Website review: The Case Against Psychotherapy
Someone discovered this in Psychiatry
•2 reviews since Jan 15, 2006
psychiatry
•antipsychiatry.org/psychoth.htm
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Jossey rated 3 months ago- "What we need are more kindly friends and fewer professionals." - Jeffrey Masson, Ph.D., The best person to talk with about your problems in life usually is a good friend. It has been said, "Therapists are expensive friends." Likewise, friends are inexpensive "therapists". Contrary to popular belief, and contrary to propaganda by mental health professionals, the training of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals does little or nothing to make them better equipped as counselors or "therapists". It might seem logical for formal credentials like a Ph.D. in psychology or a psychiatrist's M.D. or D.O. degree or a social worker's M.S.W. degree to suggest a certain amount of competence on his or her part. The truth, however, is more often the opposite: In general, the less a person who is offering his or her services as a counselor has in the way of formal credentials, the more likely he or she is to be a good counselor, since such a counselor has only competence (not credentials) to stand on. Generally, the best person for you to talk with is a person who has worked himself or herself through the same problems you face in the nitty-gritty of life. You usually will benefit if you avoid the "professionals" who claim their value comes from their years of academic study or professional training. When I asked a licensed social worker with a Master of Social Work (M.S.W.) degree who shortly before had been employed in a psychiatric hospital whether she thought the psychiatrists she worked with had any special insight into people or their problems her answer was a resounding no. I asked the same question of a judge who had extensive experience with psychiatrists in his courtroom, and he gave me the same answer and made the point just as emphatically. Similarly, I sought an opinion from a high school teacher who worked as a counselor helping young people overcome addiction or habituation to pleasure drugs who both as a teacher and as a drug counselor had considerable experience with psychiatrists and people who consult them. I asked him if he felt psychiatrists have more understanding of human nature or human problems than himself or other people who are not mental health professionals. He thought a few moments and then replied, "No, as a matter of fact, I don't." In his book Against Therapy, a critique of psychotherapy published in 1988, psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, Ph.D., speaks of what he calls "The myth of training" of psychotherapists. He says: "Therapists usually boast of their 'expertise,' the 'elaborate training' they have undergone. When discussing competence, one often hears phrases like 'he has been well trained,' or 'he has had specialized training.' People are rather vague about the nature of psychotherapy training, and therapists rarely encourage their patients to ask in any detail. They don't for a good reason: often their training is very modest. ... The most elaborate and lengthy training programs are the classic psychoanalytic ones, but this is not because of the amount of material that has to be covered. I spent eight years in my psychoanalytic training. In retrospect, I feel I could have learned the basic ideas in about eight hours of concentrated reading" (Atheneum/Macmillan Co., p. 248). Sometimes even psychiatrists and psychologists themselves will admit they have no particular expertise. Some of these admissions have come from people I have known as friends who happened to be practicing psychologists. Illustrative are the remarks of one Ph.D. psychologist who told me how amazed members of his family were that people would pay him $50 an hour just to discuss their problems with him. He admitted it really didn't make any sense,since they could do the same thing with lots of other people for free. "Of course," he said, "I'm still going to go to my office tomorrow and collect $50 an hour for talking with people." Due to inflation, today the cost is usually higher than $50 per hour.
