“Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?” asks Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. Kafka wrote in a letter to his muse: “I can’t explain to you or to anybody what it’s like inside me. How could I begin to explain; I can’t even explain it to myself.” One can only guess what Emily Dickinson means when she writes “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” or Churchill with “the black dog.” But if even the most talented writers struggle to express their inner lives, how could just any person do so through the interview method of psychotherapy? If you score a 4 out of 10 on an anxiety scale, is this double of what I feel if I score a 2? It is a myth that people can express their inner life adequately in words. Perhaps it is the tragedy of humanity—we just can’t explain to others how we really feel.
Even with a budget of $7 billion (under the Biden administration), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) admitted that the causes for mental illness are unknown to them. So how could any psychotherapist claim to know what is going on in other people’s minds, and what is causing their disturbances? The truth is they don’t know it either, nor do they know how to cure it. There are no significant differences in the outcomes achieved by trained therapists and amateurs.1 Meta-analytical studies demonstrate that the evidence for professional superiority is, in fact, “surprisingly meager.”2 Moreover, psychotherapy itself shows no measurable effect on patients’ biology, as a meta-analysis by Ioana A. Cristea et al. has found.3
These findings alone call into question everything that is being propagated about the method. But instead of questioning psychotherapy, people are increasingly encouraged to use it. In the United Kingdom, for instance, The Jewish Chronicle reported after October 7 that “secular colleges training therapists are now welcoming increasing numbers from the Orthodox community as taboos over counselling subside,” presenting this as a positive development. After all, the recent spike in antisemitic incidents has, it is argued, made mental-health support more vital than ever. What the article left open was which of the more than 600 different psychotherapeutic brands on the market readers should choose from.
The therapeutic culture spreading through Western universities—with its emotional support rabbits, self-care days, and 18-year-olds citing a “history of depression”—has reinforced a generation that increasingly treats every aspect of life as something to be therapized. Meanwhile, U.S. colleges continue to produce psychologists in vast numbers, flooding the market for a service of doubtful value. At Yale, for instance, psychology is now the fourth most popular major among women.
While it is commendable how those students seek to help others in their suffering, it is not clear how being educated in the method can help. The effects of psychotherapy on depression, for example, appear to be attributable entirely to placebo.4 In fact, there is little more than a placebo effect in any form of talk therapy5—treatments that in any case tend to take an exceptionally long time to work, probably by the time the client improved on their own and by which the therapist can claim success.
Talking things out may, of course, have its benefits—but not if the profession has lost all common sense about what it means to be human. A comment by Beth N. Rom-Rymer, who served on the board of directors of the National Register of Health Service Psychologists, is an example. She calls the simple act of people “having their own thoughts and feelings about different events,” in all seriousness, a “privilege.”6 Others, including a group of Canadian researchers, take the absurdity further by advocating that the severely mentally ill be included in early childhood education and care since “sanism” would be an unjust privilege of sanity over insanity.
It is not an overstatement to say that the profession has completely lost its way. Lee Jussim, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers—New Brunswick, has offered a conservative estimate that roughly three-quarters of psychology’s claims—whether in peer-reviewed journals, books, or conference papers—are likely false. And much like other areas of psychology caught up in the replication crisis, the most cited publications on the effectiveness of talk therapy rest on shaky methodological grounds.
In 2017, a meta-analysis led by Joseph Franklin showed that the past fifty years of research helps us to predict the likelihood of whether a specific patient might commit suicide to be barely better than chance.7 In other words, one could rely on the vast number of resources, funding, and talent that went into the field of psychological suicide research—or just flip a coin.
At this point, psychologists might as well write down their best guesses instead of conducting any costly and often taxpayer-funded studies. An analysis found that 91.5 percent of studies in psychology and psychiatry confirmed the researcher’s expected effects—a rate about five times higher than in hard sciences.8 This problem, of course, is compounded by the field’s ideological conformity, where conservative or even moderate voices are almost entirely absent. Even Current Psychology admitted that the field’s textbooks are ideologically biased, fail to address research controversies, and perpetuate scientific myths. In such a setting, error is not corrected but institutionalized.
