>"You're basically asking a friend to be an untrained therapist for free."
On the flip side, going to a therapist is just paying someone to pretend to be your friend for a while. My insurance (Kaiser; about $600 per month) covers something like 80% of 6 therapist visits, and after that it's all on me. This is probably the worst part of trying to seek help; the sickness basically prevents you from taking all the steps necessary to start getting better. I've thought long and hard about how to solve this (maybe have a service that just handles all the idiotic HMO stuff for you to make it as low-effort as possible), but I still don't have a good solution, and "hacking the medical industry" has traditionally been a non-starter.
No. That's not what modern evidence based therapy is.
If you're talking about 'counselling' then yes, a friend can do it about as well as a trained counsellor. But remember that the evidence base for counselling is weak; that people often feel worse with counselling; and that counselling is sometimes actively harmful.
> covers something like 80% of 6 therapist visits, and after that it's all on me.
That's a shame. If they covered 100% of 8 visits they'd cover most people who need CBT.
> I've thought long and hard about how to solve this (maybe have a service that just handles all the idiotic HMO stuff for you to make it as low-effort as possible),
Maybe just "buddying" - someone visits or calls you and talks to you and watches you while you do all the stuff you need to do. This builds self-reliance.
Therapist is not pretending to be your friend. Because the uninformed opinions like yours are getting spread, people who need help do not seek it, making the problem worse.
On the flip side, going to a therapist is just paying someone to pretend to be your friend for a while. My insurance (Kaiser; about $600 per month) covers something like 80% of 6 therapist visits, and after that it's all on me. This is probably the worst part of trying to seek help; the sickness basically prevents you from taking all the steps necessary to start getting better. I've thought long and hard about how to solve this (maybe have a service that just handles all the idiotic HMO stuff for you to make it as low-effort as possible), but I still don't have a good solution, and "hacking the medical industry" has traditionally been a non-starter.