I entered my counseling graduate program full of hope.
I thought I was stepping into a space of healing, one where I could learn how to support others through pain, trauma, and transformation. I didn’t expect to find myself shrinking just to survive.
The first time I was called “articulate” in class, I knew what it meant. It was said with a smile, meant as a compliment, but there was a pause behind it. I had just shared something personal and vulnerable. “You’re so articulate,” my professor said, surprised. I’d heard it before, growing up in white spaces: You speak well, for someone like you.
At the time, I brushed it off. I had already learned how to code-switch, how to smooth out the edges of my voice to fit into rooms never designed for me. I didn’t realize how deeply I would need to rely on those skills to survive graduate school.
As the semester continued, the message became louder, not through shouts, but through silence, micro-corrections, and side comments. I was expected to contribute, but only in ways that fit a certain mold. The more I showed up as myself—bringing in my lived experience, cultural context, and a passion for justice—the more discomfort I seemed to provoke.
One day, after receiving written feedback on my clinical skills as a novice therapist, I read a line that stayed with me. “Be careful; your confidence might come across as cocky.” It wasn’t in response to a class discussion or a moment of arrogance. It was a formal evaluation of my professional development, and that comment, couched in concern, landed differently. It suggested that even in areas where I showed strength, I needed to shrink.
That moment marked a shift. I started to pay attention, really pay attention, to the rules no one said out loud, but everyone enforced. The way certain theories were treated as gospel, always white, male, and Eurocentric. The way diversity was reduced to a sidebar in textbooks, if it appeared at all. The way my classmates looked at me when I challenged the assumption that therapy is neutral.
I started to understand that I wasn’t just being trained in therapeutic skills. I was being trained to conform.
As I began to name the colonial underpinnings of the theories we studied, how psychology’s foundations often erase Indigenous, Black, and non-Western understandings of wellness, I was met with gentle deflections. The feedback was wrapped in kindness, but the message was familiar: You’re too much. Your language makes us uncomfortable. Why can’t you focus on strengths? We’re already doing so much in this field for marginalized populations, more than any other mental health profession.
At the encouragement of a mentor, I submitted a proposal for a national counseling conference, a conference where I’d been warmly received the year before for presenting on neurodiversity-affirming practices. This time, I proposed a presentation on decolonizing mental health care and increasing accessibility for students, clinicians, and clients of color.
Instead of encouragement, I was met with escalating resistance. Feedback that initially seemed supportive soon shifted into a cycle of revisions—each draft met with new concerns, new flaws, new requests. My ideas were called unclear, my language too forceful, and my critique too negative. I was told to “highlight the positive,” to “focus on what’s working,” to center “solutions instead of problems.” They wanted more citations, more balance, more data. It was framed as academic guidance, but the subtext was clear: my analysis made them uncomfortable.
What they didn’t seem to understand is that for many students of color, critique is not abstract; it’s personal. When the theories we’re taught erase our communities, when our histories are missing from the syllabus, when justice is reduced to a footnote, we are not simply excluded; we are harmed. The frameworks meant to help us become counselors can end up invalidating the very identities we bring into the room.
I brought evidence. I shared statistics about racial disparities in access to mental health care, the mismatch between provider demographics and the populations they serve, the impacts of historical trauma and systemic exclusion. These weren’t abstract points, they were lived realities. Still, I was asked to revise. Still, I was told it wasn’t enough.
It began to feel like a slow erasure. Each edit chipped away at the heart of what I was trying to say. I softened my language, reworded references to colonization and white supremacy, and reshaped my message to fit more neatly within the comfort zones of my reviewers. With each change, something in me grew quieter—until the silence began to echo what I was trying to resist.
That’s when I started to see the deeper pattern: how our field often pathologizes the natural responses people have to oppression. Pain becomes a diagnosis. Grief is labeled as dysfunction. Anger is misread as instability. The systems that create harm—capitalism, poverty, and racism—are erased, leaving people to blame themselves for their distress. What remains is a person held responsible for their symptoms, and a profession too cautious to confront the conditions that produce them.
I came to counseling to help people heal. But I couldn’t ignore how much of what I was learning seemed designed to make people fit back into the systems that hurt them.
So, I sought out other voices. I read Resmaa Menakem, Jennifer Mullan, and others who dared to name the legacies of harm in our field. I learned that what I was experiencing wasn’t unique—it was systemic. As Dr. Jennifer Mullan writes, “The mental health industrial complex has always been a tool of compliance, rooted in white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.” Now, in the final months of my training, I carry a different understanding of healing. It’s not about adjusting people to unjust systems. It’s about holding space for truth. For grief. For resistance. For reclaiming our stories and our bodies.