Negative effects of psychological interventions are not systematicallycollected or reported in trials. A study that did examine them indicates that roughly 10 percent of clients deteriorate as a result of therapy.9 And in a survey by Mike J. Crawford et al., 5 percent of respondents reported lasting negative effects.10 As a result of psychotherapy, clients may feel more stressed out, depressed, experience less self-esteem, or struggle to function within their families. In some cases, it can even lead to suicide. People can also form false memories in psychotherapy, as demonstrated by Elizabeth Loftus in her ground-breaking book The Myth of Repressed Memory.
The method can also become a cruel endeavor when psychologists impose limits on how long it is considered reasonable — or even acceptable — to experience grief. Yet when someone has lost a loved one, there should be no fixed point at which grief is classified as pathology; the question itself is misguided. Moreover, it is doubtful that pathologizing grief helps to shorten suffering. If anything, individuals may come to identify with the diagnosis, potentially prolonging the grieving process.
The Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm” applies to all healthcare interventions. For that reason, many approaches to psychotherapy should not take place at all — especially given that many psychotherapists are not even aware of the possible harm they may cause. In a survey of American psychologists in private practice, 28 percent were unaware that negative effects of psychotherapy exist.11 Worse still, psychotherapists often regard their treatment as effective even when their clients don’t report positive results.12 Hence, something that is health-negative is rebranded as health-positive by the profession. Given the evidence now available, the idea that psychotherapy is just generally health-improving seems preposterous.
The academy should, therefore, break psychology up into two distinct fields that do not work well together: The study of how the mind works, which has not illuminated much despite its hype. (How Oliver Sacks’ books are still in “non-fiction” sections of many book shops is a mystery to me.) And on the other hand the study of how to help people in need, which can be informed by practical experience in treating those with problems. However, by mixing biology/philosophy and caregiving under the banner of “psychology,” therapeutic mistreatment arises from a presumed knowledge of the human mind that does not, in fact, exist.
In the end, sanity can’t be bought, it must be earned. For instance, by learning a second language and being able to think about problems in words that are less emotionally charged and more rational. Or words that capture the feeling better. To paraphrase Goethe: “whoever knows no second language knows none.” Learning English, for example, gives a Hebrew speaker the tool to think about something as broad as “awkward,” a Mandarin speaker the opportunity to think of “disgust” as a unified concept, or a German speaker a word for “happiness” that is distinct from “luck.”
Or sanity can be earned by investing one’s time in acquiring cultural knowledge, something younger people especially at American colleges seem often deprived of these days. Instead, they often end up (self-)medicating once distress occurs to alleviate all emotional suffering. This either does not work at all, or it brings a temporary numbing of emotions, which, like any drug experience, is an artificially forced calm.
As I argued in a recent article in Minding the Campus, an oversupply of psychologists has pushed the field in America increasingly toward political activism fuelled by antisemitic ideology—a development that is turning therapy more and more into a struggle session or ideological enforcement against Jews. Yet another troubling trend has emerged: psychotherapists, compensating for the field’s scientific shortcomings and oversupply, are reinventing themselves as spiritual leaders under the guise of health care.
Psychotherapy often relies on a confessional structure aimed at alleviating mental distress. In this respect, it resembles a religious practice more than a strictly scientific procedure. When therapy does not succeed, the failure is frequently attributed not to the method or the theoretical framework, but to the client’s resistance, insufficient honesty, or unwillingness to “go deep enough.” Improvement, moreover, presupposes trust in the therapist’s interpretive authority — a dynamic not entirely unlike faith in a spiritual guide.
This structure carries the risk that patients may come to blame themselves for the lack of improvement, adding secondary guilt to primary suffering. Or the patient is viewed as so damaged that psychotherapy can’t help, which is hardly any reason not to administer the method anyway. Freud once wrote to Jung about a woman who had been in his care: “she is beyond any possibility of therapy, but it is still her duty to sacrifice herself to science.”
The language of psychotherapy further complicates its scientific self-presentation. Terms such as “inner child” and “shadow work” draw unmistakably from mythic and spiritual imagery. Jung himself engaged openly with alchemy, archetype, and religious symbolism, dissolving boundaries his successors would later attempt to police. Modern psychology sought to model itself on biology or physics—measurable, predictive, objective. Now that this has largely failed, it’s less surprising that spiritual elements are being reintroduced into psychotherapy.
What began in America in the 1970s with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, involved extracting meditation techniques from Buddhism and appropriating them as clinical interventions. Core elements—karma, rebirth, and its broader metaphysical structure—were set aside, and a path oriented toward enlightenment was reduced to a therapeutic coping strategy, as though the Buddha was a proto-psychotherapist awaiting scientific validation, and the ancient religion little more than a practice of narcissistic self-absorption.
