Anyway, I agree when they say that people who need therapy the most are the ones who cannot afford it. It makes you think different, not just pat you on the head and commiserate.
On the other hand this is where therapy starts and ends. Ultimately a therapy is started because the answer to it is too negative. And if it's positive enough afterwards, it means the therapy was successful.
Or to put it the other way, there are issues where a Psychological tag can be put upon. After all the classification is largely a statistical one. But no therapy may be needed when the person is doing well.
Obviously things are more complex but from someone seeking Psychotherapy this is what it boils down to. Granted, some problems cannot be solved by Psychotherapy but that's a different topic.
Also I think it's worth mentioning that many people cannot even answer this simple question. No expert on this, but my presumption is also that through expectations e.g. in society and the career objective points are more in focus and not so much how an individual feels about it.
Though I was not sure about sharing them and more importantly I still have to clearly identify them and list them out to be able to share.
It would be a good exercise and I will try to do that. Thanks for the idea.
I agree with you, I'm pretty sure after that there are things that were explored and not explored that maybe are hidden from view.
A good friend of mine is very good exploring things with "why is that?" or "give me an example" but they are just tools.
So now whenever I am in a tricky situtation, I ask myself that question. It gives me more understanding of my feeling.
And once I've more grasp on it, I can tackle it better.
Really all you can do is stick with it for a few months and see if you get better. It’s hard to tell in an immediate moment if it’s good
You can tell they've never dealt with a person with narcissistic / sociopathic personality disorder. You express your emotions to them, all it does is provide them with a crystal clear signal of how to push your red buttons and believe me they will.
A lot of therapy is based on the assumption that "we're all the same" or "we all mean well" but it's simply not true. There's real scum out there.
Yup, and that's a particularly important lesson in context of group dynamics, where a large enough group (of say 10+ people) almost certainly contains some bad eggs, and if you present yourself as either isolated or psychologically vulnerable, these people WILL single you out.
Though the corollary is true as well - if you meet enough people, sometimes you will get to find folks who surpass your expectaions.
Many people actively work on making other people's lives miserable, everyday.
The solution to this, by the way, is not to become more sociopathic but just to be aware they exist and how they operate. The kind of schemes they put together are embarrassingly simple to understand and spot, but only once you know about them.
I always thought that coursework/lectures on this topic during high school would be extremely beneficial for the young and perhaps even quite fun to go through.
In a way, it's like talking about friendships. Some people certainly have better "friendship skills" than others, but because a given person has such skills, it doesn't automatically make them a good friend to everybody.
The 1st one asked me the most basic nonsense and then told me she thinks I just drink too much coffee so I didn't go back.
The second one told me they don't believe in medication so I never went back.
The 3rd one diagnosed me with seasonal affective disorder in about 5 minutes, gave me a little prozac and changed my life.
I suspect there is an overwhelming amount of terrible therapist.
I don't think the challenge is finding a good therapist but in not getting stuck with a terrible therapist or letting a terrible therapist ruin the whole idea of therapy.
Can you say any more about how a therapist might be more suitable for some patients than others? Is it about a methodology (like cognitive behavioral therapy), or about disorder(s) the therapist usually treats (like addiction), or is it something else (possibly something the patient won't discover until after treatment starts)?
If it’s all about methodology then a) we’re robots and b) there would be no need for therapists.
That way of thinking treats therapy almost like medicine.
Imagine if any other doctor operated like that like you had to visit 3-5 endocrinologists to get a diagnosis for your thyroid disorder.
And even if you find the right guy/gal, the best they'll probably be able to do is help you help yourself, as most of the problems in ones life have external causes, and it falls to the individual to resolve them.
It's just baffling that this is considered a legitimate medical discipline in 2025.
Even though self-help is considered a meme, I found way more success with it, as flipping though 5 different books until you find the one that you like and is much easier than visiting 5 therapists. And being honest with yourself is also much easier than being honest with a complete stranger.
Most mental issues have internal or behavioral causes. Therapy addresses your ideas about the real world, not the real world itself. For example, it can enable a choice never seen as possible before, and while the real world stays the same, your position in it may change to something unthinkable before.
