that is totally consistent with how billions of other people have been raised, then you're a victim. You are now morally justified in disowning your family. You have suffered undue trust. You experienced something the same thing that, you know, that 8 billion other people have experienced.

But for you, but no, no, you're a victim. You're a victim. Because you feel that way. This, again, is a very common idea. It's one of the main reasons why so many people have cut off their family members at the urging of mental health professionals. But, you know, a few things are lost in this way of thinking beyond just basic logic. and common sense. And first of all, if you are an adult, again, putting aside cases of actual real abuse, putting aside those cases, if you are an adult, and this is what your therapist

should be saying to you, but they won't, because most of them are terrible, it's time for you to grow the hell up and get over whatever complaints you have about the way you were raised. Okay, maybe your dad didn't attend your dance recital. Maybe your mom had a little bit of a temper. Maybe she yelled sometimes. Maybe your parents made a whole laundry list of mistakes. Maybe horror of horrors they forced you to go to church with them or get a job. Maybe they even made you do chores around the house. Maybe they didn't take you to Disney World. Okay? Maybe you drew him a picture and they didn't seem excited enough about it or something. Whatever your complaints are, you are an adult now. Okay. It's time to move on.

it's time to get over it. The fact that there are people in their 30s and 40s, grownups with kids of their own, still obsessing over minor offenses committed by their parents when they were 11 is pathetic and insane. Okay, yes, your parents made mistakes. They did. You don't need a therapist to tell you that. Your parents were human. You know what? Your parents were doing, they were doing what you're doing. They're stumbling along, fumbling around, trying to figure things out as they go, just like you are. Age and perspective should make you more understanding, more forgiving of your parents' faults, not less. If you are wise, if there's any wisdom in you, then as you get older, you look back at your parents, again, unless they were actually really abusive, you look back on your parents with more forgiveness because you realize that, oh, yeah, like, I'm kind of. of figuring this stuff out as I go along. I'm not perfect. I'm making mistakes. You know,

all those kinds of things. I can be selfish sometimes. I can have a temper sometimes. So, yeah, apparently it was the same for my parents. Oh, apparently, I'm a human and so were they. This is what your therapist should do when you sit down in their office. The second that you go, and then when I was seven, they should just cut you off right there and say, oh, why are you, how old are you? How old are you, 43? Why are you telling me what happened when you were seven? Was it like some horrible, actually horrible thing? Like a crime was committed against you? No, okay, then shut up.

Like, don't even start. I don't want to hear about it. And the second point is that your family is your family. Okay, you have an obligation to them. Any mental health professional who encourages you to go no contact from your parents is encouraging you to shirk one of your most fundamental responsibilities as a human. That's why cutting off your parents should be an extreme measure and a last resort, but that's not what's happening.

And if you think I'm cherry picking here, if you're under the impression that most therapists are actually useful, then you have to zoom out just like a little bit. And this chart shows the number of adults, as I referenced earlier, in the United States who receive mental health treatment of some kind, whether it's therapy or medications or both. And as you can see, as of 2024, the number is around 60 million people, roughly one in five adults. It's a huge number. In 2002, the number was just 27 million. It's been going up and up and up and up every single year.

just about. And you can see there was a massive spike during the COVID lockdowns for obvious reasons, and it's been increasing ever since then. Now, if we look at talk therapy alone, the numbers are still hard to believe. From 2018 to 2021, the number of American adults receiving outpatient talk therapy alone grew from 6.5% to 8.5% according to a study from Columbia University, that's a jump from 16 million people to nearly 22 million people. And more recent data from 2024 shows that at least 14% of Americans had received counseling or therapy in the past year. And when you look closely at the demographics, as you'd expect, the vast majority of those patients are young people. Something like 42% of Gen Z is currently in therapy.

That's staggering, which marks a 22% increase in just the past four years. So talk therapy is becoming significantly more common. And people who start talk therapy are more likely to continue in it for a long time. maybe forever, and they're also younger than ever when they start this. These, again, are staggering numbers. And they mean that virtually every American is either in therapy or knows someone who is. And yet, despite all of this therapy, there is no evidence that mental health is improving in this country at all. In fact, it's getting worse by every available metric.