Yet, there are a wide range of side effects associated with mindfulness meditation. Studies have documented adverse side effects, including depersonalization, psychosis, hallucinations, anxiety, increased seizure risk, disorganized speech, loss of appetite, and insomnia. One study led by Brent M. Wilson at the University of California San Diego found that participants exhibited increased susceptibility to false memories following mindfulness meditation.13 Another study found that 62.9 percent of participants experienced negative effects such as anxiety, panic, less motivation in life, depression, a feeling of addiction to meditation, pain, confusion, disorientation, or feeling “spaced out” during and after meditation.14
What this tells us is that religious insights cannot be translated well into health care. Oxford, however, incorporates the religious practice into health care with its master of science in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Beyond the supposed benefits for clients, the program also trains therapists themselves to be mindful during treatment. One might expect a “mindful” therapist to be especially attentive and capable of caring for clients. Yet one study suggested that “higher levels of therapist mindfulness predicted less reduction in client symptom severity at termination.”15
Harvard’s Thich Nhat Hanh Center for Mindfulness in Public Health in the T.H. Chan School of Public Health illustrates this further. In his New York Times bestseller The Art of Power, Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” While these lines might be part of his religious doctrine, from a public health standpoint they are most obviously destructive. Who would want to live in a world where everybody—the insane, the fanatical, the unhinged—simply accepts himself the way he is?
In a recent article with the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, I showed how some universities have drifted so far from their intellectual mission that they now award degrees in “mindfulness” itself, turning what is essentially a wellness trend on campus into an academic field. Harvard—which describes its philosophy as “Intellectual growth and academic achievement should not come at the expense of wellbeing”16—offers the course “Mindfulness, Meaning, and Resilience.” The course describes mindfulness as “a way of attending to the experience of the present moment with full awareness and without judgment or reactivity.… This introductory course explores the origins of mindfulness in Buddhist philosophy and how it can promote these states.”17
The historical record, however, shows something completely different. Sources often refer to troubling effects from the practice. As Jared R. Lindahl and colleagues note in a paper, “The term nyams refers to a wide range of ‘meditation experiences’—from bliss and visions to intense body pain, physiological disorders, paranoia, sadness, anger and fear.”18 Zen lineages have long recognized a related condition, sometimes described as “Zen sickness” or “meditation sickness,” in which practice leads to prolonged psychological or physical distress. There is even a sutta—a canonical discourse attributed to the Buddha—in which a group of monks go insane and commit mass suicide after meditating.19Not to speak of many Japanese soldiers in WW2, Nazis, and terrorists who used the practise to numb their feelings before committing their horrendous crimes.20
Buddhism is far from being the only religion that gets misapplied by psychologists these days. Some in the profession advocate for the “psychotherapeutic insights” of Hinduism, such as a focus on metacognitive awareness, others for the “clinical aspects” of Taoism, “clinical applications” of Zoroastrianism, or a “Confucian Yin-Yang mental health model based on cosmology.” In Eastern Religions, Spirituality, and Psychiatry, Mosqueiro and colleagues frame this misapplication as open-mindedness and an opportunity to include their patients’ beliefs in the treatment planning: “Fortunately, the field of health and health care is broadening, and rigid conceptualizations are gradually being replaced with more open-minded ones.” Afterall, “Spirituality should be an excellent target for interventions.”21 This is quite a revolutionary claim. In doing so, the authors depart from a tradition, often traced back to Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE, that separates medicine from religious belief.
And they are hardly alone. A 2022 review article in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), wants to “incorporate spiritual care into care for patients with serious illnesses.”22 Meanwhile, major international health organizations now endorse bringing religion and spirituality into clinical care, including the American Psychiatric Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the Brazilian Psychiatric Association. The “World Psychiatric Association Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry” proposes an “understanding of religion and spirituality and their relationship to the diagnosis, etiology, and treatment of psychiatric disorders should be considered as essential components of both psychiatric training and continuing professional development.”23
However, if psychologists wish to employ religion as therapy because it appears effective, they should switch careers instead of turning their lab coats into robes and pretend that it is science. At Harvard Medical School, for instance, David H. Rosmarin and Caroline C. Kaufman’s “Spiritual Psychotherapy” program does more than respect patients’ beliefs—it embeds religious doctrine directly into clinical treatment, encouraging patients to harness faith to reduce distress and guide behavior.24 Yet, if religion aids recovery (perhaps because in religion people can overcome the tragedy to express how they really feel), patients already have priests, pastors, and rabbis for that. Hospitals are not sanctuaries, and clinicians are not clergy.
