Capitalist therapeutics
Most psychotherapies today are unscientific because their justification is purely pragmatic. So they need not be based on an arguably true theory of the person or the mind. The best therapy is the one that best works, that is most effective. Effective at what? At helping people to succeed and be happy. Succeed in the social and economic system that is given. Happy because getting along with everyone and having few or no serious problems or resultant frustrations. This is why psychoanalysis was rejected: it produces insight, not contentment or success.
Psychological (or "spiritual") medicine and therapeutics are capitalist. They are conformist, and what you are supposed to conform to is a system in which people work, buy, pay, owe, and obey the demands of capitalism. They obey even when they are autonomous, free and self-directed: that is called conformity, and so authority is styled as "direction" in the sense of a guiding or "helping." People are now largely self-managed, but that can only be in terms of the norms of the system. There is a system of coordination of diverse actors with diverse interests; it is called the market. The market's norms may be stylized as metaphysical requirements, of Being itself ("how it is," the "way things are," etc.), often expressed mysteriously as obligations, or necessities of personal conduct, that are not given as actual laws (though they sometimes are) but as if they were just "in the air," "fallen from the sky," like a mysterious "wave" of wind or pressure in the air around you. Many bosses speak that way, not only not acknowledging but not recognizing the real agentive and material forces behind the spiritual ideality that seems manifest in their very way of feeling. I digress to what is perhaps a description of the 1970s and '80s and the often female-oriented, highly therapeutic mentality of the time that was part of the way the "political '60s" reverberated in aftershocks for many years thereafter. But what this is especially true of is what might be called the medical-military-corporate complex. It fills the coffers of investment funds that operate in insurance and pharmaceuticals, and have found a way to expand their market to provide social control of what is potentially the entire population.
It is interesting how marketing to large numbers of persons tends to mean implementing and enforcing regimes of social control. And vice-versa: military and police operations and 'softer' things that have the same ends for some reason are almost uniquely profitable. War is more profitable than peace, and policing is more profitable than -- anarchism? Setting up markets to manage people from a distance, with local on-site operatives enforcing demands and making sure people comply, or are reminded of what they need (are needed) to do, and cleaning up local spills and messes is more profit-intensive than if people just followed their own interests and desires. Though people do do that anyway, which is why controlling people whose behavior can only be coordinated by profit-seeking organizations operating necessarily at some distance, this is often a great challenge.
The control and profit nexus has certainly long been the case. Think, for example, of the Iberian American empires, expanded by armies and selling Christian ideology. Now it is psychological health.
Though I find it curious: the managers now often seem to counsel not joy but sadness. It is the ethics of resignation. They speak of wanting people to be functional. Are you functional? Are you susceptible to breakdowns? Might you be a weak link in the system of control, a deviant in a system of enforced normality and boring sameness operating with a minimal mind? And what does one do about this? Have a crisis, throw up all over the place, get constipated, nervous, panicky....? Capitalism makes me sick. And there is no cure. Cure overcomes while preserving, as in Hegelianism. We need something completely different.