@b_cavello @joepie91 I realise I'm very much coming from the perspective of my own personal experiences here, and maybe you are too and have positive experiences of mutual aid style therapy. And you're right it is a lot like DIY HRT, and every person will weigh the balance of lack of access against something that could potentially be dangerous differently, and for different circumstances and different degrees of risk.

@b_cavello @joepie91 I think for me though, I think there are some problems that can be solved by building our own mutual aid networks and some that can't, and the latter are things that are very complicated and have potentially disastrous consequences if they go wrong, like anything medical including psychological. And given that there are already systems in place to verify expertise I'd rather devote my resources to making those work better for a greater diversity of people than

@b_cavello @joepie91 trying to build a parallel verification system if that makes sense, say supporting more diverse people to train in counselling or in the UK lobbying to get mental health provision on the NHS

@afewbugs @joepie91 That makes a lot of sense! My friend has been working on some things like that: https://www.inclusiveplus.co/

In some places where such resources may be very inaccessible to people, it may feel less like making a parallel track and more like making an option where one didn’t exist before.

@b_cavello @joepie91 that website looks like a great idea!

@afewbugs @b_cavello "there are already systems in place to verify expertise" -- this is nominally true, but like with any systems, it's important to consider how competent those systems are, and who they serve. That is true for economic and political systems, but just as much for medical systems.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this for me would be my recent(!) experience with a licensed psychiatrist in a large healthcare institution in NL, who was nominally 'specialized in ADHD' and point blank told me "well, autistic people don't have empathy", which has never been true and for at least a decade now has even been disputed in mainstream psychiatry here.

So I don't personally have much faith in those existing systems of verification, or their willingness to improve, and I don't think that such faith is required either, to recognize the risks of providing care and protect/validate against them appropriately.

I would much rather learn and understand what those systems are meant to protect from and how, and apply those same principles in a contextually appropriate way.

@joepie91 @b_cavello I'm so sorry that happened to you, and I absolutely agree there are large sections of the community (neurodiverse/queer/poly/POC say) that aren't properly served by the existing therapy system. What I'm arguing for I think is that here in the UK we have an association of counsellors and psychotherapists that licenses mental health care providers on the basis that they've done a certain amount of training, that they commit to ongoing training and that they do a

@joepie91 @b_cavello certain number of hours of counseling themselves for every number of hours they provide. And absolutely that doesn't guarantee that they are good at it or aware of their own biases, but I think it provides a decent starting point that I'd like to see built on by requiring the training to involve more diversity say, or by providing bursaries and support for more diverse students to train

@joepie91 @b_cavello and if a parallel peer to peer mutual system were set up I personally wouldn't want to talk to someone who hadn't met those criteria, though I don't really feel qualified to determine what sort of training syllabus would be adequate

@joepie91 @b_cavello and I guess I'm getting into "deference to a certifying body here" but I don't feel I know enough about what that curriculum would look like to design it myself you know? Like there that famous anarchist quote I'm struggling to find about not respecting leaders to tell you how to live but respecting a baker to tell you how to bake bread. And I know it's a bit different when people are telling you how your own brain works, but there is an existing body of knowledge in

@joepie91 @b_cavello designing a therapeutic framework and relating to people in distress in a way that can help them

@afewbugs @b_cavello Right. That's why I was trying to draw a distinction earlier between that deference to a certifying body vs. learning from the established practices! I certainly think that a lot can be learned from existing practices, even if I don't trust the certifying bodies to have people's best interests in mind, and that a lot *should* be learned from them.

I do feel somewhat qualified to speak on this because I've already been providing informal therapy on an ad-hoc basis in the past, with good results, and have learned a lot from diving into the existing practices. Psychology is somewhat of a special interest that's morphed into a form of activism for me, and I'm also pretty familiar with all the ways in which it can go wrong.

That certainly doesn't mean I'm an expert on everything, and there are problems and topics I absolutely won't touch because I don't know enough about them to know where all the 'mines' are, but I do feel that there's a lot of room for mutual therapy as long as those risks are recognized, especially in currently underserved communities.

(The reason for asking the original question is that I'm looking into making this a bit more of a publicly-offered thing, and also training others on how to provide it, to start up building a different kind of mutual support network that's currently either highly dependent on the state or just completely missing)