Okay, the CDC found that the prevalence of depression rose by roughly 60% from 8% in 2013 to 13%. in 2022 among Americans age 12 and older. And Gallup surveys found that 29% of Americans report that they've been diagnosed with depression at some point in their life. There's a significant increase from 2015 when only 20% of adults have made that claim. Nearly 48 million Americans, 18% of the adult population, claim that they're being treated for depression. And depression among young adults aged 18 and 29 more than doubled from 13% in 2017 to 27% to 27% as of last year. As a therapist, Jonathan Alpert writes, quote, today 30% of people between 18 and 29 and 24% of those age 30 to 39

are affected by anxiety or depression statistics that are nothing short of alarming. So the problem is pretty clear. We have more therapy than ever, but people are more depressed and anxious than ever. And if therapy worked, you know, you would think that the lines would be moving in opposite directions. if therapy generally helps people to become less depressed and anxious, then as therapy becomes more mainstream in commonplace and goes this way, you would think that depression and anxiety would go that

way. That's the kind of inverse relationship we should see if the thing works. But instead, the depression and anxiety line is shooting up skyrocketing at the same pace as the therapy line. Something is seriously wrong here. An obvious question then is raised. Are these two facts related, and if so, how exactly are they related? Are people seeking out therapy because they're more depressed and anxious? Or is the psychiatric industry, which is very well funded, if you haven't noticed, convincing people that they're suffering from some kind of mental distress or causing them to suffer from a mental distress as a way of securing lifelong patients who can be medicated and billed for life? A therapist I just mentioned, Jonathan Alpert, became something

of a pariah in the industry for sharing his thoughts on this question. He was essentially banished from the industry for writing a New York Times op-ed in 2012, which admitted that people are spending too much time in therapy, and it's not helping them. And he pointed out that therapists have a perverse incentive in this relationship. He wrote, quote, research shows that in many cases, the longer therapy lasts, the less likely it is to be effective. Still, therapists are often reluctant to admit defeat. According to research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, therapists who practice more traditional psychotherapy, treat patients for an average of 22 sessions before concluding that progress isn't being made. Just 12% of those therapists choose to

refer their stagnant patients to another practitioner. The bottom line, even though extended therapy is not always beneficial, many therapists persist in leading patients on an open-ended, potentially endless therapeutic course. Now, think of what this means about the industry as a whole. Only 12% of therapists having realized the therapy is not working would tell their patients to go somewhere else. 12%. They could see a patient 22 times with no progress, and after all that,

they still will not admit that it's not working because in doing so, they sacrifice a regular payout. That's why psychiatry is the least regarded, least competitive medical specialty. It's a very cynical business and a cyclical business. Its patients get trapped in a recurring cycle

and never escape. And all of that is, by design. Now, in cases like this, the therapist is more like a friend who's being paid to talk to you. And he has no reason to end the relationship because as long as you keep showing up, he's making money. In other words, the relationship between a patient and a therapist is a lot like the relationship between you and the local termite guy. You might not have a termite problem at all, but if you ask the termite guy, he's going to tell you that you should sign up for his termite protection plan just in case. And then it'll stop by your house at some regular interval

collecting a paycheck every time. Same idea applies when it comes to antivirus solve. on your computer. Your anti-virus company has a clear incentive to make you terrified of computer viruses. They never tell you that actually their software is often unnecessary. They want you afraid. And to that end, they'll bombard you with pop-ups and emails and cybersecurity threats that don't actually amount to anything. They'll do whatever it takes to keep you from unsubscribing. And you can find analogies like this across the board and like every car mechanic. Okay. If you go to stop by some random car mechanic and ask them to take a look at your engine, it's very unlikely that they're not going to find some kind of problem. They're going to find some kind of problem because if they don't find any

problem, then they're not going to get paid. So, you know, these are the incentives. And when the incentives are applied to things like your car engine, your house because of termites or your computer, then, you know, the dangers are relatively minimal. And you just know that you kind of have to navigate that. But when we're talking about your mind, okay, when we're talking about you as a person and somebody being incentivized to convince you that you have problems in your mind or to make sure that if you do have problems, they're never solved, well, that becomes a much bigger problem. And part of the problem here is that therapists themselves are often, not always, but often, incompetent, dysfunctional, mentally unwell women with degrees in social work and other fields that don't give them any relevant expertise at all.

And the gender dynamics are very important. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, roughly 75 to 80% of therapists are women. Now, even if you just look at psychiatrists who have MDs, you're still over 55% female. Women regularly comprise more than 80% of the graduates and counseling and clinical psychology programs. And these women, generally speaking, are very often not remotely impressive or qualified to give anyone advice about anything. And if you're a man seeking therapy, which is likely a huge mistake on your part, well, your options are going to be almost all women. And there's something quite absurd about that. Like, how can a grown adult man with his grown adult man problems and anxieties sit in a room with a 29-year-old female with a social work degree and expect to get any advice that's useful or relevant to his life? what could that woman possibly have to say to you? What wisdom could she possibly have that you don't

already know? What could she tell you about your life or your mind that you don't already know? I mean, think about it. I mean, if this is an older, like, if you're a guy in your 30s and you're sitting down with some like old, you know, some 72 year old man with a lot of wisdom and, and a lot of life experience and, you know, a guy's been married for 40 years and he has four kids and they're grown and he has grandkids. It's like, whatever. Then in that case, that might be a guy that has some relevant advice to you. But the thing about that is that doesn't need to be a therapist. Like, that's what grandfathers are for.

