> Consider further a world in which there are many minds for whom sensitivity to being wrong is such a high priority, as you seem to want it to be, that they may try and avoid formulating stances or taking positions at all. Lest they be wrong. [...] Sometimes it can be helpful to have someone explain to you how you have to have some confidence in your own capacity for intuition, your own ability make decisions, in order to make anything happen.

We all live in that world. These hypothetical individuals sound like people in desperate need of direction, not self-reflection. People don't go to therapists because everything's great and they're thinking clearly; therapists have a naturally-exploitable customer base.

Left to their own devices, these wayward souls tend to end up radicalized in some way. Your suggested approach sounds an awful lot like the outcome of grooming-- "I didn't tell you to do that. You wanted to do it." Make anyone spend enough time miring in their own confused thoughts and they'll start to normalize and rationalize whatever it is. No wonder we have so many gender-confused kids running around; they're exposed to the topic constantly. If that's what therapy amounts to, we can call off the labor shortage, because any accomplished child molester has the qualifications to do this job...I'm sure they need the work.

For some reason, doctors have little problem proscribing direct advice to ailing patients-- "you're dying because you won't stop eating cheesecake and smoking meth." Why are therapists so resistant to telling clients they're unlikable assholes and they need to fix their shit? Why the "need" for florid introspection that distracts from obvious problems, unless it's an intelligence-gathering exercise, looking for something else to blame or ideate? No other professional service works like this except fortune-tellers and the church (through confessionals) and their track record is about as effective. My mechanic doesn't wax poetic about thermodynamics, ask about the journeys I've been on with the vehicle and blame the engineers when my car doesn't start.

> It doesn't suggest to me the task, or the institution that is still in its earliest years of trying to formally study it, is fundamentally flawed.

My point remains: perceptions are subjective, are easily manipulated, and are frequently wrong. Eyewitness testimony is incorrect 50-fucking-percent of the time. This institution has already had scandals involving "discovery" of false memories and other manipulations of both its own personnel and the public. I've even had one insist I was molested despite no such attestations on my part (and it not being true). Psychiatrists have vouched for the perceived rehabilitation of rapists and murderers up for parole, who then immediately proceeded to rape and kill again within hours of release.

There are other peculiarities too, like insistence that hypersexuality is exclusively an artifact of abuse (and not at all precocious/excessive access to pornography), while sex addiction is not recognized at all in the DSM-V-- yet they'll offer to treat you for something they say doesn't exist. They like to tout the idea of all this domestic and sexual abuse going on based on what patients report, but it's not like they conduct any actual investigation-- they'll believe anything you tell them at face value (it's how Sybil got away with it for so long).

On that note, they've managed to legitimize what we used to call demonic possession as multiple/disassociative personality disorder. Here's an open challenge: prove it. So far, the highest-profile cases they've put forth have all been frauds, and it's so easy to act out the symptoms of that there are entire subreddits and hashtags dedicated to overprivileged children LARPing it. Why it's even still in the book, I cannot fathom.

It is junk science. They have some neat ideas about behavioral classification and CBT is as useful for humans as it is for dogs, but that's about it.