Looking For A Counsellor?
You Need Your Head Examined

Fifty years ago, psychotherapy was dealt a major blow with the first scientific paper to question seriously whether it worked, and whether therapy might sometimes do more harm than good. The study triggered a debate that has raged for half a century and which some say has failed to generate an adequate response from practitioners.

It started when a young German psychologist, Hans Eysenck, analysed the first proper clinical trials of therapy at the Maudsley Hospital, London.

Eysenck, who went to become the mot famous psychologist in the world, compared the improvement rate of thousands of people under going psychotherapy with a control group who had similar psychological problems who merely remained on the waiting list.

While an encouraging 64 per cent of patients receiving psychotherapy improved after two years from their breakdown, 72 per cent of the control group made a similar recovery with no psychotherapeutic assistance.

Of those having the most rigours and intensive therapy of all, full blown Freudian psychoanalysis, only 44 per cent recovered.

When Allen Bergin, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, looked closely at this kind of research, he found the data were hiding an even more peculiar story.

The 'scatter' of measured change plotted on graphs for patients having therapy was much greater than the scatter for those receiving no treatment.

In other words, those that had psychotherapy either did fairly well, or often actually pretty badly. They tended to lie in extremes of the distribution, compared with those who had no therapy, who all improved by more or less the same amount.

Bergin had uncovered a result that has dogged the field since. Therapy could not only do good, but also harm. Further analysis found the greatest potential for harm was when therapists stuck rigidly to particular schools of training, rather than adapting to the patient.

Therapy has splintered into so many differing and often opposing schools - Freudians, Jungians, transactional analysis and a host of others - that it resembles the plethora of small Left-wing political groupings of the seventies, often more united by a hatred for each other than the natural enemy, which, in the case of therapy, is science.

Contrary to the research evidence that sticking rigidly to a particular therapeutic orientation is bad for patients, these schools tend to emphasis vigorously why they are better than all the others, in order to survive.

But, unlike factionalised Left-wing politics, therapy proved enormously successful and is growing at an incredible rate. The British Association of Counselling had just a few hundred members by the mid seventies but has now grown more than twelve fold to 16,000 members. The Department for Employment estimates that 2.5 million workers in Britain today deliver some form of counselling as part of their jobs.

This dramatic growth has occurred despite the fact that scientific research continues to question the assumptions on which much therapy is based.

A key scientific blow to the therapy empire came in 1975 when Lester Luborsky, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, published a landmark paper with the title 'Everyone has won and all must have prizes', known famously as the Dodo bird verdict, which comes from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The title is an ironic twist to Eysenck's early habit of titling chapters in his books from Lewis Carroll quotes.

He found that it didn't seem to matter what particular psychotherapy you had - everyone benefits more or less to exactly the same extent.
Daily Telegraph 12 March 2003

PHILLIP DAY: Once again, we see the mainstream media finally catching up to what has been known for decades. That psychotherapy a) more often than not doesn't produce the results desired and b) can actually be harmful to the patient.

In an age where every quirk of life is put down to a neurosis that has to be treated, are we really suffering a 'mental illness' or are we just trying to cope with life's trials that are common to millions? In an interview with mental health watchdog, the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), psychiatrist Walter Afield confides: "I think what's happened is we have a tendency to identify more illness or define illness which never used to be defined as illness." Dr Afield remembers a recent conference where "…Russian psychiatrists were talking about [how] in America you talk about treating marital maladjustment reactions and in Russia we just call that bad luck."

For all readers of EClub and Health Review who either have been diagnosed with some form of psychiatric complaint, or else suffer from depression, suicidal tendencies and other conditions, take heart! There are often straightforward explanations and answers that can be applied immediately. Don't be diagnosed into oblivion and a constant diet of drugs. Resolve to take control of the situation and do a little reading. The answer, and relief from whatever is troubling you, can often be much closer than you think!

Resources: The Mind Game (www.credence.org)