That's what the elders in the village used to be for. Okay, it is possible to sit down and get wisdom from someone. It's not, it is possible that there could be someone in there out there who you could benefit from talking to. But very often, those people are not going to be licensed therapists. Now, to give just one example of what the sorts of people who are pined, populating this industry. Here's a, here's one. This is a morbidly obese, tattooed, pink-haired therapist with a nose ring who posted a video attacking me for a previous monologue I did on therapy. And she posted a couple of years ago, I just came across it the other day, and I want you to

listen to her argument. But also, just look at this remarkable specimen and take it all in. Here it is. I think the other thing about this is really important for us to acknowledge is something we've talked about on the channel before also, which is that there is a lot of hubbub about, like, for example, ADHD diagnoses. This happened in the early 2000s. It's happening now with autism as well, where people are like, oh, blah, blah, blah. People are being diagnosed more often than they were. So clearly, we're making it up. I'm like, no, no, that's literally not the case. What's happening is that we as a culture have gained a collective language and awareness for something that has been happening for like the entirety of time. We just didn't know

how to describe that. We didn't understand what the warning signs were. We had no idea what the symptoms looked like. And we especially did not have an understanding of how those symptoms presented themselves in marginalized populations because those populations historically have been silenced. And so now what we're seeing, especially like in regards to autism, for example, is that we as a psychological community have developed a greater awareness and a better understanding for like symptomatology as it relates to femme presenting people, right? Like femme, afab, people who are like, you know, receiving misogyny. we understand now more what autism looks like and how it presents in that population. So diagnosis numbers have gone up.

It's not that we as mental health professionals are cooking the books and we're just like have a specific desire for there to be lots of femme autistic people. It's just that we imagine that over the course of our profession have learned more. We learn things over time. So that's meant that we're better at doing our jobs. I know that that's a concept that's probably foreign to somebody who doesn't have a college degree to rub together between his meaty little hands. Oh, yeah, don't have a cop. Well, the fact that this woman can get a college degree tells you everything you need to know.

Like, if you didn't already realize that college degrees are meaningless because they will give them to the dumbest, most unimpressive people who have ever lived on the planet, well, there you go. Now, there's no conspiracy, she says. There's no one cooking the books. That's all crazy. She says, it's the kind of thing that idiots like Matt Walsh believe because they don't have, they don't have college degrees. They're not, they don't have college degrees. They're not, they're not sophisticated.

They're not sophisticated like me, like a morbidly obese woman with pink hair. They don't, they lack the sophistication. Now, the real reason autism diagnoses are skyrocketing, she says, is because there's a lot of femme presenting people these days who are receiving misogyny. She goes on to beat this point of the ground saying that I'm crazy. for implying that there's a deep state that's submitting fake autism claims or whatever. This is a take that suffice to say has not aged particularly well, especially after Nick Shirley's videos from Little Somalia in Minneapolis. Everyone now realizes beyond a shadow of a doubt that indeed

the therapists are cooking the books. This is reporting from the Cato Institute, for example, quote, across eight states with publicly available data, combined Medicaid spending on autism therapy grew from $347 million to over $2.2 billion in recent years. The national total is certainly much larger. Minnesota's spending alone went from $671,000 in 2018 to $342 million by 24. During those years, the number of Minnesota Medicaid autism therapy recipients rose from 400 to more than $5,700, but per recipient spending rose even more dramatically from less than $1,700 to more than 60,000 annually. The Federal Inspector General has now audited Medicaid ABA payments at Colorado, Indiana, Maine, and Wisconsin. And each state, 100% of sampled claims contained

at least one improper or potentially improper payment, confirmed improper payments totaled $198 million, or 31% of the $638 million reviewed. One Colorado recipient was reimbursed for 200 hours of therapy in a single month or more than eight hours per day, assuming a five-day work week, the vast majority of which were undocumented. And some facilities' notes were signed before the session had even concluded. Session notes were photocopied across dates with identical text and signatures, and some files contained the wrong child's name. So this is obvious, flagrant, malicious fraud. These are numerical increases that on their face cannot be explained by a surge in femme presenting people receiving misogyny, whatever that gibberish is supposed to mean.

