the IFS takedown: my unfiltered response to the psych industry’s victory lap

Nov 4, 2025

A viral article ignites a fierce debate over Internal Family Systems and its critics. The discussion highlights psychiatry's questionable history while questioning who truly understands the mind. Important topics include the failure of the chemical imbalance theory and the dubious practices surrounding antidepressants. Scandals like Castlewood raise ethical concerns about memory recovery techniques. The clash between scientific and metaphysical views of therapy emphasizes the need for a nuanced understanding of healing.

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INSIGHT

Selective Outrage In Psychiatry

The psychiatric establishment's gleeful takedown of IFS exposed a selective outrage and ideological boundary-policing.
Molly argues psychiatry has its own record of harmful, unexamined practices that limit its moral authority.

INSIGHT

Psychiatry's Unaddressed Wrongs

Psychiatry promoted the serotonin myth and approved harmful trials while avoiding broad accountability.
Molly contrasts this historical silence with the immediate condemnation aimed at IFS.

ANECDOTE

The Castlewood Catastrophe

Castlewood is presented as a horror story where IFS allegedly led to false memories and extreme behaviors.
Molly stresses Castlewood's leadership, practices, and context made it an outlier, not representative of all IFS.

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When New York Magazine dropped its viral feature “The Therapy That Can Break You,” in The Cut on October 30th, 2025, the internet exploded with hot takes. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts flooded X (Twitter) with posts claiming they’d been “right about IFS all along.” In this episode, we’re going to completely dissect this article, as well as all the backlash and scandal surrounding it. The question hiding underneath it all is this:

Who gets to own and define the human psyche?

Together, we’ll break down:

The media’s framing of Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a “cultic fad”
Psychiatry’s very own record of harm (from the serotonin-imbalance myth to ghost-written SSRI trials)
How “Castlewood’s” scandals became a morality play for the mental-health establishment
Why metaphysical and imaginative models of the mind still matter
The line between healing frameworks and corporate therapy empires

You won’t hear me outright defend IFS or the biomedical model of mental health in this episode. My goal was to expose the hypocrisy that fuels both.

If this episode opened your mind, felt validating, or even challenged your perspective and you’d like to hear more, follow Back from the Borderline on the podcast player you’re on right now. Rate, review and share it to help more people find nuanced conversations about psychology, spirituality, and the culture of healing.

Link to the full article by Rachel Corbett can be found here: https://www.thecut.com/article/truth-about-ifs-therapy-internal-family-systems-trauma-treatment.html

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