Kaufman’s expertise lies in “gender identity and diversity among adolescents,” yet she positioned herself to interpret and operationalize religious meaning in therapy.25 And not just her own but potentially any religion. But what if a client says, “I feel abandoned by God,” and the therapist moves from disputing distorted thoughts to interpreting divine absence? That is no longer therapy; it is theology without ordination. The entire approach risks elevating the clinician into a spiritual authority—credentialed by the state, but accountable to no religious tradition.
The team then came up with an idea that, anywhere else, would make one sound like a moron, but at Harvard, it seems to fit: the attempt to empirically measure spirituality.26 This fundamental misunderstanding of the limitations of scientific inquiry presupposes that a subjective and culturally contingent phenomenon can be objectively quantified using standardized tools. Once spirituality is reduced to scale scores and outcome metrics, it inevitably becomes subject to comparison, validation, and institutional judgment. And what would such research conclude—that Baptists are more spiritual than Catholics, Sikhs more than Hindus? And that a team of psychologists at Harvard is qualified to rank them? How many minutes of prayer or meditation are required to reach “peak spirituality”?
Ultimately, the research team opens the door to the dangerous idea that authority over spiritual life can be quantified. High on their own supply, “spiritual psychotherapists” might claim that those with the “highest” measured spirituality are more legitimate, subtly shifting sacred authority from faith communities to credentialed clinicians. The cultish potential is inherent in their method. Call it science, or ideology, or religion. The sacrifice in psychotherapy, it seems, never ends.
Christopher L. Schilling is the author of Therapy People: How Bad Science Took Over Our Inner Lives, Antisemitism and the Character of America, The Japanese Talmud, The Therapized Antisemite, and others. He has held academic positions at universities in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, the United States, South Korea, and Taiwan, and has taught diplomats at the Mexican Foreign Affairs Office. His work has been featured in Law & Liberty, the James G. Martin Center, and elsewhere.
1 David Faust and Caron Zlotnick, “Another Dodo Bird Verdict? Revisiting the Comparative Effectiveness of Professional and Paraprofessional Therapists,” Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 2 (1995): 157–167, https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.5640020303.
2 D.M. Stein and M.J. Lambert, “On the relationship between therapist experience and psychotherapy outcome,” Clinical Psychology Review 4, no. 2 (1984): 127-142, https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-7358(84)90025-4; Jeffrey S. Berman and Nicholas C. Norton, “Does Professional Training Make a Therapist More Effective?” Psychological Bulletin 98, no. 2 (1985): 401–407, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-2909.98.2.401.
3 Iona A. Cristea, Eirini Karyotaki, Steven D. Hollon, Pim Cuijpers, and Claudio Gentili, “Biological markers evaluated in randomized trials of psychological treatments for depression: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 101, no. 6 (2019): 32-44, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.03.022.
4 Pim Cuijpers and Iana A. Cristea, “What If a Placebo Effect Explained All the Activity of Depression Treatments?” World Psychiatry 14, no. 3 (2015): 310–11, https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20249.
5 William M. Epstein, Psychotherapy as Religion: The Civil Divine in America (University of Nevada Press, 2006).
6 “Beth N. Rom-Rymer, PhD, Elected to National Register of Health Service Psychologists Board of Directors,” National Register, December 11, 2018, https://www.nationalregister.org/beth-n-rom-rymer-elected-board/; ADL New York–New Jersey, “Exploring the Psychological Toll of Antisemitism on Mental Health,” YouTube, 1:02:38, February 27, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7clRtE_eBmk, at 46:10.
7 Joseph C. Franklin, Jessica D. Ribeiro, Kathryn R. Fox, et al., “Risk factors for suicidal thoughts and behaviors: A meta-analysis of 50 years of research,” Psychological Bulletin 143, no. 2 (2017): 187–232, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/bul0000084.
8 Daniele Fanelli, “‘Positive’ Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences,” PLoS ONE 5, no. 4 (2010): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010068.
