Reposted from December 2005
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“I need (undefined) therapy.” Means I feel bad and think I will feel better if other people listen to me endlessly. Our other offerings, including group therapy, won’t be considered real therapy. One on one contact that involves something other than just listening -- assigning homework, or examining assumptions, for example -- will be grudgingly acknowledged as therapy, but not good therapy. There will be something wrong with the therapist. Other variations include “I haven’t gotten any therapy here.”Rescuing women often accept the reasoning from the violent men in their lives that the men just need to “get their anger out somehow.” Actually, these guys get their anger out just fine. It’s keeping it in we want them to work on. This seems terribly unhealthy to both the violent male and his rescuing female, who are puzzled that mental health professionals do not understand this very obvious psychological need. This particular bit of faulty reasoning is often paired with needing “therapy,” as above.
2 comments:
Therapy isn't fungible, is it? The Atlantic had an article about a recent study (paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/teen-mental-health-dbt/675895/
It's this study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796723001560
At any rate, as an observer, many people seem to believe any therapy will help anyone. I wonder why would anyone think a therapy mode developed to help extreme outliers ("suicidal borderline personalities, mostly adult women") would be applicable to a group of young teenagers?
The magazine article cites other studies that have shown that mass therapy isn't effective for students. Again, as a curious observer, is there a belief that therapy that helps depression in one sort of person will be universally applicable to any other group?
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten is my go-to for getting unbiased show-me-the-numbers mental health info. Here is his discussion of Depression and treatment
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/peer-review-request-depression
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