Therapy experience is associated with negative changes in personality (2017)
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
Here's a link that gets you a pdf, I recommend reading the general discussion.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Therapy%20experience%20...
The role of therapy is usually to break these "causality loops" by first introducing the idea that there is another possible way of interpreting these perceptions, and secondly asking the patient "Well, what kind of life do you want to have, and how can you get there?" A good therapist doesn't encourage people to dwell on negative perceptions; rather, they should be encouraging you to acknowledge the thought, and then also come up with other possible framings, explore what you really want, and act on that.
Causality vs. correlation is somewhat immaterial: the point is that your cognition is both a reflection of the world as it is and a driver for how you would like it to be, and so it functions as a feedback loop. If you're getting good results in your life it's a good feedback loop, but if something is wrong and you haven't been able to fix it, it can be helpful to have a trusted outsider who can point out your unspoken assumptions.
But you can't ignore the fact that therapists are people too and may be injecting their own bullshit into the equation rather than helping the person sort their own crap out of the equation.
I mean, I upvoted you and I think it's a good comment, but I have had lots of serious personal problems where other people wanting to "help" was really other people wanting to insist on keeping me down and expecting me to be grateful for it. Many of the more well meaning types wanted to help me, but not enough that I could genuinely stand on my own two feet. They wanted metaphorically get me out of the wheelchair and walking, but they wanted me to always need a crutch so that they could be needed because they needed to be needed or they couldn't imagine anyone could genuinely love them or want to friends if they weren't desperately needed by someone who couldn't cope on their own.
You sound like someone who believes in the power of positive thinking. I think if you wouldn't use your concepts of feedback loops in thinking to sober a drunk up and shove them in a car, you shouldn't consider them appropriate therapy for any other mental state.
This isn't true. Satisfactory work is not always affected by perception or quantity of work (someone may be doing good work and thinking it's poor; someone's hard work can be another's easy work; someone can do a lot of quality work without huge effort). Quite a few successful people with imposter syndrome and depression exist. People don't have super powers in terms of causality. What people think or "think" often doesn't matter that much and it's rather dangerous to give it so much gravity. This is far more gravity than the individual themselves gives their thoughts.
> If you're getting good results in your life it's a good feedback loop, but if something is wrong and you haven't been able to fix it
The problem is this describes an incredibly linear, just-world model of reality. I.e., if someone is getting good results in their life, it's due to them. If someone is getting bad results in their life, it's due to them. There's no room for randomness here, while in reality our world is very random, and people may be getting very random results and assigning them all sorts of wrong causalities.
It's really going to be a rather lousy therapist not realizing this and blaming some patient for reacting to some trauma. People's weird loops are often just adaptations to the random, erratic, and unfair world around them.
> If you believe therapy is completely unhelpful, you won't listen to anything the therapist says and so it will be unhelpful.
Well, that's useful, given that despair is pretty common in depression, one of those illnesses people go get therapy for. Good thing this isn't true, and people absolutely can be pulled out of ruts by random outside events or by well-placed conversation. I would say therapists are not very useful if they can't do something as simple as pull a person out of a standard "everything sucks and will always suck" loop.
It's not that it's due to them, it's that this is the only part they can control. Luck & randomness happens. Over the course of a lifetime it usually averages out for a given person - that's why we call it luck.
But for some people, instances of bad luck can set them off into a downward spiral that prevents them from taking advantage of instances of good luck later, while other people shrug off the bad things and take full advantage of lucky opportunities later. You can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.
One of the skills that therapy, done right, teaches is being able to recognize what's realistically in your control and what's not, and then not paying too much attention to what's out of your control.
Plus medication was one of the treatments under "therapy" in this study - and there's serious doubt whether medication(in general) is helping or harming.
Overall it seems like a fairly shallow study, though it does raise questions.
Extraversion: "leave me alone"
Agreeableness: "the world is shit"
Conscientiousness: "my home is a mess"
Openness: "Why try something new if I know I'm not going to like it"
Conscientiousness: "my home is a mess"
People who go through these phases, or live in this reality, are more likely to have seeked therapy. The results could imply that, after all, it is not very effective, since it is observed that "Therapy experience is associated with negative changes in personality", but to make the analogy clear, you could say: "People with heart transplants see reduction of heart function".
The unskilled will make a mess of what they are given out of incompetence.
The dishonest will make a mess of what they are given out of greed and malice.
Sadly, in this case, the one suffering the consequences is not a car or some code but a person.
Edit: It was an honest question, and it does appear to be considered an untrustworthy profession as a whole here. I was just asking clarification if that was the intention of the parent poster.
My wife and I saw two couples therapists. One was, again, a guy with some kind of certificate that did things like literally pulling the Good Will Hunting "It's not your fault. It's not your fault." hand-on-knee line as well as outright verbally attacking my wife. The other was a PsyD who made more progress with us in three sessions than almost a year of sessions with the other.
The crux of it all, in my estimation, is that you get what you pay for. A PsyD having a doctorate can command hundreds per hour which puts them out of range for many people.
1. This doesn't make people happy. Constantly trying to fix yourself is like running past the goal post as soon as you get there.
