To think therapists are mostly charlatans?

[BlueJuniper94]

I've heard in real life of people who have made radical decisions/changes in their lives because of what a "therapist" has said to them. Things that have surprised me as it seems outside the scope of what I thought therapists are there to do (although it's perhaps not entirely clear what that is now).

Today I was listening to woman's hour where a woman being interviewed about her husband walking out on her and her kids tried to keep it from them for a month as per her therapists advice which she said looking back was the wrong thing to do. I am surely this therapist was handsomely paid nonetheless. Aibu?

Clinical Psychologists with a Doctorate are. Not all Doctors are 'medical doctors' (to use your phrase).

I don't think someone should be making massive life or death decisions based on things their therapist says. Nor should a responsible therapist be trying to push someone into doing something radical.

I mean there's no reason why the therapist knows how to make your life happier any more than you do in many ways. Or they might just be rubbish or have poor judgement.

I'm a therapist. I would never (and generally therapists are not supposed to) advise people of anything. I work with my clients in order to help them figure out what's best for them or what they want and then support them in that if needed.

Sometimes people interpret that as us telling them/advising them to do something but actually it's usually just easier for the person to say the therapist advised that, because it means they don't have to say "I want to/I decided to/I need to xxx".

Some therapists are better than others. Some are not very good. Some have questionable ways of working. I think you get that in any area of work, its just very unfortunate that this has real effects on peoples lives, but then so do nurses, solicitors, estate agents etc, anyone that people have to trust, or that are responsible for big parts of peoples lives.

Yes… a family member went to a “hypnotherapist” for her food addiction/help with weight loss, and came out absolutely brainwashed deciding to divorce her husband, imploding up her family, and now quoting self-help books while leaning on her new boyfriend from Gambia. The funniest part? The “therapy” seemed to work on everything except the one thing she actually went for 🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

YABU.

i say this, because if people are stupid enough to just go and see anyone without checking credentials then that’s a them problem. And yeah, majority of these “therapists” are completely personality disordered themselves.

Wouldnt touch anyone without a counselling psychologist PHD personally.

Some, yes. It's an unregulated industry so of course there will be some. Clinical psychologists, no. I've had a therapist where I've known a lot more about a subject that they claimed to be an expert on, on their website, - they were full of outdated stereotypes. Binned them off when I realised I was parting with my cash, to educate them.

@MertonDensher

Psychiatrists are specialists in treating mental health problems via a biological approach. (Medication, setting the section length etc if necessary).They are not therapists.

My nan spent years as a revolving door patient in and out of psych wards. Numerous doctors diagnosed her with different conditions depending on which way the wind blew that day.

She was finally able to come off her lifelong medication and remain at home after she received talking therapy from a clinical psychologist. Only then did her audio hallucinations stop. So in her case, the “specialist psychiatrists” did a whole lot of damage, despite being at the top of the mental health clinician hierarchy.

I agree and empathise with @OtterlyAstounding and others when they say that they're perfectly self aware of their issues but need help acting on their issues to make lasting change. In this respect, this is where many therapists fall down.

FWIW, CBT did nothing for me. I actually felt persecuted as if my problems were my fault (they weren't) and it was a very critical, judgemental and cold process which set me back, frankly.

This brings to me a problem with accessing psychotherapy: how do you know until you need to engage with a therapist, which type of therapy you need? There are so many and unless you've been referred by someone who knows what they're talking about then you could end up with a bad fit which does more harm than good.

I am actually looking to engage with psychoanalysis at the moment. Finding a psychoanalyst in my area with vacancies is proving problematic.

Yes, having read up more on CBT, I'm not sure it's something I'd find helpful, as a guiding principle appears to be: "The insight of the CBT model is that it is not events that bother us. Instead, it is the way that we interpret events – the meaning that we give to them – that gives rise to our feelings."

This doesn't sound very helpful when it comes to processing traumatic events, or even when dealing with maladaptive thinking that arises out of traumatic events - it feels almost victim blaming? So I can see why you felt persecuted, or as though your problems were your fault. I'm sorry you had such a negative experience, though.

@bananafake had some helpful information on finding a therapist that will be a good fit on the previous page - it sounds as though it's the sort of thing that takes a lot of research and informing oneself first.

I wouldn't say deliberate charlatans, rather qualified but no clue in the real world. Following a structured learnt scheme without having the knowledge outside of this or/and the personal skills to explore.

I think the way to think about this is not so much that it's the "fault" of the individual. It just is the way they have learned to think about that situation, most of the time for totally natural reasons.

But the fact is, you can't change events. You can only change how you think about them. So if you want change, learning to stop harmful thought patterns in your life is the way to do it.

Do you think all therapists don’t live in the real world? Haven’t got friends, families, hobbies, colleagues, partners? Do you think they were therapists all their lives? Many therapists have had careers before becoming therapists. They have experienced bereavements, divorces, traumas, relationship break ups: they’re like everybody else.

The good ones have processed their issues and worked through their traumas. They’ve learnt to communicate how they feel and get their needs met. They have found strategies to regulate their emotions and are skilled at co-regulating the emotions of others. They very much live in the real world and draw on this knowledge and experience, allied to their psychotherapeutic knowledge to help their clients.

If you look in some of the directories like Psychology Today or Counselling Directory, you will see that many therapists there actually share some of the experiences they have worked through and explain what brought them to the place of being able to help others. They have their qualifications listed. They have links to their websites with even more information, including their specialist areas. PT even has videos so you can see how ‘human’ the prospective therapist is. Of course some therapists may work in a robotic way, like some doctors or physios. It is difficult but not impossible to sift through the profiles to find the right therapist for you and surely for such an important investment you want to do your research first. I think people sometimes spend more time researching holidays than therapists.

Does therapy necessarily do the celebrities much good though?

Also in some areas of say, NY, therapy is a 'thing' sometimes in not necessarily a useful way. I remember reading in American Pamela Druckerman's French Children Don't Throw Food that most of her NY friends didn't have huge problems but were spending more on therapy than rent.

That sounds like a good summary.

I'm not sure how that works with processing traumatic events, though - how is one supposed to learn to think differently about something that was wholly negative? I suppose perhaps CBT might not be the appropriate therapy for trauma itself, but more for any unhelpful thought patterns that arise from it.

It's all quite interesting!

Such comments cannot be taken seriously. I'd be low key offended, given this is my profession, but having worked with all sorts of people, there's no no point.

I will say that clients do misinterpret what a therapist says and sometimes use the therapist as an excuse to do what they want... to them or sounds better to say the therapist said it.

I network with other therapists as part of my CPD and most of us have experienced a client say something like " You told me I should do xyz" and no, we didn't.

CBT wouldn’t be about thinking differently about the negative event, more around the thoughts that arise from that. For example someone who has experienced lots of trauma may have lots of thoughts like “it’s my fault” “I am worthless” etc that CBT can help to gently challenge and show people how this may be an understandable reaction, this is not true and support them to move past this. These thoughts will often lead to lots of other difficult patterns (e.g. letting others abuse them as they feel they are worthless) that can be focused on in therapy.

EMDR works better for trauma processing IME. Then maybe you can work through the self limiting beliefs with CBT or similar.

This is made more difficult but the terms being used in multiple ways. Have a think about whether you want to go back over your past, and think about what went wrong, or whether you want to focus more on the here and now and building up strength without spending lots & lots of time in the past. Psychotherapy should indicate past, and counselling should indicate more of the here and now, but the terms tend to be used interchangeably.

So I would quiz any potential therapist about this to make sure you get the right fit for you.

That may give you a shortlist anyway!

I think NY is maybe very specific in terms of there being a culture of being in therapy. I don’t believe everyone needs it, and maybe no-one does. But I’m thinking of celebrities like e.g. James Norton, who I think of as intelligent, and he has spoken about how useful therapy is for him. If you weren’t finding it useful, would you keep going? Personally I wasn’t, so I stopped. But it occurred to me recently that perhaps I would have found it more helpful if I could afford James Norton’s therapist!

It seems logical that, like any job, there are people who are better and worse at it, and the ones who are better command high salaries (though also as with any job I’m sure there are also factors like social connections that help).

It depends on the therapist. Some are very good some aren’t. I’ve been helped a lot with bullying at work by a therapist when I was seriously depressed.

I’m sorry it hasn’t worked for you. However even medical treatments are often not universally successful and we don’t say doctors are charlatans because they can’t cure everyone.

It sounds like you found therapy shallow and pointless. That’s a real shame. It doesn’t even seem like you found the process supportive with everything that is going on for you, which must be very frustrating. But it doesn’t damn the whole profession: it means either that you didn’t have the right therapists or that it wasn’t right for you.

Volunteering is definitely something that has been shown to improve mental health so I can see that it was valuable for you. However not everyone is able to improve their mental health enough to volunteer or to see that it is something that will benefit them.

I did find it useful knowing that I didn’t need to be a people pleaser in order to be a valuable person. I also found it useful to see that my parents were tossers, which is the opposite from what I’d been told all my life. I found it incredible useful knowing how to set my own boundaries and not be sucked into their psychodramas. Having therapy has enabled me to be a better friend and parent.