what's happening is that autism treatment centers and daycare, daycare's higher therapists who look like this revolting person, and these therapists don't need any credentials whatsoever. The therapist then sit in a room eating pizza and billing Medicaid all day. Are they actually talking to any children at any point? Who knows? Even if there are children in the center, they're often part of the scheme because the parents are getting kickbacks from the autism treatment center for enrolling them. And to make matters worse, as we discussed before, the insurance companies are often party, to the scam as well. Insurance companies often manage Medicaid programs. On behalf of the state, that's how it works in Minnesota. The insurance companies get reimbursed by the state for any claims they pay out, plus a premium for their services. So the insurance companies have no reason to complain here. They want to keep paying out claims about any concern for fraud because they know that the state will eventually make them whole with interest. So all this to say that the obese woman was wrong. I was right. I wasn't just right about this one point. I was right about all of my points. And to prove that, here's some more of her video where she splices in some footage from

my show. Watch. Yesterday on the members block, we watched this video of a twice divorced woman explaining why none of the bad things in her life are her fault. Let's watch that again. Things I stopped with after my divorce. People who judge me based off of my choices. Oh, you would never get a divorce no matter what. Cool. Well, I've had to be well. Also stop with the narrative that something was wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with me. Things happened to me that made me the person that I was and have the struggles that I had. You can fix that, anything that you don't like, anything that is no longer serving you. Change it.

Change it. Go to therapy. Do the journaling. Practice meditation. Do the things that you need to do to be the person you want to be. Go to therapy, she says. If we can assume that she's taken her own advice, we see again how therapy has not helped this truly awful person be any less awful.

If anything, it seems to have reinforced all of her worst attitudes and beliefs. Like what? By the way, this woman, Leah Marie, is her name. She is a life coach who specializes in helping coach women through their own divorces. The About Me on her website says this. My second divorce was the ugliest wake-up call ever. That's what I knew I needed to do things differently if I was going to find the happiness I really wanted. So I did all the things. Therapy, journaling, meditation, reading books, listening to podcasts. I wanted to learn as much as I could about rebuilding my self-esteem, loving myself, taking better care of myself and knowing my worth.

What a sin. She went to therapy apparently and discovered that nothing is her fault, that everything is everyone else's fault, that she's been divorced twice. And yet it was something that happened to her each time, not something that she did. Or is it fault for? Sorry, did we watch the same video? Did I just hallucinate? This woman literally made a TikTok saying, I've been divorced twice, I decided that I wanted to work on myself, and so therefore I took personal responsibility to go to therapy, to listen to podcasts, to read self-help books, to do journaling, and to participate in all of these essentially health-promoting behaviors.

But she apparently is like, this is like the boomer entitlement thing. They just wants stuff for themselves. Like, literally no. This woman literally took responsibility for her own shortcomings and worked to improve them. Now, before we get to the substance, such as it is, of what she's saying, and not to belabor the point, but just look at this person. Listen to her. The tone of voice, the TikTok lingo.

This is a deeply unimpressive, not particularly bright, and obviously unwell human. somebody who can't get a handle on her own diet, much less anything else in her life, and yet she's a therapist. She sits in rooms with other unwell people and offers them guidance. How could a person who is clearly unhappy and dysfunctional possibly help anyone else be happy and functional? It's like hiring a scuba diving instructor who can't swim. All that will happen is that you'll both end up helplessly sinking into the depths of the sea. Or, you know, more precisely, you will sink and she'll stay up on the bottom.

boat, eating a snack, and waving to you as you descend, goodbye, never to be seen again. This is essentially how therapy works much of the time because a huge number of therapists are only in the field to begin with because they're trying to figure out how to understand and grapple with their own mental problems. That's the dirty little secret about this industry. The thing that drives a lot of these people to it is because they're interested in mental health problems because they have so many of those problems themselves. Now, the other major, problem with therapy is that it encourages people to spend even more time thinking and talking about themselves, which is the whole appeal of therapy in many cases, and that is more likely to breed

narcissism than it is to cure it. The truth is that most of your complaints, just like most of my complaints, are petty, not interesting, and not important. There's a reason why you can't find anyone in your real life who will sit down and listen to you drone on for an hour about these issues. It's not because everyone's being mean to you. It's not because nobody cares about you, boo-hoo. It's because nobody wants to be a sounding board for your navel-gazing rants about yourself. You know, therapy provides that sounding board, which is exactly the problem. There's a thrill that certain people, a lot of people, get from talking about themselves. Okay? That's why a lot of people like to go to therapy. That is why it's so popular.

because people have a desire to just sit there and they get to tell the story of themselves. They get to talk about themselves. And they can't do that, as I said, anywhere else in their life, because anywhere else in your life, if you try to just sit there for an hour and talk about yourself and your problems, that in any other context, that makes you a narcissist. That makes you, you know, an antisocial weirdo. That makes you the kind of person nobody wants to talk to. And you can do it in the context of a therapist office and suddenly it's brave.

