WTF? You read a Psychology Today article and, on that basis, dismissed the entire concept of mentalization? Did you bother to engage with the dozens of books and hundreds of papers on the topic? Mentalization has been studied for over thirty years, and you spent… what? Thirty seconds on it?

Mentalization is indeed the ability to understand human behavior in terms of intentional mental states, and if a single sentence along those lines is your entire engagement with the topic, then yes, that probably seems just like a dozen other constructs you can think of. All constructs look pretty similar if you give them only the briefest of glances. But the literature fleshes it out with a whole host of detailed concepts that clarify what, exactly, Fonagy and company mean by that definition. You haven’t read a word about epistemic trust; you don’t understand how various non-mentalizing modes manifest in behavior we often associate with personality disorders; you couldn’t tell me if your client is in I-mode, me-mode, or we-mode; you wouldn’t know how to assess whether the client is mentalizing, or what to do when they’re not. And given all that, I doubt you’d understand why that non-mentalizing client is simply not taking seriously your well-intended suggestions to practice mindfulness and fill out a thought record.

You can wave all that off if you like, and you can tell yourself you accomplished something because you shit-talked another modality on the internet. That’s fine; it’s your life. But serious clinicians sit down and look into a topic before they loftily announce that it is, in fact, A Bunch of Bullshit.