Therapists seem to rarely utilize legitinate therapy techniques. How should this be dealt with?

[Nexey]

I've been in and out of therapy since the age of nine and let me tell you... Most therapists are scam artists who take no pride in their craft. Very rarely will they use actual techniques for helping you (CBT, DBT, MBT, etc.). Instead, they'll just opt for half-listening and giving you the sort of naive, meaningless "advice" you'd expect from a teenager. The only instances I can think of that involved therapists actually using legitimate therapy techniques involved them just printing out pages from books and giving them to me.

But, is self-therapy even viable? How would one go about doing such a thing? Is there any way of receiving legitimate therapy that doesn't involve cycling through dozens of hacks and shelling out hundreds of dollars?

Does anyone still wonder why recreational drug use is so popular?

 

[BeansOfRequirement]

https://sanctioned-suicide.net/thre...de-is-entirely-one-option.59855/#post-1108297

 

[EmbraceOfTheVoid]

I stopped going to them, that's how I dealt with it. They don't have any special insight into the human mind and they're playing a guessing game that is often harmful. I avoided CBT and any variations as they try to pin the blame on your thoughts and feelings rather than the things external to you that are causing them.

I have read of some people on Reddit going to unlicensed therapists that offer things like MDMA therapy if it's within your financial means so maybe that's a potential option.

@KuriGohan&Kamehameha

As others have said, Psychiatry and Psychology are different. Psychiatrists can prescribe medication, while Psychologists are only lisenced to practice therapy and offer ways of coping that do not involve pharmaceutical intervention.

However, these two specialisms come from the same side of the coin when it comes to the fact that both of them are entrenched in the concept of diseases originating in "the mind".

There is an article floating out there somewhere about why Psychiatrists resist merging with Neurology, they seem to distance themselves from the idea of purely physical, somatic ailments causing someone to have a distressed mental state, I suppose because research is incredibly lacking in regards to mental ailments.

Likewise, many psychiatrists and psychologists seem to neglect very important environmental and socioeconomic factors that would rationally make a person depressed, scared, miserable, and anxious. I find it akin to scolding a person who recoils when they touch a hot stove. Your brain's natural response is to send out signals of pain in response to the damaging stimuli that has just burned the skin, you can't really control that reaction.

When people who are poor, alone disabled, underemployed or unemployed, marginalized, being abused, neglected, and so on and so forth seek assistance from the mental health industry, a lot of them are told they are ill and are either medicated unnecessarily or forced into things like CBT which tells them their negative feelings are cognitive distortions. When feeling awful and depressed in those situations is a completely natural response. If your environment is godawful, it is hard to delude yourself and pretend everything is peachy instead.

So instead of giving those people tangible help that would improve the mental anguish caused by their circumstances, or simply trying to provide symptom relief for things like lethargy, panic attacks, and loss of appetite, we tell them they are diseased. There is a serious lack of pragmatic help in these fields. People who need human connections aren't given opportunities for developing social skills besides their artificial interactions with the therapist. The impoverished aren't being given financial assistance. The unemployed aren't being given references and assistance with gaining employment.

I do believe medications and therapies have their place in some situations. I lived with a violent schizophrenic, who absolutely needed to be on a low dosage of Antipsychotics or else everyone in the family would be continually tormented by them. People who are violent or having extreme hallucinations do need pharmaceuticals to manage their conditions in the majority of cases. Likewise, Lithium can be helpful to some bipolar people. Yet, I think SSRIs are handed out like candy, and rarely alleviate the problem because the efficacy seems to be marginally higher than a placebo. A good number of serotonin receptors are in the GI tract, so I got nothing out of those medications except further illness.

Also, psychiatry truly lacks reliable diagnostic tools and relies on very subjective criteria. There are no blood tests, no scans, no biopsies, and things like the DSMV are often far too broad and speculative. I was seeing many different psychiatrists from age 13 to 20 and it took 6 years for them to order a laboratory test for me.

By then it was too late, I've had neuropathy for years now and it was very likely kickstarted by the fact I had dangerously low vitamin b12 levels for years and no general doctor or psychiatrist would give me a blood test, insisting my symptoms were psychosomatic.

Sure, these disciplines are not lobotomizing people anymore or locking women in prisons for disobeying their husbands under the guise that this behavior was lunacy and insanity.

However there are still human rights abuses going on every day in psychiatric wards. People being put in restraints because they're suicidal, forced drugging and physical exams that can traumatize a vulnerable person, gaslighting, verbal abuse, the list goes on and on. We should strive to criticise psychology and psychiatry to improve them, not shrug our shoulders and say, "well at least we aren't living in the barbaric times of lobotomies anymore!"