Suddenly it's, oh, it's a healthy practice. You're a healthy person. You know, a good therapist would identify that their client is engaged in a pointless narcissistic exercise of self-obsessive monologing and cut them off and tell them to get over themselves and inform them that therapy is actually the last thing they need right now. A good therapist would identify when someone's only there because they want to talk about themselves and say to them, you don't need to come back here. I don't want your money. This is not what this is about. How many therapists would actually say that?

Very few therapists would ever say that. In my life, I've heard stories of a few therapists who maybe would tell a client to shut up and get over themselves and go get a hobby or go for a walk instead of sitting in their office whining about petty bullcrap. I'm willing to concede that those therapists would be the good ones. But they are increasingly few and far between, and they're wildly out of step in a good way, with the mainstream of their profession.

Now, in that video, the therapist who is in step with the mainstream of her profession, unfortunately, praises this woman for saying that, you know, nothing is her fault and that all of her frustrations, the results of things of things of the results of things that are having an external locus of control. And it's one of the worst attitudes you could possibly have. It's one of the most debilitating attitudes you can have. The fact that she's going out and doing all these things, like listening to podcasts, going to therapy does not change the fact that she feels. fundamentally believes that all of her problems are the fault of other people, especially since, as we all know, the role of these podcasts and therapy is to affirm her narcissism even more. Every generation inherits a world shaped by the decisions made before them, and the question is

always the same. Are we giving young people the tools they need to build something better? Well, a good education isn't just about memorizing facts or checking a box. It's about developing discipline, learning how to think, discovering your strengths, and gaining the skills needed to make a meaningful contribution. That's why I'm glad to have Grand Canyon University as a sponsor. GCU takes a different approach to higher education. They believe students should be challenged academically while also being supported in their personal growth and spiritual development. The programs are designed to prepare students for real careers and real responsibilities, not just the next test or assignment. At a time when many universities continue raising

costs, GCU has held tuition rates steady on a traditional campus for 17 years. They've also continued investing in their students with 75% of their programs and facilities. built within the last decade. Whether you're pursuing a degree on campus and Phoenix or online from wherever you go, GCU offers hundreds of programs designed to meet students where they are and help them move toward where they want to go. If you're thinking about your future or helping someone you care about, think about theirs. Learn more at gCU.edu, Grand Canyon University, private, Christian, affordable, nonprofit. That's gCU.edu. you. Now, most of the time, the actual way to overcome your depression, your anxieties,

your quote-unquote traumas is to stop obsessing over. Stop thinking about it and live your life. The chances are very high that you're better off going to the gym or going for a jog than talking to a therapist. Now, there may be exceptions in extreme cases, but most people are not extreme cases. I know this is hard for people in our culture to understand, but talking it out is actually not the way to solve your problems most of the time. There's a reason why most people are in therapy forever because it creates repeat customers, because that's intentional, because it's a symbiotic relationship. The therapist needs her clients to come back so the business is viable. The clients want to come back because they have a narcissistic desire to talk about themselves and navel gaze

in lieu of actually doing anything to take charge of their own lives. Now, unless we break this cycle, the leftist machine will achieve what it's sought for a very long time. Families will be torn apart. Local communities will collapse. And the state will inevitably become more powerful as a result. They want nothing more than to turn as many people as possible into resentful, overweight, narcissistic slabs. And to bring it back to the beginning, to imprison anybody like Shiloh Hendrix who resists. Matter what issues you may have with your own family, ignore the paid activists and fake therapists who insist that you can't fix those issues. look at your own life, take personal responsibility, make your own decisions. You'll find that nothing enrages a bad therapist, more than telling her you've resolved your problem on your own,

which, of course, is pretty good evidence that you never needed her in the first place. That I'll do it for the show today. And this week, have a great weekend. Talk to you on Monday. Godspeed. Once upon a time, there was a country. Not just a country, but a big one. empire. And in that empire, there was an upper middle class family where two boys were raised by their mother, loved books, Uncle Tom's cabin in the Bible. Their father admired the country's

leaders. They were patriotic and happy. Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized. One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader. He was hanged. The other brother read the same books, but decided to lead a movement. First they came from the universities and no one seemed to care. Then they took over the unions and again no one seemed to care. Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities. And again, most people just ignored it. Change after all was something they could believe in until it was too late. Sound familiar? This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution.