On August 16, 2025, psychotherapists are taking to the streets of Bern. The grievances: fees too low, therapy slots too few, bureaucracy too much. The media narrative is ready-made: a mental health care system in crisis.
But anyone who examines the demands behind the rally's slogan - "Mental Health for All — Stop the Care Crisis" - discovers not so much a health problem as an accumulation of professional cognitive errors: psychotherapists who refuse to think for themselves.
Mental Health as a Legal Entitlement? An Intellectual Declaration of Bankruptcy
"Mental health is a fundamental right — not a luxury." So reads one psychologist's call to demonstrate. The sentence sounds compassionate, modern, humane. But considered on its merits, it is nonsense.
Health is never an enforceable entitlement, neither physical nor mental. No law, no institution, no health insurer can guarantee that a person will feel well.
Mental health is not a deliverable product. It is the result - not the right - of an active confrontation with oneself: with self-defeating thought patterns, the blind spots of emotional wounds, and distortions of reality.
To frame mental health as a "right" is to invert the relationship between cause and effect. It strips the individual of responsibility — and transfers it to the system. Yet this very fantasy of absolution is the first obstacle to any successful psychotherapy: the absence of personal responsibility and self-reliance.
What Psychotherapy Really Is: From Insight to the Work on Oneself
Anyone who embarks on psychotherapy should understand: a psychotherapist cannot solve problems — he can only make them visible and point the way toward solutions.
Effective psychotherapy that incorporates cognitive methods is a guided system of self-help, not a repair shop. It works only when the patient becomes not a consumer but an active collaborator.
The goal is personal responsibility, not provision of care. The best psychotherapists do not help patients feel comfortable — they teach them to think soundly.
Written Cognitive Psychotherapy (WCP) by Dr. Dietmar Luchmann, LLC, provides assistance for self-help to enable the self-healing of psychological disorders:
1. Discover WCP
2. Take Suitability Assessment
3. Start Self-Therapy
Once this is understood, the decisive step toward mental health becomes clear: it is not "care provided by others" but the individual's own cognitive effort in overcoming pathological thinking errors. The desired sense of well-being is attainable only through the cognitive unlearning of thought and behavior patterns that generate suffering.
Psychotherapy or Chat Ritual? The Quality Problem
The reality looks different. A large proportion of what passes for psychotherapy today consists of unstructured conversations: empathic, friendly, therapeutically garnished — but substantively hollow.
There is talking, consoling, flattering — but no work on the reality-defying thinking that forms the breeding ground for anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and depression.
For decades, psychotherapy research has demonstrated that with cognitive psychotherapy methods, most of these disorders can be eliminated in an average of ten sessions — even when they have been chronified over decades by ineffective treatments.
Yet many patients endure years of sessions without any change in their core beliefs, behavior, or way of life. This is not entirely their fault. They are trapped in the widespread cognitive error that it is the psychotherapist's job to make them feel good.
Psychotherapists reinforce this conveniently self-serving cognitive error, selling sentimental chat sessions at premium rates as psychotherapy. They shy away from the effort of thinking for themselves and demanding independent thought from their patients — because the recognition of cognitive errors is painful.
Such "chat sessions" would be of little concern — were they not financed by the general public. But they are reimbursed as medical treatments. And this is precisely where the scandal begins.
Therapy Without Accountability — An Absurd Privilege
Primary medical care is strictly regulated. Surgeons, internists, radiologists must justify their methods, demonstrate outcomes, and submit to evaluation. In psychotherapy, by contrast, a weekly conversation and the right form are often all it takes for the health insurer to pay — for years on end, with no efficacy review and no proof of therapeutic success.
When SVP National Councillor Martina Bircher submitted a motion to the National Council on September 27, 2023, demanding that psychotherapy for "everyday problems" no longer be billed through mandatory basic health insurance, professional associations condemned it as an attack on mental health. Yet the motion's assertion - "feel-good events are not medical treatments" - is simply an appeal to economic reason and therapeutic honesty.1
Self-Investment: The Most Effective Therapeutic Approach
One insight unites all good psychotherapists: the most effective therapies begin where patients invest in themselves — financially included. Those who pay for their own development engage. Those who engage change.
