Other than cognitive-behavioural therapies many form of brief psychotherapies have been developed in recent years to tackle specific problems, with scientific literature showing their efficacy.
At the moment measuring the results, understanding and testing what works and why it worked, is an element of mental-health intervention that’s receiving more and more attention and it’s being required in many “schools” or approaches.
From what I’ve seen, most of the resistance to this is coming from the “long” forms of psychotherapy, arguing that it’s too difficult.
But yeah, as a field, psychotherapy is still struggling with the task of getting rid of a bunch of stuff that’s about as evidence based as voodoo, and the standards required to operate in mental-health are way too lax.
Many books written to train psychotherapist will tell you that most of the healing power comes from the relationship between the psychotherapist and the patient, and that you have to rely a lot on your personal experience and intuition, with no mentions at all of attempts to do better and to improve the methodologies.
Talking to a professional is still your best shot if you need to take care of your mental health, but you might want to find out which school or approach use the professional you are considering, and whether they have an approach of measuring results, operating on scientific evidence and so on.
Edit:
This was probably, to no small extent, responsible for the existence and continuation of psychotherapy in the first place—the promise of making yourself a Master, like Freud who’d done it first (also without the slightest scrap of experimental evidence).
I agree wholeheartedly, still Freud has the credit that the field was such a disaster when he started, that talking to people and trying to go by ear was still a huge improvement. He wanted to help people and didn’t understood the scientific approach well enough to use it in such a confusing and unexplored field as mental health, or just wanted to help people now and not 50 years later.
His biggest success seems to be the radical intuition that talking to people with mental health issues yield better results than torturing them and locking them up, but it was still an improvement and I think scientific psychology would have been born a lot later without the impact his ideas had on popular culture, so I’d avoid picking on him too much.
I have a master degree in psychology.
Other than cognitive-behavioural therapies many form of brief psychotherapies have been developed in recent years to tackle specific problems, with scientific literature showing their efficacy.
At the moment measuring the results, understanding and testing what works and why it worked, is an element of mental-health intervention that’s receiving more and more attention and it’s being required in many “schools” or approaches.
From what I’ve seen, most of the resistance to this is coming from the “long” forms of psychotherapy, arguing that it’s too difficult.
But yeah, as a field, psychotherapy is still struggling with the task of getting rid of a bunch of stuff that’s about as evidence based as voodoo, and the standards required to operate in mental-health are way too lax.
Many books written to train psychotherapist will tell you that most of the healing power comes from the relationship between the psychotherapist and the patient, and that you have to rely a lot on your personal experience and intuition, with no mentions at all of attempts to do better and to improve the methodologies.
Talking to a professional is still your best shot if you need to take care of your mental health, but you might want to find out which school or approach use the professional you are considering, and whether they have an approach of measuring results, operating on scientific evidence and so on.
Edit:
I agree wholeheartedly, still Freud has the credit that the field was such a disaster when he started, that talking to people and trying to go by ear was still a huge improvement. He wanted to help people and didn’t understood the scientific approach well enough to use it in such a confusing and unexplored field as mental health, or just wanted to help people now and not 50 years later.
His biggest success seems to be the radical intuition that talking to people with mental health issues yield better results than torturing them and locking them up, but it was still an improvement and I think scientific psychology would have been born a lot later without the impact his ideas had on popular culture, so I’d avoid picking on him too much.