And most of all—for naming what’s broken.
Because we can’t heal what we’re afraid to name. And I refuse to keep whispering.
How and why, if entertained in your program, do the lights come on for “better data?” Certainly a very serious justice issue, a collective as well as singular though to be your own attorney for the practice of law, into the deepest and then outward, to where the “Got IT” gets it, is an aspect the formality of learning to learn can put the soul to sleep in the age of AI or cell phones and texting every where! How to adjust to hear the inner voice, but more readily to help hold the space sacred for learing, discovery, unveiling what becomes ossified? Enjoyed your post!
Report comment
Thank you for such a thoughtful and poetic reflection. I really appreciate you engaging with the piece in such a deep way. Your question about how to keep the inner voice alive, especially in academic and clinical spaces that can feel rigid or depersonalized, really resonates with me.
For me, the “lights come on” when we stop treating learning as a performance and start making space for questioning, for discomfort, and for listening, both to ourselves and to each other. Decolonizing the way we learn is as much about unlearning as it is about discovery. It’s about making space for truths that don’t always fit neatly into the frameworks we’ve been taught, and staying awake to what’s often been silenced or dismissed.
I love what you said about holding space sacred for learning and unveiling. That’s exactly what I hope we can move toward – together. Thank you again for your generous words.
Report comment
Thanks for giving new names. Yes I saw that but as a white person and did not know what to do. And I was not raised that way. My parents worked in a hospital in the 1950’s where the professional and student staffs actually more diverse then when I worked there in the eighties. We need interactive dialogue and truth and reconciliation. Healing has been suppressed for a long time.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your openness and reflection. I really appreciate your honesty. It takes courage to name what you saw and sit with the discomfort of not knowing what to do at the time. So many of us are navigating inherited silences, and your willingness to engage in dialogue is such an important part of the healing process.
You’re absolutely right; true healing requires interactive dialogue, truth-telling, and collective accountability. We all carry pieces of this history, and I believe that when we start naming them together, we open the door to something more honest and more liberating for everyone. Thank you for being part of that conversation.
Report comment
“I started to understand that I wasn’t just being trained in therapeutic skills. I was being trained to conform.”
That’s what happens when psychological pain becomes politicized.
Report comment
I appreciate you engaging with that line—it’s such a pivotal realization for me. When I talk about being trained to conform, I’m pointing to how certain norms in our field can unintentionally silence lived experiences, especially those shaped by systemic oppression. I don’t believe psychological pain should be politicized, but in many cases, it already is—because people’s distress is often rooted in unjust conditions like racism, poverty, or marginalization. When we ignore those roots, we risk pathologizing people instead of truly helping them heal.
My hope is that we can expand the field to hold both individual pain and the broader contexts that shape it, with compassion, not conformity.
Report comment
Thank you for choosing to be one of the few positive anomalies in the psychology field. I admire your ability to not only see through the systemic gaslighting, but to publicly confront it head on.
Unfortunately, it seems most therapists end up unintentionally succumbing to their seemingly unbiased training. Hopefully more therapists in the future will also choose to question what they are taught which I hope includes “diagnoses” and so-called “medications”.
Report comment
Tahira, this is such a relevant, important article that you have written. I see so much of myself in the words and experiences you have written about and am grateful for your article. I do hope that more of the counseling community pays attention.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your kind words. It means a lot to know that the piece resonated with you—I wrote it in hopes that others who’ve had similar experiences would feel seen. I share your hope that more of the counseling community will begin to truly listen and reflect. Thank you for being in this work with me.
Report comment
Tahira, thank you for sharing your writing. I have experienced and witnessed this “gas lighting” you identify.
Working with you helped me survive that year at Perez and I am grateful for you.
Please continue exposing the systemic oppression.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your kind words. I’m really grateful we had the chance to work together that year—I remember how committed you were to your students, and it meant a lot to be able to support your efforts in the classroom. I appreciate your encouragement more than you know, and I’ll keep speaking up—for all of us.
Report comment
This is so beautifully written and so thoughtful. I am grateful you are documenting your experiences and emotions and thoughts surrounding these experiences. First, we hope things can change, then we speak and write to foster that change. I like this future you are envisioning and I hope more people see the light of it.
