Comment by gyello
8 days ago
Respectfully, that view completely trivialises a clinical profession.
Calling evidence based therapy a "checklist of advice" is like calling software engineering a "checklist for typing". A therapist's job isn't to give advice. Their skill is using clinical training to diagnose the deep cognitive and behavioural issues, then applying a structured framework to help a person work on those issues themselves.
The human connection is the most important clinical tool. The trust it builds is the foundation needed to even start that difficult work.
Source: a lifelong recipient of talk therapy.
>Source: a lifelong recipient of talk therapy.
All the data we have shows that psychotherapy outcomes follow a predictable dose-response curve. The benefits of long-term psychotherapy are statistically indistinguishable from a short course of treatment, because the marginal utility of each additional session of treatment rapidly approaches zero. Lots of people believe that the purpose of psychotherapy is to uncover deep issues and that this process takes years, but the evidence overwhelmingly contradicts this - nearly all of the benefits of psychotherapy occur early in treatment.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30661486/
The study you're using to argue for diminishing returns explicitly concludes there is "scarce and inconclusive evidence" for that model when it comes to people with chronic or severe disorders.
Who do you think a "lifelong recipient" of therapy is, if not someone managing exactly those kinds of issues?