The Mental Health Industrial Complex

On connection, the old institution and a new world

My intention for 2024 is to focus on the future and what we are building together as a collective rather than on the past and the broken systems we are trying to operate around and within. This will be my last post for awhile on the mental health system.

Perhaps I hung myself out to dry in my post Death of a Therapist and Death of a Therapist 2.0 by saying that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that our mental health industrial complex is a burning building. If you are in the profession or one of the millions of clients that have benefited from therapy, you may get your hackles up at the idea that there is no salvaging the mental health system. I include myself in this, of course, both as a practitioner and as a client. I have spent hundreds of hours in both chairs and have a view from both sides.

On the clients side, I have spent multiple years doing my own work and engaging in the therapies that I offered to my clients. We’re talking really deep healing work for the sake of myself and to know inside and out my client’s experience. Have I grown and healed from it? Absofuckinglutely. And, at the same time, I was also doing shamanic healing work, ketamine treatment, psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and somatic energy work. So it was a package deal. I was coming at it from all sides. I was, and still am, immersed in a world of healing.

On the therapist side, I have worked with hundreds of clients and have over 100 hours of training under my belt. I trained in therapies that I know work for trauma and ironically, most of them can be practiced by any healing practitioner, not just licensed therapist. And for two plus years now, I have struggle to accept what was right before my eyes — that what I had dedicated almost a decade of my life to learning and doing as my craft in the world was not actually getting at the core, the essence, of human suffering.

My journey as a therapist was in synchrony with my experience as a client though and I began to see that I was expanding beyond the limits of what therapy could do, way beyond it. In fact, I found going to therapy every week, showing up to “do the work”, focusing on the minutia of my trauma, and looking to an expert for answers to be constricting — a dumbing down or muting of my own and my client’s innate knowing and our natural rhythms of healing. I began to clearly see the both/and of the profession. It works to an extent and it is constricting.

…this building of mental health care is built on the foundation of seeing the mind as controllable and consciousness as something to be harnessed, labeled and bottled.

The reason therapy works, the only reason it facilitates a transformation, is because of the relationship the therapist builds with the person sitting opposite them. The therapeutic relationship is what facilitates change — not if you are doing cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis or dialectical behavioral therapy but the rapport you have with the client, the compassion they can feel from you and the opportunity to experience unconditional positive regard. The key word in therapeutic alliance is alliance. You feel like someone is on your side, gets you, sees you, hears you, connects with you and maybe, if you are really blessed, has walked a similar path as you.

I recently heard someone say, “relationship is the great activator” which is such a deep profound truth. True of everything from people to pets to crystals to writing to plants to therapy. If you build a relationship with anything, you activate the potential for change, growth, healing and expansion. I would argue you could get just as much therapeutic benefit from a relationship with nature as your therapist, perhaps even more. And what about the relationship with your Self?

Does the work you are doing in therapy, no matter what chair you are sitting in, facilitate a relationship with Self? Yes, capital letter Self. The essence of who we are as humans, our spirit, our compassion, our creativity, our divinity, our oneness with each other and the world around us. I would argue that western psychology and our mental system, as a whole, do not. I would argue that we are swimming upstream if we are trying to deeply connect with Self through this system.

Why? Because the very foundation that mental health care is built on sees the mind as controllable and consciousness as something to be harnessed, labeled and bottled. The system was conceived by those who believed themself the expert in the room, the arbiter of truth and as the credible human that has the “education” to understand the human psyche and help you navigate all that you have internalized.

The actual entry point, the door if you will, that we come through to sit in the therapist’s chair often labels us as broken, defective, the identified “patient” that needs to be fixed and that the answers exist outside of us. In fact, if you are using insurance to get support, a diagnosis is a requirement. And if you come to mental health care through the doors of community health, the institution of the industrial complex, well I hate to say it, but you are really nothing more than a dollar sign.

We cannot ignore or pretend that therapy, no matter what kind, doesn’t operate within an industrial complex. If you have any exposure to community health, you know what I mean. A client is an entry in a financial spreed sheet and they get categorized into a tier of financial income for the agency based on just how sick they are. Just enough money to keep the cogs moving at a snails pace but not enough money to actually every help anyone.

This paints a very bleak picture, indeed. And yet, somehow, within this train-wreck of a system, we manage to find some healing. How is that even possible? It’s possible because of the deep suffering that exists in our separation from each other and our belief that we are alone in that suffering. Therapy brings a connection with another human. It gives us access to a mirror so that we may see more clearly our Self through another human — hopefully a human that has a compassionate perspective on the deep rut of suffering we find ourself in. How could it not help to connect with another in our pain. Connection is what we are searching for — connection with Self and connection with others. The knowing that we are not alone and that what we are experiencing is shared.

The truth is we need it ALL as we are building something new. One of my core beliefs as a healer is that we have to build the scaffolding to hold us before we begin to tear something down. We can’t just go for broke and torch something without at least beginning to build something that is more beneficial and healthy to move into — whether that be habits, beliefs or collective systems. As my mother used to say, you can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. I truly believe with all my being that it is time to put our energies toward the new, a world beyond the medicalized model of mental health that we have.

I know there are so many others that have this vision and that want to serve the whole by helping the individual and the collective heal. Every time I connect with others who are serving in the world I hear the same story. The winds are changing and our collective consciousness is shifting. And indeed, you don’t have to look hard to see that the scaffolding is being built through technologies that have long been considered dead — plant medicine, stone medicine, ceremony, ritual, dance and song. We are turning back to the earth, back to our roots and back to the Self.

I feel hopeful about the future of healing and I hope you will join me on this journey of turning back to what we already know. Back toward our innate knowing and ancient technologies. To learn more about the online communities and courses I am building, visit me at my new website!

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Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. - Carl Jung

In order to (re)member who we are, we have to (dis)member the programming, the patterns and the egoic structures we hold as our reality - Michelle Acacia Raine