"Mental health services" do not think

The "need" many people in America avow for "mental health services" is a desire to be subject to a master who represents the state apparatus and the larger governmental and ideological system, which is capitalism, that the medical system operates within and for.

Medical power, which can be and usually is identified as giving people things they "need," today is assimilated to state power, the objective of which is the surveillance and control, or policing, of individuals.

It is possible for medicine and psychological therapies to be made relatively, if not absolutely, independent of the state. Generally however they are closely integrated with it. The ideologies ("scientific" theories) of the professions involved are so arranged as to make that almost certain.

Medicine properly engaged in has only the goal of helping people, and asks nothing in return. How many doctors and therapists are so inclined?

A therapist's major function is to reconcile people to the social systems, institutions, ideologies and power relationships of the society that they are part of.

Even psychoanalysis cannot evade this. But it can resist it.

The mark of a good (virtuous) professional is the knowledge that they are expected not only to help people with medical or other problems, but also to serve the state apparatus and social/economic system, assisting it in governing people and protecting its interests against them, as people are considered dangerous, and thus may all be "sick" in the "head." Knowing this latter, the virtuous professional, instead of looking for ways to pretend that they serve good ends entirely, only, and purely, will seek to resist the forms of domination to which he/she and his/her patient are necessarily subjected. The virtuous professional therefore needs a critique of the power relationships he/she is part of, and paid to uphold, sustain, and enforce. This means that professional virtue requires the wisdom that necessitates living and working with cognitive dissonance.

And what is the use of cognitive dissonance? Otherwise called "contradictions"? Not to avoid them. But to understand them and try to resolve them through - thinking.

Psychiatry does not ask its patients to think. Many therapists try to help their patients think "in the right ways," or the presumptively happiest because most successful ways. But their understanding of how to think well is not only greatly limited, and ignorant of what we can know about this from the professional work and science of how to think, which is philosophy, a part of which is ethics (how to live a good life by thinking well). Their understanding of thinking is also warped.

Cognitive therapy teaches an inadequate way of thinking (by directing the mind towards the having and believing of certain thoughts). So do most psychotherapies. They, in part, teach the patient to "think" by following certain mental procedures that dictate what thoughts, or possible beliefs (possibly or presumptively true propositions) they are to consider and hold, and what mental techniques or procedures they are to follow in considering the different propositions that they might be inclined to entertain, or can be trained to do so. Psychotherapists when they teach patients how to think do so in the manner of business managers who tell employees what is true and what are the procedures to go through in processing information. This is not thinking, but only operational manipulation of mental representations.

This is one way in which Heideggerian traditions in contemporary philosophy and social theory are relevant. Marx explained the political economy of this society, and the contradictions it cannot resolve, short of revolutionary changes. To understand the mental health ideology and system, we need to understand how it distorts the "thinking" of those who are subject to its power, in terms that ultimately are best explained by understanding capitalism. And understanding it as a seeming necessity that can be shown to be contingent and false.