Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoZebra120vClip | Hacker News Reader

NoZebra120vClip

This is a weird article, and one of the weirdest features that leaps out at me is that they are treating "psychotherapy" as a monolithic thing to discuss and be studied. There are, of course, many forms of psychotherapy, such as CBT, EMDR, IFS, etc. etc. So I don't see how any one monolithic study of "psychotherapy" can evaluate its effectiveness, even if they are going to focus solely on depression, and indeed, this article only addresses depression.

Furthermore, of course, depression does not occur in a vacuum, and in my case it was the tip of the iceberg, and future sessions would progressively refine and broaden the diagnostic landscape.

Most of all, the positive experiences I have gained from psychotherapy are not simply talking to a professional guy and having him validate my feelings, but rather I've learned practical tools for coping and alleviating symptoms. You may work out of this year's depression, only to find yourself depressed again in five years. If you had taken drugs, then you come crawling back to the psychiatrist and the pharmacy again and you get back on drugs. If you had taken psychotherapy, then you may not need to return to the psychotherapist, if you have been equipped with the right tools, you could have them in a notebook still, and then you just do some checklists, you follow steps, and you've got your skills for coping back at your fingertips again.

Granted, I don't believe that psychotherapy is the be-all-end-all of curing mental illness. In fact, psychotherapy was invented in competition to, or perhaps as a replacement for, auricular confessions to a Catholic (or Orthodox) priest. The Protestant Reformation had eviscerated Germany's ability to cope with the mind's inmost challenges, and the common people had lost their most trusted human confidants, the ones who ministered in the person of Christ. So Freud and his Freunde came up with a way to whisper secrets to a man, have them held in confidence, and maybe even get some advice in return. But essentially, it was just a secular façade to compensate for a sacrament which had been efficacious for thousands of years.

I can assure you that a great majority of practicing Catholics do not treat confessions seriously. Coming from a traditionally Catholic society, we don't have any better coping techniques than "simply man up".

I'm fascinated with Americans who discover Catholicism though. Suddenly the religious parts of Europe become what Japan is to anime enthusiasts - a mythical land of perfection.

> I'm fascinated with Americans who discover Catholicism though.

Catholicism is the largest single denomination in the United States.

> Suddenly the religious parts of Europe become what Japan is to anime enthusiasts - a mythical land of perfection.

Not really; very few American Catholics, cradle or convert, mainstream or “trad”, idealize “the religious parts of Europe”. American Trads idealize a fairy-tale vision of pre-Vatican II Catholicism which they are very aware does not reflect the present of Europe, and most American Catholics don’t idealize any particular alternative time and/or place in human history, current or past, real or imagined.

Focusing on denominations is a bit misleading, since some Protestants are anti-denominational (i.e., they reject denominations as wrong, which is kind of like Roman Catholics, except those Protestants go from one to zero ;-).

By affiliation, Protestants make up 66% of Christianity-derived religions in the US. 29% are Roman Catholic. Evangelical Protestants alone are 36%. (Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...)

Religious affiliation is also highly geographically variable in the US, so many places would have relatively little cultural awareness of Roman Catholicism.

Therapy in combination with the right medication has shown higher effectiveness long term than each alone.

> In fact, psychotherapy was invented in competition to, or perhaps as a replacement for, auricular confessions to a Catholic (or Orthodox) priest.

Thank you for showing me a positive aspect of Catholicism. Their 7 deadly sins are just symptoms of people trying to numb their emotional pain for me. Shame makes people feel worse though. The threat of eternal punishment in an imaginary hell is a lousy deterrent to bad behaviour.

The words ascribed to Jesus, whos' story was written down 40 years after his "death" for the first time, work well though. Forgiveness works, the person that practices it benefits the most. You can do it for purely selfish reasons, to stop burning your energy being angry at people. Even if you practice Satanism after Anton LaVey, the first religion without a god.

If you want to hear people trying to numb their emotional pain, stop looking at the 7 deadly sins and start looking at the Stoics. Ancient or Modern

For what it's worth, Catholic priests specifically remind people (the few who go) not to treat Confession as a therapy session. The purpose of the sacrament is different from talking out your problems.

>practical tools for coping and alleviating symptoms

Can you share some of those or are they rather personal?

I practiced visualizations as a way of coping with overpowering emotions. For example anger as fire which can then be extinguished, controlled

I don’t remember everything from my sessions, but in case of my severe anxiety we used text logs of (date, emotion, situation, initial thought) and my “I/they must” attitudes. Eventually we found a set of automatic (unconscious) thoughts that led to the symptoms. Once I started to root them out, anxiety reduced and panic attacks stopped completely.

Collecting this info was a homework because you can’t do it right in a session. The final homework was to consciously break “I/they must” attitudes. Specifically, I intendedly was several times (1) late for something, (2) went somewhere completely unprepared. As you may have guessed, I had two separate anxieties of being late or unprepared (among others). Ofc it’s not that I’m always late or unprepared now. But my own pathological anxiety feedback loop is no more in these cases.

These methods aren’t secret and every <insert type of psychotherapy here> book describes them in detail. You don’t even need to go to a therapist to use them, like you don’t need a programmer to use scandisk or memtest. But detecting inconsistencies in yourself is much easier when you talk to a different person.

In addtion to sibling three simple ones and a book recommendation:

Observe your thoughts.

Replace B/W "all or nothing" thoughts with logically correct ones.

Wear a rubber band around your arm. Every time you have counter productive thoughts, snap it lightly. Their frequency will go down.

The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris. It is about the very effective Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

I second the Happiness Trap.

I don't know your reasons for asking, but we are not therapists, we don't know you, and I implore you not to try anything in your free time without direction and guidance from a professional who's charged with your care.

The variety of psychotherapeutic approaches is discussed in the article. You can just ctrl+f for "cognitive behavioral".

I agree with GP after investigating your response, TL;DR: because it's very narrowly true: mentioned once, can be found via [searching the article].

Investigation revealed the context of this single mention is a claim that it is a lie to say the modalities are different. This context is created for a claim that [recent metastudies] showing therapy effective are falsified, proof being the modalities are all moderate to high effectiveness.

The reading of it is a polemic against a They, starting as "experts" in the subtitle and continuing throughout, leaving a generally correct GP versus a narrow claim that a modality name is mentioned once.

If you mean to observe that the authors literally typed the string "cognitive-behavioral therapy" into their draft, then yes, they did that: the string occurs one time, in a list of modalities, linked to a paper that they propose shows that all therapeutic modalities have comparable effect sizes despite the fact that even the abstract of that paper says otherwise.

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