People airing their grievances against these professions on this forum doesn't mean that you personally have to stop engaging with these services or question their benefit to you, especially not if you've improved with voluntary therapy or psych meds and whatnot.

This discussion is not about those who personally benefited from psychiatry or psychology and thus see no issue with it, it is about the people who are receiving subpar, lackluster, un-scientific, and quite frankly, shitty care. Individuals who want things to change, and want to push for better treatments, diagnostic criteria, and services aren't going to impede someone from accessing things like talk therapy and SSRIs if they personally want those options for themselves and find them helpful.

But when it seems like the entire world does nothing but victim blame those who got no results from these things, and insists that it is a deficit of willpower and desire to change, that is the problem. Telling people they need to keep throwing out money to try a million different therapists is appalling. If you sent a plumber out to fix a leaky pipe and he couldn't do it, you wouldn't have to call 30 different plumbers to get the job done, would you? So why don't we hold counselors to the same standards?

I get that the science hasn't progressed far enough to understand complex cognitive processes and abnormalities. I am studying a Neuroscience degree, and I know how very little we actually know about things. Yet, we shouldn't put people in harms way and subject them to invalidation and gaslighting because of this. I blame stoicism for creating this falsehood that one can be in total control of their every thought and emotion. Sometimes, most of the time actually, that isn't the case. My severe ptsd isn't going away after reading some self help books about loving yourself.

You can't treat a malfunction of the fight or flight response with self help and mindfulness mantras. Neither can you fix derelict living conditions by popping a handful of pills. This is the dichotomy that psychiatry and psychology have plagued themselves with.

You aren't stupid for being skeptical of these things.

Fixed the quote, sorry my phone jumbled it.

 

[wannago]

Living without it now, albeit close to ctb. I found that even private ones for £70 or so an hour can offer paid therapy sessions - and still only have a college (high school in US) psychology qualification. I think that they should be regulated at working to a much higher standard. The best I've had have been through the NHS, so I guess I can't complain.
£70 / hr, twice a week just to be told to "close your eyes for a minute" every 20 mins though. Shocking. I know that sometimes it works, but c'mon... so fraudulent in a lot of cases.

 

[soakmeinbleach]

also refused to keep going to see them, got passed from therapist to therapist and each 'session' was the exact same but abt a month apart with different people. all they did was say they had to assess me n then said smth like' .....ooh sounds like youve had a hard time... that mustve been hard....' genuinely did not get a single bit of help once,, the last guy answered his phone 4 times in 1 session lol it felt like i wasnt worth it

 

[Puffinz]

I started seeing one about a month ago for the first time in my life and it hasn't really been helpful. Like you said it's just half-listening and the same shit you hear all the time. The most infuriating advice I was given was to "just take deep breaths". Like are you serious? That's supposed to fix my problems? The more I talk with my therapist the more I'm convinced I'm right to be depressed because the world really is a bunch of meaningless bullshit tasks that you have to keep doing all the time and there's nothing you can do about it. Every piece of advice I'm given is shallow, unoriginal, and doesn't actually do anything to fix the underlying feeling of pointlessness that I live with all the time.

 

[Hirokami]

See, what doesn't help is that I risk being admitted into a psychiatric ward if I even mention having suicidal thoughts. For a supposed "safe space", making me feel as if I need to mince my words doesn't help me feel safe at all.

 

[kovkay]

I had a good experience with a counselor provided by my university for free. The expectations were low, I didn't think she'd help me much, but it helped in that I organized my problems in a straightforward fashion and she guided me to solutions, albeit obvious.

I tried going to an actual therapist some time later. I went to only one session. She listened to my "story" and told me to think of a time I was happy and what I did during those times. Seemed like a waste of $150.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

To be fair, some of those techniques are really blatant and easy to see through and therefore won't work on people who might be prepared to stubbornly go against them (like me). The techniques themselves have their own set of flaws...

 

[Life_and_Death]

I do self therapy. And I believe it's something everyone should. No one knows you better then you. They can only suggest stuff. They dont know you. Do some research and find what feels right. Just know that for it to work you have to be honest with yourself.

 

[BigNarkoleptic]

I've been in and out of therapy since the age of nine and let me tell you... Most therapists are scam artists who take no pride in their craft. Very rarely will they use actual techniques for helping you (CBT, DBT, MBT, etc.). Instead, they'll just opt for half-listening and giving you the sort of naive, meaningless "advice" you'd expect from a teenager. The only instances I can think of that involved therapists actually using legitimate therapy techniques involved them just printing out pages from books and giving them to me.