Report comment
Thank you so much for this thoughtful response. Your words really mean a lot to me. Writing this piece was both vulnerable and necessary, and hearing that it resonated reminds me why we keep showing up and speaking out. I’m grateful to be in community with people who also believe in the possibility of a more just and human future, and who help bring that vision into focus. Thank you for seeing it with me.
Report comment
The “colonists” were made up of Quakers who were abolitionists and were being threatened to be burned at the stake in England so they migrated to a continent where Indigenous nomadic warriors were already present. Those same warriors were attacking other Indigenous people but that part’s ok. The Society of Friends (a.k.a. “Quakers”) were Christians and wanted to live in solid structures that had doors with metal hinges and so that makes them evil (type thing) … and the Natives were attacking settlements of white Europeans and ended up losing the war.
Report comment
Thank you for your comment. I want to take a moment to clarify what I mean when I talk about colonization and decolonizing mental health, because these concepts are often misunderstood.
Colonization is not just about people migrating. It’s a violent process of occupation, displacement, and cultural erasure. When Europeans colonized North America, it involved genocide, land theft, forced removals, and systemic attempts to destroy Indigenous languages, spiritual practices, and ways of life. That history matters—not just as a past event, but because its impacts are still felt today through intergenerational trauma, broken treaties, racial inequities, and the continued marginalization of Indigenous communities.
When I talk about decolonizing mental health, I’m not vilifying individuals—I’m questioning the dominant frameworks we’ve inherited. Our current mental health systems are deeply rooted in Western, capitalistic, patriarchal, heteronormative, and ableist worldviews. Decolonizing means making space for other ways of knowing and healing—ways that center community, relationality, culture, and collective care. It means recognizing that what’s labeled as “mental illness” is often a response to systemic violence, not just an individual pathology.
Acknowledging this history isn’t about blame. It’s about truth-telling, and building a profession that can actually hold space for the full humanity and lived experiences of all people.
Report comment
This is excellent work, Tahira. It’s hard to find mental health care, including psychotherapy, that isn’t seeking conformity as a major criterion for client success. There is a real need for self and other honesty in practitioners.
I’ve noticed that it is those who deny the prejudice they have themselves suffered who are much more likely than their self respecting fellows to be bigoted towards another group. It’s as if the lack of self-empathy and self-respect renders them less able to give genuine respect towards the ‘other’ and to be able to put themselves into the shoes of members of other groups unlike their own.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your kind words and for engaging so deeply with the heart of what I was trying to express. You’re naming something so important—the way conformity often becomes a silent expectation in mental health care, and how that expectation can be profoundly damaging to both clients and practitioners.
I really appreciate your insight about the relationship between denied pain and projected prejudice. That resonates. When people are disconnected from their own wounds or conditioned to minimize them, it often limits their ability to extend compassion outward. Genuine empathy—for ourselves and for others—requires a kind of courageous honesty that many systems actively discourage.
I’m grateful for your reflection and for the reminder that respect for difference begins with self-awareness and self-regard.
Report comment
I respect your experience and perceptions as authentic. Good for you that you are not going to let all the rest redefine your earned convictions.
Then there’s me, a white lady, and I have felt similar pressure by those whose path of understanding has been strewn with different challenges than mine, and unfortunately, some of them cannot hide their presumption about what I do or don’t know or the foundations of my convictions. We have to keep slogging forward. I hope that as we embrace “First Do No Harm” that we will accommodate cultural differences.
There is a point where frameworks of being may become incompatible. I would wish for respectful dialogue and paths of peace. For children to be healthy, I would not deliberately fuel political discord, and I’m NOT saying that you would do that either. May paths of peace prevail.
Report comment
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with such honesty and care. I really appreciate your respectful tone and your willingness to engage with the complexity of this work.
It’s true that we each carry different histories, different forms of pain, and different pressures—often invisible to one another. The weight of presumption, from any direction, can be heavy. I deeply resonate with your hope that we can move forward with mutual respect, even when our frameworks or lived experiences don’t align perfectly.
I share your wish for dialogue that honors difference without defensiveness, and for a collective commitment to “first, do no harm.” That principle has to include cultural humility—recognizing the limits of our own lenses and making room for those whose paths diverge from our own.
Thank you again for your thoughtfulness and for holding space for peace, especially for the sake of our children. That shared commitment means a lot.
