# From NY Times: In Therapy Forever? Enough Already



## VeronicaM (Dec 4, 2005)

Check out this excerpt from a recent Times article:



> _MY therapist called me the wrong name. I poured out my heart; my doctor looked at his watch. My psychiatrist told me I had to keep seeing him or I would be lost._
> 
> New patients tell me things like this all the time. And they tell me how former therapists sat, listened, nodded and offered little or no advice, for weeks, months, sometimes years. A patient recently told me that, after seeing her therapist for several years, she asked if he had any advice for her. The therapist said, "See you next week."
> 
> ...


Read rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/o...rever-enough-already.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


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## VeronicaM (Dec 4, 2005)

Here's a link to the comments: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/knowing-when-to-put-an-end-to-therapy/

Taking your own personal experiences into account, what do you make of all this?


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## sheblushed (Dec 29, 2012)

well i'm sure there's a lot of ineffective therapy. i have no idea how often i've been there (my first one) i'm guessing 6-8 times, but like 20 more sessions are planned? soo... idk. but... how is someone supposed to help you in only 3-10 sessions?


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## SublimeChange (Dec 9, 2012)

Maybe they feel like its a one way conversation? Some therapists do like the approach of letting you guide yourself through healing, with them as a sidekick. But some therapists do use that as an opportunity to not talk at all. And you feel strange doing all the talking because what you want the most is your therapist to help, or at least say something.


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## millenniumman75 (Feb 4, 2005)

It depends on how deep-seeded the problems are. Some issues can't be resolved in six visits.


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## bent (Aug 4, 2005)

How about 600 visits? 6000? Let's try to be serious here. It is a fraud.


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## Spungo (Jul 30, 2012)

VeronicaM said:


> Here's a link to the comments: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/knowing-when-to-put-an-end-to-therapy/
> 
> Taking your own personal experiences into account, what do you make of all this?


my opinion based on absolutely nothing:
People get stuck in endless therapy because psychologists cannot prescribe drugs nor can they talk sense into someone who is crazy. It's like talking to a wall, so they just listen. And they listen. That goes on until you stop going.

I'll give an example of unfixable craziness: social anxiety. The logical part of my brain knows that most people really don't give a crap about me. The emotional part of my brain says the opposite; it says people will remember every word I say and they will judge every word I say. The logical part of my brain says that being rejected by 90% of women means I will be successful with 10%, so I should get out there and ask women out on dates. The emotional part of my brain is terrified of rejection and would rather have a 0% success rate just because there's no rejection. I could probably go to talk therapy every week for a decade and make almost no progress.


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## VeronicaM (Dec 4, 2005)

bent said:


> How about 600 visits? 6000? Let's try to be serious here. It is a fraud.


bent,

Why do you think it's a fraud?


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## bent (Aug 4, 2005)

I would not be able to do that question justice here but I will begin by letting you know that I have already posted some of my experiences with doctors and therapists elsewhere on this forum.

I think the future of therapy should not include a paid therapist. There are computer programs that might be able to be developed to provide people with some assistance. As for human contact only real associations, not paid ones, can be helpful. And as I have mentioned elsewhere, associations with a therapist, especially medical doctors, are often not only useless but actually HARMFUL.

