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Is the 'talking cure' just hot air or can we rally be 'cured' by counsellors?
asks Independent columnist Virginia Ironside
| | |  Is the 'talking cure' just hot air?Do you agree? Join the discussion by calling 0870 010 0444, lines open at 1.30pm. | |
It's now, just after Christmas, that anxiety and depression seem to hit their hardest.
Relate gets more calls than at any other time of the year - the cracks in relationships show up all too clearly over the festive season, and the Samaritans are inundated with calls.
But before anyone makes a New Year's resolution to go into therapy to cure those post-Christmas blues, a word of warning.
I must make clear what I'm not against. I'm not against the Samaritans, kindly listening friends or cognitive or behavioural therapy - the only talking therapies that research has shown actually work.
But I do think everyone should be exceptionally wary of counseling or therapy, even though there are an astonishing number - around 25,000 - counselors and therapists around, listening to over 100,000 people.
There are grief counselors, stress counselors, sexual abuse counselors, AIDS counselors, victim support counselors, post-traumatic stress counselors - and over 500 organizations offering training. Half of them hang out at GPs surgeries - and yet there is absolutely no evidence that counseling - except for cognitive or behavioural therapy as I say - actually works.
Take 100 anxious and gloomy people and give 50 of them counseling and 50 of them nothing, and exactly the same number in each group will get better, worse or stay the same. Counseling may appear to have some effect - but it doesn't.
Indeed, some research has shown counseling and therapy can actually be harmful. Sociologist Dr. Frank Furedi has said that counseling has created a damaging culture of dependency - and he's right. Functioning adults are encouraged to focus on their weaknesses and not their strengths - and this makes them weaker.
Then counselors and therapists generally encourage people to express their feelings - and yet there's no evidence that this makes people feel better in the long term.
Indeed, there are 400 pieces of evidence to show that showing anger only results in people becoming more angry, not less. And one survey of survivors of concentration camps showed that although some seemed to suffer, and come out the other side, many others just continue to suffer, trapped in the horror. Those who coped best emotionally were those who simply put the experience to one side and didn't think about it. Burrowing in an unhappy past re-enforces feelings of unhappiness, not the other way round.
Counseling-speak has entered our language. We talk of 'hidden agendas', 'dysfunctional families', 'co-dependency' - but isn't it all so much gobbledygook?
Many people say that counseling would be okay as long as it were accredited: at the moment, anyone - you or I - could set up as counselor with no training at all. But why accredit something that is fundamentally worthless? It would be like taking a bunch of quack doctors and churning them out as "accredited quack doctors."
Go into therapy or counseling by all means, but go into it with your eyes open. What you could lose is more than your money. You could also lose your independence, and, often, what little bit of happiness you still possess.
Do you agree?
Join the discussion by calling 0870 010 0444
lines open at 1.30pm.
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