You might be able to read a self help book to distill the information you gain in therapy. But that doesn’t mean you would be able to apply it to your own life and understand exactly how you have been affected by your past.

And having faulty thought processes is not your fault. It also doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It just means the way you’re thinking might be detrimental to yourself and potentially to your relationships with others. For example someone might catastrophise about elements in their life. Now that might be down to past experiences like e.g. anxious parents. If you catastrophise it may prevent you from doing things that might positively benefit you. But many people are not aware of their tendency to catastrophise and how it has stopped them from taking up opportunities ‘because it’s bound to be a disaster’.

That may not be you. You may have excellent self awareness. Or it may not help you to see how certain patterns of thinking have a negative impact on you enjoying your life. But for many people that knowledge together with looking at various options to change how they think are really helpful. It certainly was for me and has changed my life so much for the better. So while it’s perfectly understandable to talk negatively about your own experiences of therapy, extrapolating that to therapy in general isn’t really valid.

@bananafake I have not described anyone as a 'charlatan'. (That was the OP). I have stated my opinion (like arseholes, we all have one, especially on here...) that therapy can work on people who don't blush at the idea of inflicting their little neuroses on a paid stranger and are self-interested enough to listen to themselves droning on about it during what (for me, in my busy life) was a serious time commitment. I reached the conclusion that my time is better spent looking outwards to others, rather than reflecting on things I cannot change. Imagine if everyone currently in therapy spent that time or money on their community, what an amazing difference it would make to society eh? Now imagine if only 20% of those people found it equally or more effective than therapy, and continued to do so?

The premise that talking to a therapist can alter thought patterns does not remotely wash with me. As I wrote before, how and why would it? It's a conversation. No therapist (and I have consulted many) has even explained that satisfactorily, nor have they ever said anything that I have not considered myself, being a moderately curious and intelligent human. Maybe their success stories are more suggestible people than me.

The comparison with medical treatment is a bit disingenuous too. The success or otherwise of drugs or procedures may be objectively measured by observable cure or improvement. The success or otherwise of psychology can (presumably) only really be measured by self-reporting. Who is to say that talking to a friend or the dog or a stranger would have been more effective? What about a comparison with regular exercise, fresh air and a good diet? Putting the bins out? Re-organising a cupboard?

And the tyrannical thinking comes out yet again in your post, i.e. it means either that you didn’t have the right therapists or that it wasn’t right for you. Thank you for proving my point so eloquently.

@Vinvertebrate therapy can for some people change thought patterns because good therapy can challenge unconscious assumptions, or ones that people have been fed from childhood. For example "you should eat less than men at the dinner table" (with the subtext that men > women) as an obvious example, or that you're worthless if you have sex before marriage. People are still fed both those beliefs, even now.

The challenging gets people to be aware of the lines that they have been fed as children and if the therapy is successful it can literally start forging new brain connections. The more the person chooses to think and act differently (in these cases, serving themselves as much as the man, allowing themselves a sexual relationship with their bf) the stronger the connections get. The old neural pathways never completely disappear but the new ones get stronger and stronger.

You're not wrong that volunteering can be a really constructive thing to do. But you asked how therapy can help change though patterns, and that's how. Choosing to think of pre-marital sex as pleasant and natural rather than a sin - but some people need external help to make that shift, because it's going against the extremely powerful parental conditioning.

Objectively therapy -is- hard to quantify but trauma, especially childhood trauma, tends to lead to a considerable number of physical issues later. Immune system, digestive system and skin are the three major ones. Trauma that people have come to terms with tends to lead to less use of medical services, at least that's the theory.

And actually, walking, fresh air, exercise, healthy eating, a reasonable social life, not much alcohol, a reasonably tidy house, a safe environment are all very helpful in maintaining good mental health. No doubt studies could be done to see if depressed people recovered better if they changed to healthy living from unhealthy living v therapy, or if a combination of change to healthy living and therapy woukd be best. Don't know if those studies have been done.

The tone of your post is generally sneering though, so it looks like you've tried therapy, it was not effective for you and you're completely dismissing it. But I don't think that because it wasn't helpful for you, you can blanket dismiss it for everyone "and their little neuroses". Therapy has in some cases helped people who have been to hell and back, and it's a wonder they are still walking this earth, never mind managing to hold down jobs and relationships.

I have a coupe of friends who are therapists and both fantastic at what they do. Genuine loving and caring people however I also know one that is a narcissist, a liar, shitstirrer AND she has been overheard telling stories outside of the therapy room. She is known for this and her practice hopefully will get shut down sooner rather than later. I think it needs more regulations though.