Report comment
This! I was planning to become a therapist but dropped the idea when I realized early on that there was no room in mental health for questioning and dissention. It’s all about conformity to the status quo. Doing whatever it takes to coerce your client to conform. Much of behavior that therapists pathologize are normal and (should be) expected actions to injustice and mistreatment. Take CBT, for instance. You are being bullied at work. Coworkers have decided they don’t like you because they are threatened. By your intelligence, race, religion, sexual orientation, whatever. YOU are not the problem. THEY need the therapy. The therapist uses her “tools.” Practice gratitude, give yourself positive affirmations, stop caring what they think and “let them,” and worst of all: turn your negative thoughts into a positive thoughts. When you feel yourself responding to bullying and oppression, it’s not REALLY happening, it’s just your negative feelings about yourself that came from your parents (even if your parents were great.) CBT is mostly just gaslighting yourself. Meanwhile, the bullying at work continues while you continue to be more and more affected by it. However, in the therapist’s mind, you just aren’t “doing the homework.” When, in exasperation, you tell the therapist what you really need are ways to shut down the bullying, real solutions to the actual problem of dealing with messed up people, they stare dumbfoundedly at you and then begin to back away from you as a client. It’s as if a light bulb went off, they see themselves for what they are really doing (nothing at best, more harm than good at worst) and their brains can’t handle it. So they retreat into their comfortable world of denial, fully supported by their colleagues, and blame the client for the lack of successful therapy.
Report comment
What other profession allows your failure to be helpful to be reframed as “treatment resistance?” What would we say if our mechanic told us we had “repair-resistant fuel injectors?” Wouldn’t we look for a new mechanic immediately?
Report comment
That’s such a powerful analogy—and I really appreciate the sharpness of your critique. You’re right to question the way “treatment resistance” can sometimes function as a deflection of responsibility in mental health care. When practitioners stop being curious and start blaming the client, that’s not care—it’s avoidance.
At its worst, the label treatment-resistant can pathologize people who are actually responding in completely understandable ways to trauma, oppression, or misattuned care. It can mask the system’s failure to adapt, listen, or offer more humanizing approaches.
That said, I also think there’s a version of that phrase that could be reclaimed—one that reflects a mismatch between the model and the person, not a failure on the client’s part. What if instead of “treatment-resistant,” we said, “this approach isn’t resonating with what this person needs right now”? And then got curious, instead of defensive?
Your comment gets to the heart of why I wrote the piece: we need more accountability, more humility, and a greater willingness to question the frameworks we’ve been taught to uphold. Thank you for naming it so clearly.
Report comment
Love this comment!!! Most of the therapists I saw were totally clueless in matters of office politics. Now how in the world could that possibly be…?
Report comment
Thank you! And yes—exactly! It’s wild how often therapy is treated like it exists in a vacuum, separate from the real-world systems people have to survive in every day—including messy, political, and often toxic workplaces. When therapists don’t understand those dynamics, it’s easy for their guidance to miss the mark or even cause more harm.
I think part of the problem is that many therapists are trained to look inward but not necessarily outward—to focus on individual coping rather than the systems that create distress. That gap can make clients feel incredibly unseen.
Appreciate you calling this out!
Report comment
I appreciate you! 🙂
Report comment
Thank you so much for sharing this. Your words hold so much truth, pain, and clarity. I hear the disillusionment, and I also hear the deep desire for justice, real change, and care that actually responds to the world as it is—not as it should be through the lens of privilege or conformity.
What you described happens far too often: therapy that centers the individual’s “resilience” while ignoring or even denying the harm being done to them in real time. It can feel like gaslighting—especially when tools like CBT are applied in rigid, decontextualized ways that pathologize natural, righteous responses to oppression.
You’re right: some of what gets labeled as “maladaptive” is actually resistance, awareness, and a sign that a person is still alive in the face of chronic invalidation. When the therapeutic system can’t hold space for that truth, it does end up protecting the status quo.
I’m sorry that you were pushed out of the field before you could find a space where questioning, dissent, and systemic critique were welcome. We need voices like yours. And I hope—truly—that spaces continue to open where clients are not expected to suppress their pain but are supported in naming it, and where therapists are held accountable to the world beyond the therapy room.
Thank you again for your honesty. You’re not alone in feeling this.
Report comment
If your experience is an atmosphere restrictive to your ideas and insights, maybe you’re training with the wrong people or maybe I didn’t notice it due to my perspective. It’s a thought, though. Once you’re on your own, you can take knowledge from anywhere and apply it as you think best. That being said, the article helped me identify and adjust some of my unconscious biases. Uncomfortable, but growth is sometimes funny that way.
