
Therapy experience is associated with negative changes in personality (2017) - monort
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656616302410?via%3Dihub
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lsiebert
This was longitudinal study where people who chose to go to therapy were
compared to those who didn't chose to go, not a randomized experiment with a
control group.

Here's a link that gets you a pdf, I recommend reading the general discussion.

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Therapy%20experience%20...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Therapy%20experience%20in%20naturalistic%20observational%20studies%20is%20associated%20with%20negative%20changes%20in%20personality&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

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tunesmith
People who choose to go to therapy probably tend to generally feel more
negative feelings (and express them) than people that don't. Is this study
anything more than pointing out that obvious correlation? I don't see how they
can demonstrate causation without randomizing with a control group.

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msoad
Yup, people who mix correlation with causation will end up dead.

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forgetcolor
Interesting results (thanks for the SciHub link), but also a call for more
research. Not enough info yet to rule out a likely explanation: that those who
seek therapy were already in a negative situation, and thus the therapy is a
symptom of a problem rather than the cause of one. They discuss additional
interesting angles about it near the end, re therapists who don't follow
standard protocols, patients who don't stay with therapy, etc.

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chiefgeek
From my own experience, therapy was only the first step. It wasn't the
solution. The further I went down the path (more than 10 years on my own,
couples therapy for over a year with my ex-wife, and two separate one week
intensive experiential retreats) the less helpful it was. After doing work
with a Zen coach, meditating regularly and going on a ten day silent
meditation retreat what became clear to me is that therapy tends to drag one's
focus back to what happened in the past to explain the present. I think
therapy has a place. I think it would be exceedingly difficult to create a
valid study that proves what this piece claims.

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petra
did you find the meditation more helpful?

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chiefgeek
The meditation is very helpful. The 10 day vipassana course was very
insightful. Even if I can just manage 30 minutes a day, I feel better, more
calm.

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duopixel
Let's think about personality traits in a depressed person:

Extraversion: "leave me alone"

Agreeableness: "the world is shit"

Conscientiousness: "my home is a mess"

Openness: "Why try something new if I know I'm not going to like it"

Conscientiousness: "my home is a mess"

People who go through these phases, or live in this reality, are more likely
to have seeked therapy. The results could imply that, after all, it is not
very effective, since it is observed that "Therapy experience is associated
with negative changes in personality", but to make the analogy clear, you
could say: "People with heart transplants see reduction of heart function".

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gfs78
Problem is not with therapy in itself but with the skill and-or decency of the
therapist. Just as happens with mechanics, programmers, etc.

The unskilled will make a mess of what they are given out of incompetence.

The dishonest will make a mess of what they are given out of greed and malice.

Sadly, in this case, the one suffering the consequences is not a car or some
code but a person.

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white-flame
As this appears to be about measuring statistical association, and not just
singling out individual failure cases, are you implying that the entire
industry is generally filled with unskilled and dishonest people?

Edit: It was an honest question, and it does appear to be considered an
untrustworthy profession as a whole here. I was just asking clarification if
that was the intention of the parent poster.

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Zelphyr
My experience tends to confirm this. I have had two personal therapists, one
was of the "Why do _you_ think you feel that way?" ilk with some kind of
counseling certification, and the other was an evidence-based practitioner
with a PsyD. The former didn't help me at all and the latter changed my life.

My wife and I saw two couples therapists. One was, again, a guy with some kind
of certificate that did things like literally pulling the Good Will Hunting
"It's not your fault. It's not your fault." hand-on-knee line as well as
outright verbally attacking my wife. The other was a PsyD who made more
progress with us in three sessions than almost a year of sessions with the
other.

The crux of it all, in my estimation, is that you get what you pay for. A PsyD
having a doctorate can command hundreds per hour which puts them out of range
for many people.

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knaik94
_In one study of treatment-as-usual for drug and alcohol disorders, the
researchers found that most therapists failed to implement well-validated
intervention techniques (Santa Ana et al., 2008), choosing instead to focus on
assessing social functioning and asking open-ended questions, rather than
changing relevant thoughts, feelings, or behaviors._

This is what stood out to me and seems similar to problems I hear regarding
internal medicine. Doctors trust their intuition above results of novel
studies. It takes time for their recommendations to catch up.

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woodandsteel
This doesn't surprise me.

Let me start out by saying that although I am not a psychotherapist, I do have
a masters in psychology, and two years graduate clinical training, plus
experience in the field. I also have some experience helping conduct
psychotherapy research studies.

Back in the 60, a well-known psychological researcher named Hans Eysenk
published a claim that, based on an analysis of many psychotherapy outcome
studies, psychotherapy does not work. This sparked a great debate.

I was puzzled by this claim, since it seemed clear to me that psychotherapy
could be helpful. But then years later I read an article in the Handbook of
Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, I think it was the 1979 edition.

