Are friends more useful than therapists? -- GREEN EVENTS

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 13:49:47 04/17/03 Thu
Author: Graham John
Subject: Are friends more useful than therapists?

Intelligent friends more useful than psychiatrists? Green Events would be interested to receive comments from therapists and patients on the points made below via Green Events Forum.

The point of view that intelligent friends more useful than psychiatrists is expressed by Dr Raj Persaud, a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in south London in his recent book, "From the Edge of the Couch", reviewed on Wed 12 March in The Guardian newspaper.

Criticism of the effectiveness of psychiatry dates back some 50 years, when Hans Eysenck conducted the first proper analysis of clinical trials of therapy at the Maudsley Hosital in London. Eysenck�s research showed that only 64% of patients undergoing psychotherapy as opposed to 74% in a comparable control group made an improvement as a result of treatment. Allen Bergin , a psychologist at Brigham Young University, investigating the scatter of such results, discovered that in psychotherapy patients often did extremely well or extremely badly by comparison with the control group. In other words psychotherapy may actually harm some patients. Research evidence also suggests that sticking rigidly to one school of therapy is bad for patients.

Despite these findings there has been a rapid growth in psychotherapy in recent years, and the Department of Employment estimates that 2.5 million workers in Britain deliver counselling in one form or another as part of their job.

Lester Luborsky, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found that it didn�t seem to matter what particular school of psychotherapy was followed � the benefits are apparently equal for patients. This finding suggests that talking to someone who encourages you and activates hope is the main ingredient in successful therapy. Hans Strupp and Suzanne Hadley of Vanderbilt University found in work they conducted in 1970 that depressed patients treated by a group of untrained people did just as well as those treated by trained and experienced psychotherapists. In 15 separate major scientific attempts to pool all the research done into the effects of therapist training and experience on patient outcome, only one showed a positive association. Another study by Dr William Piper of Alberta University showed that the more interpretations a psychotherapist made, the worse the patient got.

The conclusion is that the benefit gained from professional therapy is no greater than that obtained from talking to a reliable, understanding and intelligent friend. Chris Harding in his article "Personal Growth Therapy and Healing" (South West Connection, Issue No. 65, p35) would seem to make a similar point when he states that the "quality that heals is LOVE, transmitted through the therapist�s attention and care."

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]