Full cost coverage by health insurers may be well-intentioned as social policy — psychologically, it is often counterproductive. The ideology behind it is a textbook example of propagating institutional order at the expense of thinking things through — for it creates the illusion that mental transformation can be consumed.
It takes no psychotherapist, only common sense, to understand: change begins with personal responsibility. And responsibility manifests first in one's own actions.
A Profession in Avoidance Mode
Psychotherapists perpetually demand more resources — but deliver no quality assurance. They lament the shortage of therapy slots while defending interminable therapies without goals. They claim interpretive authority over mental health, yet argue like lobbyists serving their own interests.
According to OECD statistics from 2014, Switzerland has by a conspicuous margin the highest number of psychiatrists per capita in the world — twice as many as Iceland, which holds second place.
The OECD survey of Swiss psychiatrists revealed that their average treatment duration is approximately 60 months. This is beyond all standards of effective psychotherapy.
Dietmar Luchmann, Psychotherapist: "Anxiety disorders and panic attacks can be perfectly overcome through cognitive methods. Anyone who instead accepts a psychotherapy lasting more than ten sessions, or medication, is accepting improper treatment."
In response to Interpellation 14.4178 on the "psychiatrist glut in Switzerland," submitted by SVP National Councillor Sylvia Flückiger-Bäni on December 11, 2014, the Federal Council confirmed the OECD statistics in a statement dated March 6, 2015: "Switzerland has by far the highest density of psychiatrists," it reads.2
More than ten years have passed since then. Switzerland now has more psychiatrists and psychotherapists in private practice than general practitioners and pediatricians. Anyone who ventures to think for themselves even a little will recognize: the problem is not too few professionals but too many inefficient therapies.
The central question is: why does a profession whose most important instrument is rational thought so consistently avoid analyzing its own thinking? The answer is uncomfortable: because it is easier to be provided for than to question oneself.
What is called avoidance in patient therapy goes by the name of "systemic critique" in professional politics. Except that the system is not the problem here — it is the self-image of a profession that refuses to critically examine its own methods — methods that have long been recognized as inefficient.
Cognitive psychotherapy "is, on average, highly significantly more effective than psychoanalytic therapy and person-centered therapy," demonstrated psychotherapy researcher Klaus Grawe of the University of Bern in the standard work Psychotherapie im Wandel [Psychotherapy in Transition] (1994).3
In Switzerland's psychotherapy paradise, the transition from the psychoanalytic creed to the profession of highly significantly more effective cognitive psychotherapy remains unwelcome in many quarters in 2025.
Conclusion
The crisis in psychotherapeutic care is real. But it is not merely a question of fees — it is a question of intellectual honesty. Anyone who truly wishes to promote mental health must first summon the courage to abandon the illusion that it is a legal entitlement. Mental health is not a service delivered by the healthcare system — it is the achievement of the thinking individual, rendered unto oneself.
1 The Swiss Parliament: Wohlfühlveranstaltungen sind keine Krankheitsbehandlungen [Feel-good events are not medical treatments]. Motion 23.4108 of September 27, 2023, submitted by Martina Bircher (SVP).
2 The Swiss Parliament: Psychiater-Schwemme in der Schweiz [Psychiatrist glut in Switzerland]. Interpellation 14.4178 of December 11, 2014, submitted by Sylvia Flückiger-Bäni (SVP).
3 Grawe, K.; Donati, R.; Bernauer, F.: Psychotherapie im Wandel: Von der Konfession zur Profession [Psychotherapy in Transition: From Creed to Profession]. Göttingen: Hogrefe Verlag, 1994, p. 670.
Your Comment
Do you have remarks, suggestions, or additions regarding this article? Do you have personal therapy experiences? We welcome substantial feedback.
Comments
Person Affected
August 18, 2025, 1:59 PM — from InsideParadeplatz
Fantastic article! For over 20 years I went to therapy and ended up sicker than when I started. One tentative diagnosis after another, pathologized personality traits, "deficits" here and "traumas" there. You are literally conditioned into becoming a helpless victim. What finally set me free was shifting my focus from what is problematic to what is functional. The only thing missing from this article is the distinctly feminine dynamic of the psycho-industry. It had increasingly made me doubt whether any of this could ever do me justice. I feel like a former cult member.