9 Scott O. Lilienfeld, “Psychological Treatments That Cause Harm,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 2, no. 1 (March 2007): 53–70, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00029.x.
10 Mike J. Crawford, Lavanya Thana, Lorna Farquharson, et al., “Patient Experience of Negative Effects of Psychological Treatment: Results of a National Survey,” British Journal of Psychiatry 208, no. 3 (2016): 260–265, https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.114.162628.
11 Charles M. Boisvert and David Faust, “Practicing Psychologists’ Knowledge of General Psychotherapy Research Findings: Implications for Science–Practice Relations,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 37, no. 6 (2006): 708–716, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0735-7028.37.6.708.
12 Scott O. Lilienfeld, Lorie A. Ritschel, Steven Jay Lynn, et al., “Why Ineffective Psychotherapies Appear to Work: A Taxonomy of Causes of Spurious Therapeutic Effectiveness,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9, no. 4 (2014): 355–387, https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614535216.
13 Brent M. Wilson, Laura Mickes, Stephanie Stolarz-Fantino, et al., “Increased False-Memory Susceptibility after Mindfulness Meditation,” Psychological Science 26, no. 10 (2015): 1567–73, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615593705.
14 Deane H. Shapiro Jr., “Adverse Effects of Meditation: A Preliminary Investigation of Long-Term Meditators,” International Journal of Psychosomatics 39, nos. 1–4 (1992): 62–67; Christopher L. Schilling, “The Case Against Jewish Mindfulness Meditation,” in Zen Judaism: The Case Against a Contemporary American Phenomenon (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Christopher L. Schilling, “The ‘Mindfulness’ Degree,” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, January 16, 2026, https://jamesgmartin.center/2026/01/the-mindfulness-degree/.
15 Sheila Stanly, Lorraine Reitzel, Laricka R. Wingate, et al. “Mindfulness: A Primrose Path for Therapists Using Manualized Treatments?” Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy 20, no. 3 (2006): 327–335, https://doi.org/10.1891/088983906780643957.
16 Harvard University, “Mental Health,” In Focus, last updated May 2022, (accessed June 18, 2024).
17 “Mindfulness, Meaning, and Resilience,” Harvard Division of Continuing Education, accessed January 16, 2026, https://coursebrowser.dce.harvard.edu/course/mindfulness-meaning-and-resilience/.
18 Jared R. Lindahl, Nathan E. Fisher, David J. Cooper, et al., “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience: A Mixed-Methods Study of Meditation-Related Challenges in Western Buddhists,” PLoS ONE 12, no. 5 (2017): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176239.
19 Bhikkhu Anālayo, “The Mass Suicide of Monks in Discourse and Vinaya Literature,” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 7 (2014): 11–55.
20 Christopher L. Schilling, “Buddhist Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Political Studies Review 31 nos. 3/4 (2021): 18–28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27083953.
21 Bruno Paz Mosqueiro, Alexander Moreira-Almeida, H. Steven Moffic, and Daniel V. Jeste, “Spirituality: Relationship with Religion, Health, Wisdom, and Positive Psychiatry,” in Eastern Religions, Spirituality, and Psychiatry, eds. H. Steven Moffic et al. (Springer, 2024), 75–86.
22 Tracy A. Blboni, Tyler J. VanderWeele, Stephanie D. Doan-Soares, et al., “Spirituality in Serious Illness and Health,” JAMA 328, no. 2 (2022): 184–197, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2022.11086.
23 Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Avdesh Sharma, Bernard Janse van Rensburg, et al., “WPA Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry,” World Psychiatry 15, no. 1 (2016): 87–88, https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20304.
24 David H. Rosmarin and Caroline C. Kaufman, Training Manual for the Spiritual Psychotherapy for Inpatient, Residential, & Intensive Treatment (SPIRIT) (Spirituality and Mental Health Program, 2024), https://supp.apa.org/psycarticles/supplemental/pst0000577/pst0000577.pdf.
25 Caroline C. Kaufman, “About,” CarolineCKaufmanPhD.com, accessed April 23, 2026, https://www.carolineckaufmanphd.com/about.
26 David H. Rosmarin, Caroline C. Kaufman, Stephanie Friree Ford, et al., “The Neuroscience of Spirituality, Religion, and Mental Health: A Systematic Review and Synthesis,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 156 (2022): 100–113.
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