You have a physical problem, you go to the doctor and he fixes the problem or gets you the information you need to manage your problem. That's the stop point for medical intervention.
You have a mental health problem, you go to a therapist for a mental health intervention, and now you're in weekly therapy for years. Not so much an intervention, more like a new part time job.
Yearly checkups is not a counterpoint to this general trend. A yearly mental health checkup could be totally reasonable, but that's not the norm.
> Not everything is a problem that can be fixed.
The real issue here is that you keep bringing up outliers like your mother's palliative care and I keep talking about the norm, ie. that most people in therapy are not like your mother. Therapy has become fashionable. Everyone is "working on themselves" and plenty of therapists like patients that are well off and so can pay regularly.
> I get it. You are convinced therapy is intrinsically a scam
No, that's not the point I'm making. At best, you could maybe case what I'm saying as "the therapy industry/fad is a scam, and plenty of therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists are feeding into it".
There are people that legitimately need therapy to develop coping strategies to address trauma or retrain maladaptive behaviours, because even as ineffective as it sometimes is, it's better than nothing. My point is that a lot of people who go to therapy probably don't need therapy, and even if they do they don't need as much as they think they do, the techniques in therapy are not very effective even in the best case, and that therapists are not incentivized to stop seeing patients that are paying them well and triage to cases that need more urgent intervention and probably can't pay them regularly.
Part of this is probably because of the US's dysfunctional medical system, and another part is because psychology and psychiatry has not had a good track record for empirically sound practices. It's getting better but has some ways to go.
So, if the customer is dying (and we're all dying), it's not a scam, but if the same service is provided to someone else, it's a scam? That almost sounds like, (...wait for it...), the service isn't the scam.
> Therapy has become fashionable.
Nothing worse than services that have become fashionable.
> Everyone is "working on themselves" and plenty of therapists like patients that are well off and so can pay regularly.
Nothing quite like customers who can afford to pay for your services. Mercedes dealers tend to focus on those people too. ;-) Is it your position then that services that only wealthier people can afford are a scam? Is it not possible that they're receiving some benefit from the service that others would benefit from if they could somehow afford them?
> My point is that a lot of people who go to therapy probably don't need therapy, and even if they do they don't need as much as they think they do, the techniques in therapy are not very effective even in the best case, and that therapists are not incentivized to stop seeing patients that are paying them well and triage to cases that need more urgent intervention and probably can't pay them regularly.
Ice cream is similarly a scam, because a lot of people don't need ice cream, but they think they do. The ice cream is not very effective for them even in the best case, and ice cream makers are not incentivized to stop selling it to people who don't need it.