Recently I had to extend useless 'therapy' sessions with a very dirty person who has acquired a medical degree (after six attempts she finally got into the 'alternative admissions' med school in this part of canada) because I did not want to have to start all over again with another doctor and go through the protocol to be allowed to pay for new drugs that can provide me with some real, albeit minor, assistance. This individual would repeat practically the same things at each session and asked the same questions because she couldn't be bothered to keep track of the details of the file and her attempts at changing me were facile and miscalculated. However, she did keep track of any details to do with social status, be it academic, professional, or financial and that was very revealing. I have written about her in another thread. At the last 'therapy' session she tacitly insulted me and tried to place herself above me for leaving a decently reputed school to do a different program at another worse reputed one. I made this decision because I did not like the professors and did not want to spend an extra year to transition into the program for which I did not already have a bachelor's degree in that subject. However, she took this as an opportunity to imply that she is intellectually superior to me because she had taken additional courses in this subject after her fine arts degree (at undergrad level btw, I was doing master's level) and done well as a means of increasing her chances of getting into the crappy med school she eventually got into after at least six applications, by her own account (she told me this at the beginning of the sessions before they became overtly abusive). Now, I'm not going to belabour the fact that her implications of superiority were unwarranted and that most people would not agree with her self-flattering choice of perspective. I'm only going to say that regardless of whether she views it that way it is GROSSLY INAPPROPRIATE for someone who is supposedly providing therapy to communicate this to me as she did. Not only is it rude and unprofessional but it is quite disgusting because she is getting paid to supposedly help people who feel vulnerable and diminished by others...yet she takes pleasure in diminishing them to inflate her own pride. I hope people are able to digest the full extent of how dirty and outrageous this scenario is. And while she may be an exceptionally pernicious doctor I don't believe my experience is unique. 

Why do I think it's a fraud? For starters look at how easy it is for doctors and other therapists to run amok with the suckers who show up to their offices. These people probably don't even believe in their methods themselves deep down. They only cling to the conveniently developed lies and habituate themselves all too easily to the do-gooder posturing since it provides them with the easiest paid job ever combined with a deceptive and protected means of satisfying their dirtiest of egoistic desires by abusing vulnerable people. That fact alone, and mine is by no means the only anecdote, should make people wonder about the concept of psychotherapy. 

But even if one looks at the raw data that attempts to track success rates it becomes evident, and has been admitted on numerous occasions since it's so obvious, that therapy simply doesn't help people. I was recently once again disappointed while listening to cbc radio when they mentioned in passing that cbt 'has proven to be very successful'. However, that is incorrect. It has apparently proven to be the most successful form of therapy but that is a far cry from very successful. All the success rates for therapy are surprisingly low. Apparently cbt is a bit higher than the others so in that sense it's 'very successful' but it's still low. Moreover, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the methodology employed to arrive at any claims of success is guaranteed to be less than kryptonite. And in fact, if most people who have felt bad/disturbed can be caught over say a five year period saying 'I feel a bit better now than a few years ago', one might even wonder whether the therapy, cbt included, has actually lowered the rate of improvement since everyone who's been down seems to get better at a higher rate than those who went to cbt or other therapy. So many variables, and how do you keep them accurate? And then you are building more variables on the practically arbitrary faith placed on the first ones, and on and on. You can see just what a mess it is to try to make any claims of success in this area. This is something that has been going on for decades. People nevertheless stay in therapy because they cling to it like religion and have nothing else to turn to in hopes of improving their lives. But the doctors and therapists just laugh it up all the way to the bank, believe me! If they could be priests or psychics at a fair and get the same kind of money and perceived status they'd all be doing that instead.


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## tbyrfan (Feb 24, 2011)

SublimeChange said:


> Some therapists do like the approach of letting you guide yourself through healing, with them as a sidekick. But some therapists do use that as an opportunity to not talk at all. And you feel strange doing all the talking because what you want the most is your therapist to help, or at least say something.


I wonder if most therapists are like this; I had to deal with a lot of this during my 6 years of therapy. I had several therapists (4 were long-term), but none of them worked for me, mostly for that reason. I told them that some of my goals were to learn coping skills and ways to build my self-esteem, but they never had my goals in mind and just sat there like a wall while I ranted. I almost never received feedback or advice. :stu I came into therapy aware of what I needed to work on, and I needed help coming up with strategies to work on those things. That rarely ever happened, though, and i've had more success coming up with those strategies myself and using trial-and-error.


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## Pam (Feb 14, 2009)

I think one of the commentors got it right when they said therapies like CBT are being described as better only because they are easier to research!

Therapy should be judged by the patient. Only he knows if he is making progress. And he is the one who should decide what changes he wants to do, not the therapist! 

As far as number of sessions--it takes however long it takes. But a therapsit should not "keep" a patient they know dang well they can't help. That seems unethical.


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## puppy (Jun 27, 2012)

I'm not stopping therapy anytime soon. I'm scared of going through a Flowers for Algernon regression.


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