When I tried to find help, I was at the lowest point of my life – I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think.

I looked – I really looked for help – my wife really looked! But, it was no good!

I kept asking “What was wrong with me” and “How can they help me?” nothing the professionals said made sense!

You have to understand that there are two ways of studying the mind: from the inside or from the outside. Traditionally, psychology was on the inside (Freud, Jung etc) but with the modern iteration of “neuroscience” psychology quietly changed lanes to the outside (Moncrieff, 2008).

The problem is that people who are suffering from poor mental health need explanations that make sense on the inside and traditionally that has been the job of psychotherapy, which was on the inside but over the last few years, psychotherapy has come under pressure to use mechanistic models (outside) to explain their patients symptoms and it’s not working.

If you have acute anxiety, you might be told that your amygdala or your prefrontal cortex is on the blink and you might be given diazepam or Beta-blockers such as propranolol and this would confirm your suspicion that you are broken (Stahl, 2021).

On the other hand, you might be told that your mind is a predictive meat computer (Clark, 2016) and that your emotions are constructed (Feldman Barrett, 2025) and this only adds to your feelings of hopelessness (Bracken, 2001) and despair.

Ultimately, our understanding of the brain depends on technology, experimentation and interpretation. Together we call that “Neuroscience” and what treatment we receive with that depends on what neurological model is fashionable that day (Yalom, 1980).

And that’s fine for academics but when it comes to healing people, they don’t care about all the fancy Latin names we can remember for different parts of the brain – even if its dressed up in fancy Chat GPT Info graphic.

Clients want to know what is wrong with them explained in a way that makes sense of their inner experience and shows them how they can thrive instead of live in hell.

Psychotherapy is focused on how the mind works not theoretical models of the mind.

That’s why psychotherapy needs to get a divorce! Our job is to use therapy to help people heal not make ourselves look like neuroscientist and psychiatrists.

By doing so, I suspect that we are doing both ourselves and our patients a disservice.

References

• Bracken, P. & Thomas, P. (2001) “Postpsych