But, is self-therapy even viable? How would one go about doing such a thing? Is there any way of receiving legitimate therapy that doesn't involve cycling through dozens of hacks and shelling out hundreds of dollars?

Does anyone still wonder why recreational drug use is so popular?

Yes, you need to understand how your experiences have shaped your behaviour
And to detach, and rebuild yourself without the emotional ties you grew up with
Start there
Detach
And focus on being who you like
Even if that means making yourself laugh x

 

[Tegan_sky]

In the 1980's into about 1997, when my second (good) therapist retired, I felt like I got REAL therapy from her, for 11 years. I have severe trauma from childhood, both this therapist and the one I saw from 1981 to 1986, both therapists were VERY helpful. The second therapist, who retired in 1997, she herself had been through horrible childhood trauma, had worked extensively on it and healed, and she knew from her experience how to treat me and what I needed. For me, this is a crucial thing, if the therapist has not been through the abuse, suicidal depression, whatever the hard issues are, if they have not been through it THEMSELVES they offer up froth. That's the difference in "therapy" for me nowadays, the "meat versus froth" analogy, I need MEAT when suicidal, expressing feelings, whatever, and today's therapists offer up FROTH instead, useless, vacuous advice like "remember to breathe!" Or "have you tried doing some YOGA poses?" What I felt like telling this one "therapist" who said this kind of crap to me, in 2010 especially, when severely suicidal, I pictured telling her "Yes, right before I jump off the building, I'll 'remember to breathe!' " or "right before I get in the bathtub with a gun, I'll be sure to 'do some yoga poses!' "

I swear that 12 to 15 years ago, no therapists had even heard of the word "mindfulness" AKA pseudo-religion as far as I'm concerned. Now, "mindfulness" is their cop out answer for everything. Some of them even say they are certified in "mindfulness." I need to express my anger, depression, anxiety. I don't need all the fake religion all these "therapists" push these days. I'm in California, I swear that the CA licensing board for therapists has really, REALLY relaxed their criteria for giving these therapists licenses to practice.

Even psychiatrists are getting into this pseudo-religious crap, at least where I live. I found a shrink last July, after another good shrink retired, both the retired shrink and my current one, let me feel my feelings, I can say to them how I REALLY feel, without them doing what one "therapist" did a few years ago, which was shutting down my expressing true feelings with "Now! Let's calm down! Let's BREATHE!" Luckily so far, since 1991, I've had GOOD shrinks, all of them. But in the process of finding my current, understanding shrink, I had to look through SO many shrinks that are now pushing this pseudo-religious crap, just like all therapists are pushing.

Real help for mental health, is sorely lacking. And the people out there who want to take this website down, everyone who posts here have had these feelings THEMSELVES, hence why one can come to SS and be truly understood, heard, validated, we have all been there OURSELVES. I hope SS sticks around, otherwise there is nowhere to express these hard feelings and be truly not judged, be heard, be understood. Outside of a good shrink that is, like I said, so far at least I have had consistently good shrinks. Sorry this is so long, but I feel kind of passionate about this topic.

 

[JipJopMop]

I've been in and out of therapy since the age of nine and let me tell you... Most therapists are scam artists who take no pride in their craft. Very rarely will they use actual techniques for helping you (CBT, DBT, MBT, etc.). Instead, they'll just opt for half-listening and giving you the sort of naive, meaningless "advice" you'd expect from a teenager. The only instances I can think of that involved therapists actually using legitimate therapy techniques involved them just printing out pages from books and giving them to me.

But, is self-therapy even viable? How would one go about doing such a thing? Is there any way of receiving legitimate therapy that doesn't involve cycling through dozens of hacks and shelling out hundreds of dollars?

Does anyone still wonder why recreational drug use is so popular?

Maybe it depends on the therapist, the ones I've seen have always done lots of CBT with me.

Are the therapists you've seen trained in CBT and accredited? (Or the other methods you lisr?)

 

[Sensei]

To be fair, some of those techniques are really blatant and easy to see through and therefore won't work on people who might be prepared to stubbornly go against them (like me).

That's a real problem. I could only take advice from someone who's wiser than me. Essentially, the person must be able to manipulate me for it to work. I think few psychotherapists fit the bill.

 

[BigNarkoleptic]

That's a real problem. I could only take advice from someone who's wiser than me. Essentially, the person must be able to manipulate me for it to work. I think few psychotherapists fit the bill.

Word of advice, build your own aesthetic. Don't feel manipulated, despite our SI.