"My therapist doesn't understand me"

A READER WRITES: “I have been seeing a psychoanalyst for years now. Is this a worthwhile thing to do?”

BB SAYS: No, seeing a psychotherapist is a dreadful waste of time, energy and money. You might as well become a Scientologist, and give all your money to the frauds who run Scientology. There is no scientific evidence that psychiatry improves mental health. There have been tests done on this. Researchers monitored a large group of people with mental health problems, who attended psychoanalysts over a number of years, to see if there was any improvement in their mental health. What did the research find? On average, there was some significant improvement in the people’s mental health.

So psychoanalysis worked! Not so fast. In order to carry out a scientific test you need a test group. In this case you need a group of people with similar mental health problems but who did NOT go to a psychiatrist. What happened to that test group? On average there was some improvement in their mental health – the same amount of improvement as the people who went to the psychoanalysts. So the passing of time helped to ameliorate the mental health problems. But going to a psychoanalyst contributed absolutely nothing to the people’s mental health.

The only therapy that has been shown to cause measurable improvements in mental health is Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is sometimes also known as “Common Sense” or “Philosophical Psychology”. I would recommend paying to see a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist. Alternatively you can just read this blog, which is free, and will tell you the many of the same things that a good Cognitive Behaviour Therapists will tell you.