Damien at the Speed of Life

Photo by corrinely

There’s a new book out questioning whether psychotherapy works and whether it ever worked for that matter. As I read the review, I found myself saddened at the lengths to which the author had apparently gone to imply that psychotherapy doesn’t work and that it has blossomed in recent decades as a result of surreptitious intentions. In fairness I haven’t read the book, only a review of it. Still, it brings up a real topic.

Why do healthy people get mad at ill people?

No family can ever know the sting of mental illness until they have been through it with a loved one. The numbers of those afflicted with clinical disorders is a small percentage of the population so it is highly likely many people will never go through that sort of experience. This is unfortunate because books and articles and even talk shows at times paint mental illness as some form of lepersy. The fact of the matter is that many perfectly sane people engage in behavior much more dangerous than mentally ill people.

Is mental health a real science?

Depressed people are ridiculed by friends and family often because they can’t just “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.” This tends to even be a sort of professional view nowadays of psychiatry and psychotherapy in general. My wife and I even got some strange stares a while back when we shared we were going to a marriage therapist. I don’t care what anybody thinks, the cognitive stuff we got from that will help us our entire marriage. Some stuff was complex like the REBT theories and other stuff was simple like “mirroring” what the other said as a form of “active listening.” What educated person would say psychotherapy like that was false?

Think of those who suffer.

I do believe drugs are a bit over-prescribed but the point the cynics are missing is this: peoples’ suffering is being alleviated by psychotherapy. Go sit in an ER in the middle of the night and watch what comes in. You’ll see a miscarriage or two, a heart attack maybe, stroke, and maybe a young girl who thinks her phone is tapped. She’ll be so upset they’ll need to restrain her. Where will the cynics be then? They’ll be sleeping in their beds, able to sleep no less, with their alarm clocks set to wake them up to ordinary lives.

Does psychotherapy work?

Not only do I believe psychotherapy works, I think it is a collective work of genius. The cognitive strategies extant can help us through any difficulty. They aren’t 100% successful but what medical procedure is? To say that mental illness is “normal” and we are all the same is dangerous. As a society we should recognize some people are “touched” with too much madness and we should do all we can whether it be creating drugs or creating cognitive strategies to alleviate that collective suffering. If false stigmas continue it could feasibly have profound effects on the mentally ill such as the difficulty of getting life insurance quotes. Let’s hope it doesn’t go that way.