Why do people pretend to do therapy to make money? If you can simply open a dude ranch and let people talk in a group during afternoon coffee break, why is that considered legitimate therapy? What's the difference between some dude with a dude ranch and a bachelor's in engineering and organizational psychology calling himself a life coach and someone with a PhD in clinical psychology who put time and energy into studying the science and getting vetted? Why is the spectrum so wide? Can I not simply start being a life coach ala Jeremy in Peep show, fuck with people's lives for 100£ an hour, then take the alcoholics anonymous cop out that the program works if you work it blaming you for any and all problems or difficulties you have along the way? If men need to go to some kind of dude ranch experience to connect with something that's fine I guess. Im not really talking about the men who seek these experiences. Moreso the ones who offer them.
The advice I ws given (by a pro) was that if you're thinking of therapy, you need to check out the therapist's credentials. In which tradition(s) were they trained? Are they in therapy themselves? (A therapist with active clients should be in therapy)
I don't think I'd consider group therapy on a dude-ranch run by a cowboy and a "life coach".
I guess the difference is in the severity of the persons mental health issues.
If you're otherwise healthy, but never learned or have been discouraged from doing "the basics" like talk about how you are feeling with your loved ones then you really just need someone to teach you how or perhaps just give you permission to do so. Maybe this is easier if you dress it up in a specific kind of setting, depends on the individual.
If you have some potentially diagnosable serious mental health issue, then of course you should see an actual trained clinical psycologist.
Sometimes you may not know which one you are, perhaps you go to the former and figure you actually needed the latter. Maybe you're happy with what you've done, or maybe not? At the end of the day you just have to try figure it out.
i guess your point is there is a spectrum of needs and a spectrum of solutions to fit those needs. I think my question is more like, why are the edges seemingly geometrically far from the center?
Because your friend may be too close to your problems to be of help, may not speak with candor to avoid harming you/your relationship, may be an active participant in your problem, may have no experience talking/thinking about your problem limiting their ability to offer useful feedback…
Without even broaching the diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions, there are any number of reasons why paying a neutral third party to discuss your problems could be preferable than talking to a friend at a bar. Nor are they mutually exclusive.
Talking to anyone is pretty good, so you're not far wrong.
A counsellor or therapist has training - think of it as a mental toolkit - to help explore things with you. Depends on their exact approach but most of them wont give advice for example, they will just ask question or reflect what you say back to you to encourage you to figure it out yourself. Or they might look for parallels between your early life and current life, as most people follow repeated patterns in their relationships (or so the theory goes). At least 75% of their skillset is just listening and occasionally asking good questions which is an underrated skill.
There are many different flavours of therapy/psychotherapy/counselling and sometimes the adherents get quite religious about it (ask an integrative therapist what they think of CBT for example). But research generally shows that most 'talking therapies' are roughly equal in effectiveness and the main factor for success is the relationship between the client and therapist - i.e. whether they click. (putting aside for the moment the tricky questions about how to measure effectiveness of therapy - what does improvement look like? how do you have a control group?)
There's a thing called the 'Dodo Hypothesis' - that "all empirically validated psychotherapies, regardless of their specific components, produce equivalent outcomes" - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict
People heavily invested in a particular brand of therapy dont like to hear about the Dodo Hypothesis but broadly I think its an optimistic conclusion - talking to people helps, and if you find the right one, talking to a specially trained listener can help more.
> Depends on their exact approach but most of them wont give advice for example, they will just ask question
Because general advice is rarely useful in such cases, like you can see in almost all of comments giving advice in this topic. Most of them have at least one "yeah, but in my case...".
Bold of you to assume someone with significant issues has a friend, especially when friendship statistics (especially for men) are plunging through the ground.
