Seriously getting desperate. Why does therapy not work for me?

I've had the same experience with therapists. I don't think they work for everyone. Their abilities to help are limited with what they can do. It's not like they can directly work on your brain like a mechanic can with cars.

They have some tools like CBT but they don't have classes where you practise the skills. You are basically told how it works & are expected to work on it yourself without any coaching beyond that.

For some therapy they may have group sessions where everyone is practising similar skills but for the most part, they work one-on-one where they can't do much practical stuff.

I'm sorry to hear of your experiences with therapy @tSeFcu5sb5fXdF9 @Jlol @Historylover and others. It can be a very tough one. I guess when someone says DBT or DBT or ACT, there's so many elements and each therapist can take a different element.

Perhaps recovery aligns more with the work you end up doing for yourselves instead? However, a therapist can guide the work? I think this is the stance I've taken. For me, my group therapy and individual therapy has made a huge difference in my life.

Group therapy taught me the skills to communicate with others (it didn't go well many times), while individual therapy following group allowed me to dissect and debrief about the group session and whatever else was happening in life.

I hope you all find something that works for you, no matter what it is.

Such a robust thread going on here!

My feelings on this subject are pretty well known around here, so I'll try not to beat the dead horse anymore that I've already beaten to dust.

@Jlol Re your comments on:

---

@FloatingFeather wrote:

If a client doesn't connect with a therapist, doesn't feel heard, understood, supported, validated etc it would be very challenging for therapy to work

---

I agree with you very much.

Lack of "connection" seems to be blamed for a large majority of therapy failures, but so very often "connection" is not at all relevant to the situation. I'm sure I've mentioned this somewhere else recently, but I've been reading a lot of the testimony from the victims of Robodebt recently, and that scandal has proven to be a very timely example of how "connection" with a therapist is often completely irrelevant.

If I'm a Robodebt victim who's been driven to contemplating/attempting suicide by an outrageous Robodebt bill (and the testimony indicates there were many, many such victims!), the solution to that crisis is obvious: the therapist needs to access my government records and find and correct the faulty numbers that have caused a bogus debt to have been calculated for me. That is how you cure my "mental illness"! That is how you stop me being suicidal! You don't need to "connect" with a patient to understand the nature of that rather straightforward problem; you don't need to "connect" with them to understand the required solution. The only question is whether or not the therapist has the capacity to do the very obvious job that is required.

My hope is that, at the end of this debacle, we will have learnt how irrelevant "connecting" with a therapist often is, and stop blaming the majority of therapy failures on this issue, so we can start focussing on the real reasons behind the failures of therapy.

In terms of the varying opinions on here about therapy being over/under-regulated (@Appleblossom @Historylover @hanami @EternalFlower ), I think it's a bit of both.

The biggest failing of the system, IMHO, is "the golden rule of therapy", that forbids therapists from giving their patients the real help that they often desparately need. That rule needs to be shredded, post haste. I also think that there needs to be a massive reduction of the education requirements on the industry, so that people of lower education levels would have the freedom to become therapists. If I were ever to go into therapy again, I would much prefer a therapist with minimal education. I suspect we would relate to one another much better, and they would be much more likely to have the sort of connections that would be useful to me.

That being said, there are too many crooks and predators in the industry, so we do need some sort of effort to weed them out.

In this day and age, therapists probably live and die by the "Better Access" scheme. So maybe the solution is to make them inelligable for the scheme if they fail to produce positive outcomes in too many cases?

I'm sorry this has been your experience @chibam .

?😕
Not sure if we've gotten our signals crossed there, @tyme .

I wasn't a victim of Robodebt, myself. I was just using the ordeals of Robodebt victims as a good example.

I did have a problem somewhat similar to Robodebt a while back, but it was resolved much quicker and less painfully then most of the Robodebt cases I've been reading about.

However, it was a worry at the time, and it still resonates with me that when I asked about getting help to fix it, I was more or less told that no help was available. That's a really glaring problem, that we need to overcome; because we know for a fact that situations like these cause suicides. It is now a matter of public record; the mothers of the dead victims have personally testified at the Royal Inquiry. So obviously, these are the sorts of situations that the mental health system is going to need to start resolving, if it is sincere about it's commitment to stop suicides.

We can't keep fobbing these sorts of failures off as "patient and therapist just didn't click", because it is plainly obvious that "clicking" isn't necessary for these sorts of problems to be satisfactorily resolved.

I'm just a little curious how you said the industry is poorly regulated. I always considered it highly regulated

Not trying to speak for @EternalFlower but I think they mean that the quality of services is unregulated.

@Jlol

Not as many but similar boat and cant figure the point. But I was recently told to get a psychatrist and get them to tell you the kind of therapist you need. Like CBT, DBT etc and see them and you might get further. You might just be seeing the wrong style of therapist/psychologist to get what you want out of the session.

I think therapy is extremely unregulated personally. Regultory bodies often fail patients who make complaints. Its a legal matter often and the therapists are more protected through being generally wealthier and more litigious.

100% agree with you @chibam

Society is in a dangerous state right now in that when someone is feeling depressed or anxious they are told they are sick and should seek help in the form of a therapist.

But what if there are good reasons they are feel depressed or anxious? Why do we burden the person in an abusive relationship or the robodebt victim with adjusting their reaction to what are stressful situations?

Why can't we help them remove themselves from these situations?

@Jlol I'm thinking, isn't that what therapists actually do? If someone went to a therapist who was in an abusive relationship they would support them to make a decision about leaving or staying in that relationship? Of course there are situations in life that can cause the individual to be depressed or anxious such as the breakdown of a relationship or the death of a loved one, or not being able to gain secure employment. These things are often inevitable and out of our control and in those cases (things we can't control) we do have to learn how to adjust our reaction to them if they are causing us depression or anxiety. I hope that makes sense.

I'm in no way saying the system is perfect.

I'm wondering what the ideal world would look like if there was another option to people being referred to a psychologist, counsellor, psychiatrist, social worker etc?

In my ideal world there would be more lived experience based services, more community based groups where things like creative arts (for eg music, art) can help foster recovery. As well as access to psychological services that had shorter wait times and cost much less.

Hanami