2. Life just sucks sometimes, and therapy doesn't always make it better. You can't force a therapist to actually have compassion and empathy for someone if they don't. This may be complicated. Therapists and stuff may have their own issues, like the fact that they have to deal with a world where everyone has access to almost the same information they do. How can they help? How can they deal with a dynamic where a mentally ill person may even understand this, and have compassion for it? That has to be confusing.
The world is crazy and there are no rules. We want to believe there are rules when there is chaos, but there aren't. Sometimes you just have to trust people. That can be really scary if you don't know them, and it can also be really scary if you've been educated into a career where you are constantly on the lookout for people that could be ... dangerous.
Also culture. There's a fuck ton of stigma going around for mentally ill people lately. Just because we were more aware of it a couple of years ago doesn't mean it improved collectively. We've taken a massive step backwards culturally when we blame every horrible thing that happens in the world on mentally ill people. That's all in the cultural background noise, it changes things, affects the ways people see things, affects their fears. We are not omnipotent beings that know everything.
Some information that people with fucked up intentions intend on spreading for whatever intent - you gotta fight it. If you don't, it's going to hurt you in the long run. That's something I've learned through lots of confusion.
I wouldn’t be so sure https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/cdc-homeopathic-heal...
This is what stood out to me and seems similar to problems I hear regarding internal medicine. Doctors trust their intuition above results of novel studies. It takes time for their recommendations to catch up.
Let me start out by saying that although I am not a psychotherapist, I do have a masters in psychology, and two years graduate clinical training, plus experience in the field. I also have some experience helping conduct psychotherapy research studies.
Back in the 60, a well-known psychological researcher named Hans Eysenk published a claim that, based on an analysis of many psychotherapy outcome studies, psychotherapy does not work. This sparked a great debate.
I was puzzled by this claim, since it seemed clear to me that psychotherapy could be helpful. But then years later I read an article in the Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, I think it was the 1979 edition.
It was written by Truax and Carkhuff, and it summarize a number of studies that looked at outcome by psychotherapist. What they found was that about 1/3 of psychotherapists were helpful with most of their clients, 1/3 had little impact, and 1/3 were on the whole harmful.
Based on a good deal of experience in the field, including a whole summer observing psychotherapists practicing group psychotherapy in a mental health clinic, this seemed to me about right.
I think the problem started with Freud. He was a brilliant man in many ways, but I think it is clear he was not very good at actually curing people of their personal problems. In the decades that followed, I think there was a pattern that developed where some training institutes, Freudian and non-Freudian, were run by therapists who are poor at the craft and so don't know how to teach it to others, and furthermore don't know how to select students who would be good therapists, while at other institutes the overall pattern was neutral or positive.
I have been out of the field for many decades, and had hoped things had improved. Alas, it seems that is not the case.
OK. So this is a observation study, not an experiment. Only correlation can be inferred, not causation.
To make it clear why you can't, let me come up with a new, parallel study:
Track everybody who self reports being told they have a genetic disposition to cancer by a doctor. Divide them by those that decide to go a cancer treatment center vs those who don't. The study would probably show that cancer treatment centers are associated with shorter lifespans.
That makes sense, because you're not going to go to a cancer center treatment if you don't have cancer. But it doesn't mean that going to a cancer treatment centers are ineffective.
Self selection in a study means you can't infer causation. You can only infer correlation.
Note: I'm not actually weighing in on whether I think therapy is good or bad. I'm say the results of this study could happen either way.
Edit: I think you could reasonably infer that therapy isn't enough whenever it is used. But you can't tell if not going to therapy would have been better than going to therapy for those who did - so if there's an action item from this study, it's to improve therapy. But I don't think you can unequivocally say: this study shows therapy is bad.
Misdiagnosis was the worst part of my experience, but not the beginning or the end. Diagnoses are naturally a double edged sword and some therapists avoid them altogether, but it seems a clear mistake to focus on this conflict.
Bureaucracy notwithstanding, a lot of the reason for diagnoses is that the suffering seek closure. I declare however that a lot of the reason for the mental health field is that the citizens of a suffering society seek closure. The therapist delivers that closure in the form of: “It’s you.” Whether this contributes something wholly productive to that person’s mental health is surely circumstantial. For me, it was a disaster.
I’m not comfortable making similarly broad assertions about therapy itself, but in my experience, it was just me opening up to someone who didn’t open up to me. Having a 3rd party to resolve disputes is not any new invention so couple therapy and similar should probably be considered separately. As for individual therapy, I have been inable to map the process by which what we call therapy today evolved from what was psychoanalysis. My fear is that it was painfully basic and painfully stupid. Can someone fill me in?
Some of my friends are in the mental health field and a couple of them are very open minded, willing to discuss these things. Our conversations led me to make a vow that I will never visit another mental health professional for as long as I live. Being no stranger to the history and other less contempory criticisms of psychology, the experience motivated me to learn more about the industry of psychology in America. I think the issues are strikingly congruent with contextual issues in the structures that empower it. In the US, this would be law enforcement, healthcare, academia, public education, the economy. In a sum, I concluded that capitalism is simply not as fit to address mental health problems as it is to create them.
You shouldn't remove something so relevant from the title.
study seems to have used some kind of matched pair design. maybe there's something to this...