Sure, lots of self-reported successes by patients with no control to compare against, but at this point there is just as much self-reported evidence that prayer works.
For medical treatments, the bar should be higher than "patient believes it worked".
When you go to a psychiatrist, now we are talking medical treatments. That is where you get a specific diagnosis and possibly medicine to change how your body and mind work. That is where to expect objective results.
Both explore what is needed by talking to patients, often with some testing... but they are not the same thing. And neither are going to solve all problems for all people. But it helps to evaluate them properly if you understand what they are, and what they are not.
Most kinds of therapy, by contrast, are closer in their empirically measured effectiveness to studying geography through astral travel or studying history through past-life regressions. CBT and exposure therapy are among the few exceptions.
If you remove the assumption that a deity answers the prayer; what they're doing is focusing on gratitude and if asking for things they are identifying goals. This is a healthy mindset so unsurprising that they report it "working".
It's a bit unfortunate that people out of the psychology area don't even really know that there are multiple different Psychotherapies approaches and that they vary wildly in how problems are tackled/studied (source: my wife works in the area).
You'll not be able to prove validity of the concepts behind this school of therapy themselves in any other sense, even if you would be able to identify some coherent set of concepts from all the various techniques and approaches that CBT subsumed over the years.
And certainly just because "if you follow these practices, you will maybe get better" metric does not say anything about validity of the concepts of a particular school of therapy in any case, no matter what school you're talking about.
I mean yeah, many people usually care about whether some therapy works and how well, and not whether the concepts that you're told in therapy to justify what the therapy is doing make coherent sense or can be scientifically validated, so this is usually not a problem for people in need of care. But idea that CBT's concepts are more objective than other mumbo jumbo therapies out there is just plain wrong.
It’s not like with a broken bone where you can look at an image of the bone and see that it has healed, you have to rely on what a person tells you, which is inherently subjective, and since a person can’t be cloned, you can’t have a “control” either.
If the patient is happier, does it matter if there isn't an objective measure.
Quite to the contrary, while there is plenty of evidence of specific types of therapy yielding actual results, there's often very little evidence of the methods commonly applied by psychiatrists (i.e. medication) to be actually beneficial.
In fact, some types of psychiatric drugs (with SSRIs probably being the worst offender) are actively harmful, while evidence of their presumed positive effects is vague and ambiguous at best.
What tools for "measurement of success" does a psychiatrist have that aren't available to a therapist?
i imagine success stories tend to self-select as well. if you go to therapy in the first place it means you're admitting a need and willingness to change.
if a person thinks they know everything and can't benefit from therapy then they're probably unlikely to gain anything from the experience.
To give a very "Hacker-Newish" snappy remark:
So, if the therapy teaches you programming, and you thus get a much better job improving your life, you'd claim that "learn to program" is a suitable therapy? ;-)
But this is true of things that we already know don't work - aromatherapy, homeopathy, acupuncture.
The evidence for therapy is neither more nor less than the "evidence" for things we already know fails double-blind studies.
There is an extremely large body of evidence that therapy substantially improves psychological disorders as measured by these diagnostics and measurements.
What are you talking about?
Yes. With two different therapists. Also people close to me have been.
I see no difference between the results from therapy and the results from prayer and a belief that aliens with UFOs made things better.
The take away is basically you should pay attention to your emotions, don't be afraid to express your emotions and don't be afraid to try new things. Which feels like something you would see on instagram written over a sunset.
Perhaps its just a case of the difference between knowing the path and walking the path, and the 12 months was learning to walk it.
Therapy isn't really about the advice but actually transforming it into action, as you say, walking the path instead of just knowing the path.
But for someone who is, let's say, suffering from depression, the aforementioned path sounds like cheesy bullshit and not a source of happiness at all. They don't do those things for many different reasons depending on the person's psychological history, and the advice sounds empty because they don't realise it actually works.
I had been avoiding that advice, pretending outwardly that it was bullshit, for 30 years of my life. Those cliche Instagram slogans actually do mean a lot to me now, it just turns out I literally spent my entire life until now unconsciously, but actively, avoiding them.
The way I learnt to take my first step on that path was to understand the rich psychological tapestry that caused me to avoid the path.
