1/ "Lived experience" can be loaded term. Speaking only for myself, I would never ever discount or minimize another person's experience or their efforts to describe it. However, I often encounter people who speak in ways that seem to presume their "lived experience" should trump
2/ everyone else's lived experience or their own personal experience/perception/understanding is universal truths that must apply to all. As psychologist whose work is all about listening & hearing, my ears would perk up if someone said "my lived experience is..." vs. saying "my
3/ experience is..." While the statements are objectively the same, the former locution somehow seems to be making a greater claim. Something about term "lived experience" implicitly seems to set it apart from the rest of experience & accord it a different & privileged status.
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1/ Highlights from this crucially important paper:
About 7 out of 10 patients who get “evidence-based therapy” for depression are still depressed after treatment
Of the 3 that get well, about half would have gotten well without treatment
No significant differences between types of therapy (the “dodo bird verdict”)
“Third wave” therapies (eg, ACT) no better than plain old CBT, or any other form of treatment
From the paper: “Most patients do not respond or remit after therapy, and more effective treatments are clearly needed”
So… can someone please explain to me again why these treatments are routinely called “evidence-based therapy?”
2/ When the benchmark is “getting better”—not just doing better than a control group—this is what research shows
Most patients get little or no benefit from brief therapy. This is what research has has shown for 40-50 years. The findings have been consistent for half a century
3/ Someone here offered and analogy:🙏
Imagine if the benchmark for evaluating a plumber was not doing the job right, but how they compared to not trying to do the job at all? Pipes could be leaking everywhere, the pluming fixtures could be falling off—and researchers would be
1/ This quotation needs more psychological nuance. In fact, it’s in our human nature to take pleasure in others’ downfall, for many reasons—often unconscious
It’s not so much that we “make monsters of ourselves,” because the monster is already within. In the words of Aleksandr
2/ Solzhenitsyn, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”
It is that *acting* on these impulses—publicly reveling in sadistic glee, joining in the pile-on, inciting others to pile on—feeds that inner monster. It grows larger and uglier, and
3/ the rest of us is diminished. In time, we become an empty husk of the person we could have become
We can’t reason away our feelings and impulses (sorry, cognitive therapists). We may feel that twinge of pleasure in another’s ruination, we may feel feel that inner impulse to
2/ In historic usage, it referred to taking a position (as a matter of *technique,* aimed at self-knowledge) equidistant from id, ego, & superego—terms that no longer hold currency in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and that are now meaningless to most
So here’s an update:
3/ The term is a recognition that we humans are of many minds about many things, there is inner contradiction, and the contradictions can be at any level of conscious awareness
“Neutrality” means helping the person become aware of all of the inner facets and contraductions,
1/ Depressive Personality Style
“Despite its omission from the DSM, depressive personality is the most common personality syndrome seen in clinical practice. It is a personality syndrome in every sense of the term: an enduring pattern of psychological functioning evident by
2/ adolescence and encompassing the full spectrum of personality processes.
People with depressive personalities are chronically vulnerable to painful affect, especially feelings of inadequacy, sadness, guilt, and shame. They have difficulty recognizing their needs, and when
3/ they do recognize them, they have difficulty expressing them. They are often conflicted about allowing themselves pleasure. They may seem driven by an unconscious wish to punish themselves, either by getting into situations destined to cause pain or depriving themselves of
1/6 The goal of psychotherapy is to insert spaces for noticing and reflecting where space has not previously existed—and thereby create opportunities to know ourselves more fully, connect with others more deeply, and live our lives more congruently
2/6 Psychotherapy is about slowing things down—so we can begin to see and understand patterns and responses that otherwise happen quickly, automatically, without awareness or understanding
3/6 Talk about “optimizing” psychotherapy or making it more “efficient” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding
We find ourselves in difficulties specifically because we *cannot* slow down to notice and reflect. The rush to optimize every facet of life is the disease—not the cure