I was not impressed, and this is before I knew who the authors were.

I think it's worth examining, but only to see how right-wing cranks cosplay as scholars.

1) They keep using passive voice, like "Scholars say..." to introduce their critiques. One could be bad writing but multiple times is suspicious. WHICH SCHOLARS??? This is a sure sign of someone trying to obscure the motives and origin of their critique. The white nationalist author identifies himself as an independent scholar, which suggests strongly he really means far-right cranks like themselves.

2) The authors never clearly identify their target. Who are they attacking - popular representations of psychotherapy, or the validity of psychotherapy itself? They introduce the topic with culture war tropes, gesturing vaguely to what elites talk about at "cocktail parties" (what is this, the late 1960s?) and incredibly, the movie "Ordinary People" (1980!).

Anyway, they assert that there is a myth in popular culture and then tear down the most simplistic version of the argument - that therapists are superhuman engineers of the soul. Strawmanning heavily here, and presenting a false dilemma - one can only be self-reliant or only depend on therapy.

But so what. Popular culture gets a lot of things wrong.

3) In any case, by a somewhat crooked road, they proceed from there to some critiques of the effectiveness of psychotherapy, itself. And it's worth considering. All of social and medical science is undergoing a huge replication crisis.

They rely heavily on meta-studies. Unfortunately, those studies show the opposite of what they are claiming. So by various techniques, they try to mathematically weaken the conclusions of those meta-studies, coming up with surprisingly precise numbers about how wrong the studies are. (This, by itself, is already a hallmark of the right-wing crank.)

Is psychotherapy just great all the time? No. I've had my share of therapists that I'd consider pretty awful. But anecdotally I've found that the more academically qualified, the better the therapist is, and the closer they adhere to evidence-based therapies. If the Winegards' critique was true that the field is rotten, it should be the opposite.

I can't help contrasting these author's arguments with a book I happen to be reading right now, The Body Keeps The Score, by Bessel van der Kolk. This is a best seller which may have done more than any other book to inject concepts like trauma into contemporary consciousness.

I'm just in the first chapters, where van der Kolk works in a VA hospital where there are many divots in the wall, due to Vietnam veterans flipping out and punching it, often over trivial frustrations. These are conservative and military people, and they have tried hard to do what the Winegards prescribe - going to church, not dwelling on their past experiences - and they fail, because their trauma keeps reasserting itself. van der Kolk later sees some of the same signs in his civilian patients, and as a young intern assigned to monitor patients on the late shift, hears many confessions of abuse that are never repeated to the doctor in the morning.

The Winegards attack the concept of psychotherapy as if it's quack medicine for trivial ills, the kind you can shrug off with a little grit. And their critique remains at a safe distance from the problem, through their own vague perceptions of pop culture and browsing the internet for meta-studies.

If the Winegards could show some examples of people overcoming trauma by just manning up, praying or, suppressing things and getting on with it, then maybe I'd be interested. Or if they wanted to talk about the eroding of medicalized terms through popularization, like "trauma", I'd be at least partially on board. But they don't, and they won't.

Like all right-wing cranks, they aren't concerned with what you might assume; that is, the health of patients. they're concerned with knocking down "elites". You know you're dealing with a right-wing crank when they characterize their enemy as an elite that is both contemptibly weak and inexplicably strong. They offer no explanation as to how their enemy's cultural power was achieved and maintained. It certainly couldn't have been because it kind of works or because the need is great. It's always because of the masses being hypnotized by messages in the media - like, you know, Ordinary People (1980).

Beware this sort of thinking, because it leads to reactionary solutions.