I don’t have much knowledge of all the different types of therapy, but I can talk from personal experience. In my own experience I found the following to be true, but of course that could just have been specific to my situation:
1) I did not find the professional psychologists that I went to to be tremendously helpful. Much more useful in my situation were caring, thoughtful individuals who were short on formal training but rich in common sense and life experience. (This type of person used to be called “wise”, but that term seems to have gone a bit out of fashion.)
2) Caring, understanding, and supportive relationships were crucial for me. Family, friends, mentors, and role models all served different supportive roles in this regard, and all were important. In fact, the thing that finally did away with my depression was forming the best and closest relationship in my life—namely meeting my wife.
3) There’s a big difference between trying to root out the underlying cause of someone’s depression vs. doing practical things to alleviate it. I once saw this compared to a patient who comes in with a gaping wound. If you just try to find out the underlying cause without first treating the wound, then the patient will quickly bleed to death. If you bandage the wound without treating the underlying causes then the patient may live a bit longer but they’ll still die. The psychologists and counselors I dealt with all tended to focus on underlying causes, and that was definitely important. But what I usually needed was some short-term bandages. Sometimes what I needed was some concrete, practical advice that I could put to immediate use. Or sometimes the best help would have involved a direct intervention on the part of the counselor, such as getting on the phone with some of my mentors / friends and enlisting their help, or arranging with my teachers to see if there was something that could be done in the classroom that could help. But psychologists are often prohibited from doing things like this.
I don’t have much knowledge of all the different types of therapy, but I can talk from personal experience. In my own experience I found the following to be true, but of course that could just have been specific to my situation:
1) I did not find the professional psychologists that I went to to be tremendously helpful. Much more useful in my situation were caring, thoughtful individuals who were short on formal training but rich in common sense and life experience. (This type of person used to be called “wise”, but that term seems to have gone a bit out of fashion.)
2) Caring, understanding, and supportive relationships were crucial for me. Family, friends, mentors, and role models all served different supportive roles in this regard, and all were important. In fact, the thing that finally did away with my depression was forming the best and closest relationship in my life—namely meeting my wife.
3) There’s a big difference between trying to root out the underlying cause of someone’s depression vs. doing practical things to alleviate it. I once saw this compared to a patient who comes in with a gaping wound. If you just try to find out the underlying cause without first treating the wound, then the patient will quickly bleed to death. If you bandage the wound without treating the underlying causes then the patient may live a bit longer but they’ll still die. The psychologists and counselors I dealt with all tended to focus on underlying causes, and that was definitely important. But what I usually needed was some short-term bandages. Sometimes what I needed was some concrete, practical advice that I could put to immediate use. Or sometimes the best help would have involved a direct intervention on the part of the counselor, such as getting on the phone with some of my mentors / friends and enlisting their help, or arranging with my teachers to see if there was something that could be done in the classroom that could help. But psychologists are often prohibited from doing things like this.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.