Article: Counselling: more harm than good?, 2003

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
When it comes to dealing with personal tragedy, it seems you still can't beat the British stiff upper lip.

Reliving near-death experiences and other traumas during counselling is a waste of time, say experts - and can even make the suffering worse.

The claim will come as a shock to the country's burgeoning counselling industry. There are now more trained counsellors than ever, with 30,000 working full-time, 270,000 part-time volunteers and 2.5 million more who undertake counselling as part of their job.

With 16,000 members, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy is 12 times bigger than it was only 25 years ago.

But the research says that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is not as widespread as claimed.

A report by the Oxford-based Cochrane organisation - which provides specialist medical advice - also questions whether counselling can help even when it does exist.

Its authors conclude that counselling is useless at best, and in some cases could even make victims more likely to suffer PTSD.

Research leader Simon Wessely, professor of psychological medicine at London's Institute of Psychiatry, said his study of 3,000 soldiers who served in the Bosnian conflict showed that only 3 per cent suffered long-term traumatic stress.

He said: 'Undoubtedly some people do suffer, but most do not. The toxic effect of counselling is that some people begin to see themselves as having a mental health problem, when they do not.'
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Counselling: more harm than good? | Daily Mail Online
 
Up to 9,000 therapists offered their services to New Yorkers - three for every victim of the Twin Towers attacks.
But an American psychiatrist who led the study called therapy for survivors and victims' families 'an enormous waste of money'.
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It would really be quite something if this was the beginning of a groundswell of recognition of this - that huge amounts of scarce health care funding are being wasted on therapies that, at best, don't help.

My one own experience with a counsellor was disappointing and a waste of time; my son's encounter with a counsellor caused lasting harm. I think it all depends on the quality of the counsellor, and, unfortunately, too often the people attracted to helping other people solve their emotional or relationship difficulties are the ones who should be nowhere near vulnerable people.

Edit - now realising that the article is from 2003, that's sad. Such evidence of a lack of impact does not seem to have made much difference in the readiness of health system decision-makers to keep supporting talking-based therapies.
 
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You know, if all one did is look at correlations between investment in "mental health" and claims of a "mental health crisis", one may easily conclude that it's those investments that caused the crisis. More likely because the crisis is mostly inflated to justify employing all those people, who then take resources away from where they would be needed, while essentially stagnating all the areas where, and this is Wessely's work, people with no mental illness are told they do and everything focuses on it at the exclusion of everything else.

The correlation is definitely there, no question about it. And really the most generous interpretation is that investing in a product that doesn't work doesn't yield good outcomes. But it's simply not credible that there has been a huge motivation to massively overestimate mental illness and it had no impact on the outcome. The FND/conversion disorder fanatics are still very much at it. The BPS ideology demands to label disabled people as mentally ill, it's what it's built to do.

This is the house of nightmares that Wessely's beloved biopsychosocial ideology built. He got everything he wanted out of it, and he hates every bit of it because he can clearly see that it's disastrous, he just can't take responsibility for any of it. In fact he's still there basically in charge of things. So no reason to learn any lessons out of it.

What medicine failed massively here is the combination of two economic concepts: opportunity cost and externalities. Opportunity cost is the choices someone loses while making a choice, e.g. if I choose to go on vacation I won't be able to repair the roof. By obsessing over a BS definition of mental health over the reality of chronic illness, none of the real work was done and we are no further ahead today than at literally any point in the past.

Externalities is the costs borne elsewhere by simply being negligent and greedy. A good example is a factory that pollutes rivers. They save a lot of money, but someone pays the costs downstream, literally. In our case, the externalities are enormous, but no one's actually counting. The quacks boast about saving hundreds here and there, all imaginary savings, while completely ignoring the fact that labeling disabled people as healthy doesn't make them so, we're still not paying taxes or doing other stuff that make up for all the money that was spent by society to raise, take care of and educate us.

So of course it ended up doing more harm than good. It's the wrong choice. It was always the wrong choice, but ideologues like Wessely got their way, sold a lie and the entire medical profession just ate it all up, now can't even untangle themselves from this mess because they've done so much harm and they can't handle that.

Yeah, making bad decisions does more harm than good. Always does. Quit making bad decisions, and quit employing people like Wessely who do nothing but make bad decisions.
 
DigitalDrifter said:
I'm beginning to think that most of the medical profession don't really believe it, they just pretend they do to placate the patient, it affords them plausible deniability. "We're not saying your symptoms aren't real"...Sure.
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Oh they bought the real version, not the lie sold to the public. Of course they don't believe the symptoms are real. That's what they bought: the lie, and lying about the lie.

There are 2 versions here: the lie sold to the patients, "your symptoms are real, just not medical", and the real lie, "all tests are normal, nothing wrong with them, just lie to them and be done with it quickly". They just think it's a good lie. But of course there's no such thing and the only reason it keeps going is because there's zero accountability for anything they do about this.
 
A friend who lost an adult child counsels parents who have lost a child. She does it for her her own needs, not theirs. She was turned down by a more professional counselling organisation because, when she was asked why she wanted to do this work, she broke down and the job interview abruptly ended.

I also wonder how many other people do this work primarily to address their own needs. She freely admits that counselling makes very little difference but says talking is a temporary release of tension. She has spent a fortune "working on herself" so I doubt she would admit it was completely useless.

I almost never talk about things because I immediately feel quite a lot worse, not relieved at all. For me, the solutions to most problems become clear given time and patience anyway.
 
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