Are therapists just expensive friends?
Most people just need someone to listen and help them process. Requiring licenses for psychotherapists might be harming millions of people.
For most psychological difficulties that send people to therapy, professional training appears to be unnecessary. This isn't a radical claim — it's what the empirical evidence consistently shows. Multiple studies spanning decades find that people with minimal training achieve clinical outcomes equal to or better than licensed professionals.
This is important, and is in no way a jab at therapists. (I myself almost became one, but dropped out of the program 10 days before classes began.) It is important because we could alleviate a massive amount of suffering if we expand access by normalizing unlicensed, regular-person therapy as a completely valid form of clinical treatment for mild to moderate health struggles.
That time "professional" help almost killed me
A licensed therapist once recommended I return to cannabis use after six months of sobriety. Around the same time, another professional missed clear signs of bipolar disorder and prescribed Zoloft. The combination triggered severe mania and led to a 29-day hospitalization at UCSF.
These weren't just clinical mistakes - they were predictable failures of a system that claims unique expertise in human psychological healing.
Yet during that hospitalization, I experienced something that challenges the foundations of professional therapy: The most profound and helpful conversations weren't with the clinical staff, but with other patients. People labeled as "mentally ill" offered more genuine insight and emotional support than many professionals I'd paid hundreds of dollars to see.
A look at the efficacy data about "therapist therapy" vs "normie therapy"
The evidence is consistent and compelling:
Durlak's 1979 meta-analysis: Paraprofessionals achieved superior outcomes to trained therapists across multiple contexts.
Christensen and Jacobson's studies: College professors with basic counseling training performed as well as experienced therapists.
The Zimbabwe "Friendship Bench" program: Grandmothers with minimal training treated depression as effectively as professionals (published in JAMA).
Research on peer support specialists: People with lived experience + basic training tend to match professional outcomes.
This shouldn't surprise us. Humans have been helping each other process psychological difficulties since we developed language. The idea that this fundamental capacity requires professional certification is a very recent - and highly profitable - innovation.
Why most therapists don't want you to know the facts about their field
The therapy establishment responds to this research with predictable defensiveness, and it's not hard to understand why. If regular people can help just as effectively as professionals, several uncomfortable questions arise: Why spend years getting expensive degrees and certifications? Why maintain licensing boards and professional associations? Why charge $200 an hour if someone with basic training could help just as well?
The answer reveals something important about the medicalization of human suffering: We've created an artificial scarcity of psychological support by convincing ourselves - and more importantly, convincing regulators - that only highly trained professionals can help with basic human struggles.
This isn't just about protecting income streams (though that's certainly part of it). It's about preserving professional identity and social status. After all, what's more threatening to a profession than evidence suggesting their extensive training might be unnecessary?
My responses to the classic counterarguments against this evidence
The establishment offers three main counterarguments. I think the responses actually reveal more about professional self-preservation than any clinical reality:
"These studies only dealt with the easy cases!"
True, but most people seeking therapy aren't dealing with severe pathology.
They're struggling with anxiety, depression, relationship issues, and existential uncertainty.
Basic human problems shouldn't require professional intervention.
"The outcome measures are superficial!"
If "deeper therapeutic change" doesn't show up in measurable improvements, what are we measuring?
Like wine experts claiming superior taste while failing blind tests.
Results matter more than theory. We should be scientific consequentialists.
"Even 'untrained' helpers received some basic training!"
This actually strengthens the case against extensive professional education.
If a few days of instruction produces similar outcomes to years of graduate education, what are we paying for?
The marginal value of additional training appears minimal.
All therapeutic modalities and frameworks are similarly mediocre: the "dodo bird verdict" shows different therapy methods achieving remarkably similar outcomes. This suggests the specific technique matters far less than basic human factors like empathy and attention.
Radical proposal: blow up the system and deregulate mental healthcare
For the everyday psychological challenges that comprise most therapy visits, the evidence points toward a radical solution: We need to deregulate therapy entirely.
Yes, this means anyone should be able to set up a practice and offer psychological support. Quality control? Let market forces handle it through reviews and reputation, just like any other service.
This isn't just theory - it's a testable proposition:
Bad therapists will get bad reviews and lose clients.
Good ones will thrive.
More options mean better matches.
Lower barriers mean wider access.
Psychiatry and pharmacology should still be managed by experts
Psychiatric medication - actual medical treatment from physicians - can be literally lifesaving. Several medications helped stabilize my bipolar disorder, and I'm profoundly grateful for medical psychiatry. Professional intervention remains crucial for severe mental illness, trauma, and crisis situations.
What would therapy look like without gatekeepers?
Imagine a platform matching people with peer supporters, charging perhaps $20 per hour instead of $200. Immediate access to human connection without waiting lists or insurance barriers.
To be clear: I'm not suggesting people should just get occasional, ad hoc support from friends. The structure and consistency of regular sessions matter enormously – they get you out of bed, create accountability, and build the trust needed for deeper work. What I'm proposing is a platform that maintains these benefits while dramatically lowering barriers to access.
The benefits would be immediate:
No more waiting weeks for appointments
Affordable support for everyone
Multiple perspectives and approaches
Natural selection of effective helpers
Regular, scheduled sessions with consistent supporters
Modern technology could take this even further. By recording and transcribing sessions (with consent), AI language models could build deep understanding of each person's history, patterns, and needs. This creates an always-available support system between human sessions - imagine having an AI companion that actually knows your story, remembers your struggles, and can offer relevant insights from your own journey.
This isn't about replacing human connection with AI – it's about augmenting it. The weekly human sessions provide the core emotional support and accountability, while AI offers continuous engagement and pattern recognition that even the best human therapist couldn't match.
This is fundamentally a strong-link problem: Having more options, even if some are mediocre, increases the probability of finding genuinely helpful support. The current system optimizes for professional credentials while systematically undervaluing the natural human capacity for empathetic interpersonal healing.
These conclusions obviously threaten therapists' professional identity and their economic interests. But their resistance illustrates precisely why reform is necessary: We've created a system where the only legitimate way to receive psychological support is through expensive professional services.
Someone needs to build an Uber for loneliness and peer support. Can you?
I think often about those conversations in the psych ward – with people traditionally viewed as being too unstable to help others, yet who helped me more than many professionals ever did. Their insights didn't come from textbooks or clinical training, but from something far more valuable: the lived experience of human suffering and the authentic desire to help another person through it.
This hints at a deeper truth: The professionalization of human caring might be one of modernity's greatest mistakes. Not because professional care has no value, but because we've convinced ourselves it's the only legitimate form of psychological support. We've been optimizing for the wrong variables all along: credentials instead of connection, technique instead of authenticity, professional boundaries instead of human understanding.
The solution isn't to fix the current system. It's to build a new one that recognizes our innate capacity to help each other heal, supported by evidence of scalable community-based models.
If you're interested in building a platform for instant, affordable peer support, I'd love to hear from you. The world is waiting for someone to make this happen.