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Comment by intellectronica | Hacker News Reader

Another suggestion: age. It's usually wrong to discriminate on age but when it comes to therapy there's broad agreement that people with more life experience (and likely more time practicing) are often better placed to offer help. Let others be the guinea pigs of that young and promising therapist and choose for yourself someone with a few decades of experience.

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Can you link to published research indicating that there is any correlation between therapist age and patient outcomes? Many people come to the helping professions later in life, and time spent practicing is the just about the only factor that counts for behavioural therapies (with the caveat that therapy outcomes are a difficult thing to measure). [1][2]:

1: Estimating variability in outcomes attributable to therapists: A naturalistic study of outcomes in managed care - Wampold, Bruce E.,Brown, George S. (Jeb) Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol 73(5), Oct 2005, 914-923

2: Huppert, J. D., Bufka, L. F., Barlow, D. H., Gorman, J. M., Shear, M. K., & Woods, S. W. (2001). Therapists, therapist variables, and cognitive-behavioral therapy outcome in a multicenter trial for panic disorder. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 69(5), 747-755.

> time spent practicing is the just about the only factor that counts for behavioural therapies

When using age as the predictor I'd imagine time spent practicing is the latent metric actually being measured. You can't have 10 years of experience at age 25. That said it seems silly to use age when time spent practicing is a readily observable value.

If, as GP stated, life experience was a significant factor in fostering the therapeutic relationship than older therapists with equal or lesser experience than their younger peers would have better results, though I agree that it likely is simply a proxy for YoE

Anecdotal, but imho old therapists practice older research. Younger ones are more apt to continue their learning, with the exception of my mother, who is nearing her 80's, still has a vibrant private practice, just completed a 3 year academic program (well past medical school she did in her 30's) to maintain current training, etc.

Its a mixed bag on age. Younger, I think, is better due to both learning more recent research and also continuous education. Relatableness is a factor. Again, all anecdotal.

> there's broad agreement that people with more life experience are often better placed to offer help.

Broad agreement among whom? As with MDs, I would expect several complex trade-offs. Particularly between the value of medical (and life) experience against the value of being trained with the current science and treatment methods. For therapists I would also expect more significant trade-offs due to the difficulty of building strong therapeutic relationships across large age differences for some patients. Are you aware of any studies on the issue?

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