It was written by Truax and Carkhuff, and it summarize a number of studies
that looked at outcome by psychotherapist. What they found was that about 1/3
of psychotherapists were helpful with most of their clients, 1/3 had little
impact, and 1/3 were on the whole harmful.

Based on a good deal of experience in the field, including a whole summer
observing psychotherapists practicing group psychotherapy in a mental health
clinic, this seemed to me about right.

I think the problem started with Freud. He was a brilliant man in many ways,
but I think it is clear he was not very good at actually curing people of
their personal problems. In the decades that followed, I think there was a
pattern that developed where some training institutes, Freudian and non-
Freudian, were run by therapists who are poor at the craft and so don't know
how to teach it to others, and furthermore don't know how to select students
who would be good therapists, while at other institutes the overall pattern
was neutral or positive.

I have been out of the field for many decades, and had hoped things had
improved. Alas, it seems that is not the case.

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ChrisSD
Published in June 2017 and has no citations? Huh.

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swsieber
Edit: The authors of the study don't imply causation, but it's tempting to
infer it yourself. Thus, my comment.

OK. So this is a observation study, not an experiment. Only correlation can be
inferred, not causation.

To make it clear why you can't, let me come up with a new, parallel study:

 _Track everybody who self reports being told they have a genetic disposition
to cancer by a doctor. Divide them by those that decide to go a cancer
treatment center vs those who don 't. The study would probably show that
cancer treatment centers are associated with shorter lifespans._

That makes sense, because you're not going to go to a cancer center treatment
if you don't have cancer. But it doesn't mean that going to a cancer treatment
centers are ineffective.

Self selection in a study means you can't infer causation. You can only infer
correlation.

Note: I'm not actually weighing in on whether I think therapy is good or bad.
I'm say the results of this study could happen _either way_.

Edit: I think you could reasonably infer that therapy isn't enough whenever it
is used. But you can't tell if not going to therapy would have been better
than going to therapy for those who did - so if there's an action item from
this study, it's to improve therapy. But I don't think you can unequivocally
say: this study shows therapy is bad.

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windows_tips
Is someone inferring causation? From the title, we can at least conclude that
"therapy" did not "prevent" measured negative changes.

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swsieber
Ah, this is prompted by a conversation I had with others. I'll add a general
disclaimer.

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zentiggr
Right... I'm going to pay _Elsevier_ to read an article about anything.

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smt88
Can you explain your comment to those of us who aren't in publishing or
academia?

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bokumo
Here is a web site dedicated to explaining why many academics are boycotting
Elsevier: [http://thecostofknowledge.com](http://thecostofknowledge.com)

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extralego
I have anecdotally experienced this, among other more measurable negative
outcomes of therapy. My experience was in America, which as I understand has a
similar psychology industry to most European countries, albeit the extra
double dose of exceptionalism, rigidity, and economic depravity one would
expect.

Misdiagnosis was the worst part of my experience, but not the beginning or the
end. Diagnoses are naturally a double edged sword and some therapists avoid
them altogether, but it seems a clear mistake to focus on this conflict.

Bureaucracy notwithstanding, a lot of the reason for diagnoses is that the
suffering seek closure. I declare however that _a lot of the reason for the
mental health field is that the citizens of a suffering society seek closure._
The therapist delivers that closure in the form of: “It’s you.” Whether this
contributes something wholly productive to that person’s mental health is
surely circumstantial. For me, it was a disaster.

I’m not comfortable making similarly broad assertions about _therapy_ itself,
but in my experience, it was just me opening up to someone who didn’t open up
to me. Having a 3rd party to resolve disputes is not any new invention so
couple therapy and similar should probably be considered separately. As for
individual therapy, I have been inable to map the process by which what we
call _therapy_ today evolved from what was psychoanalysis. My fear is that it
was painfully basic and painfully stupid. Can someone fill me in?

Some of my friends are in the mental health field and a couple of them are
very open minded, willing to discuss these things. Our conversations led me to
make a vow that I will never visit another mental health professional for as
long as I live. Being no stranger to the history and other less contempory
criticisms of psychology, the experience motivated me to learn more about the
_industry_ of psychology in America. I think the issues are strikingly
congruent with contextual issues in the structures that empower it. In the US,
this would be law enforcement, healthcare, academia, public education, the
economy. In a sum, I concluded that capitalism is simply not as fit to address
mental health problems as it is to create them.

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sdf43543t345
These freaking knowledge paywalls are awful, try scihub: [https://sci-
hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2017.02.002](https://sci-
hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2017.02.002)

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drngdds
"in naturalistic observational studies"

You shouldn't remove something so relevant from the title.

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HillaryBriss
the study's conclusion, if i'm reading it right, is that therapy is associated
with a tendency in people toward fewer good traits and more bad traits. an
interesting result given how often therapy is recommended as helpful.

study seems to have used some kind of matched pair design. maybe there's
something to this...

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tlb
They don't make a claim for causation. As they shouldn't.

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outlace
“this matched sample is used to estimate the causal effect of therapy
experience”