Report comment
Thank you so much for reading and for your thoughtful reflection. I really appreciate your willingness to sit with discomfort and use it as a space for growth—that’s not easy, and it means a lot to hear the article supported that process.
You raise a good point: perspective shapes so much of what we notice—or don’t—within training spaces. Sometimes what feels like freedom to one person may feel like constraint or erasure to another, depending on their identities and lived experience. I think there’s a real opportunity in what you said: to hold both the wisdom we gain in training and the responsibility we have, once we’re practicing, to shape the work in ways that are more liberatory, more honest, and more inclusive.
Thank you again for engaging with the piece so thoughtfully.
Report comment
I enjoyed reading and being mentally stretched by your experience of being gaslit (I think that’s the right term) when you worked to expand the discussion to decolonizing mental health care. I am learning and have a distance to go, and I’m sure I make mis-steps – I’m white, male, CIS, middle class, after all. It’s been and is still a big mindset shift from my safe upbringing. A journey.
I was fortunate enough to work on a project in the UK with people struggling with poverty (money/debt, housing, relationships) and mental health. And I found the middle-class approach I’d been taught served as a foundation, but was not enough, and could set me in the wrong direction on occasions. As you say “The systems that create harm—capitalism, poverty, and racism—are erased, leaving people to blame themselves for their distress”. I agree, and I only saw the impacts of capitalism and poverty.
We need to listen to patient experience and be humbled to learn and look wider for causes and solutions. And add that approach to our training. My inadequate thoughts! Thanks again for an important article.
Report comment
Thank you so much for reading and for sharing your reflections with such honesty and humility. I really appreciate your willingness to sit with discomfort and acknowledge the ways your training, while valuable, didn’t always equip you to meet people where they actually are. That awareness is powerful—and necessary.
What you shared about working with people navigating poverty, debt, and housing instability in the UK resonates deeply. So often, we’re trained to locate distress inside the individual, without enough attention to the systems that create and sustain harm. It’s encouraging to hear how your experience helped widen that lens.
You’re absolutely right—centering lived experience, listening deeply, and making space to be challenged by what we hear is critical. I don’t see your thoughts as inadequate at all. In fact, your comment models the kind of self-reflection and openness that gives me hope for how this field can evolve.
Report comment
I so appreciate your description of your experience and your courage in dissecting all that’s
unspoken and troubling in what you encountered.
Report comment
Thank you so much for your kind words. It means a lot to know that the piece resonated with you. Naming the unspoken parts—especially in systems that thrive on silence—can feel risky, but responses like yours remind me why it’s worth it. I really appreciate your affirmation and encouragement.
Report comment
Forgive me, but I think you are getting worked up over nothing, because this field is very ineffective at fixing people. See for yourself: https://totalmentalhealth.info/how-well-does-psychotherapy-work-mental-health-workers-tell-the-truth/
The mental health industry also actively misleads people into believing they are biologically defective:
https://totalmentalhealth.info/to-the-mentally-ill-your-brainsare-fine/
I don’t think anything can be done to help psychology nor psychiatry. Look into the Dodo bird verdict — most if not all the therapies, no matter how different they are, apparently work about the same. Why do you think something you thought up would be better?
Report comment
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and taking the time to include these links. I can hear the disillusionment in your words—and you’re certainly not alone in feeling this way. There’s a growing and important body of critique around the limitations and harms of the mental health system, especially when it pathologizes individuals and downplays the real impact of social and systemic injustice. I share many of those concerns.
You’re absolutely right that therapy isn’t a cure-all—and that the field has, at times, failed people in deep and damaging ways. The Dodo bird verdict and meta-analyses showing similar effectiveness across therapeutic approaches do highlight something important: it’s often not the technique itself that matters most, but the relationship, the safety, and the meaning-making that happens in the space between people.
That’s exactly why I believe there is room—and need—for different approaches. When therapy is practiced in a way that centers cultural context, collective struggle, and lived experience, it can become more than symptom management. It can be a space for reclaiming one’s voice, connecting to community, and resisting systems that cause harm. That’s not everyone’s experience, and I respect your skepticism. But I’ve also seen what’s possible when therapy stops trying to “fix” people and instead starts to witness them—fully, without shame.
I don’t believe we need to throw the entire field away. I think we need to decolonize it, reimagine it, and hold it accountable. And that includes listening to critiques like yours, not dismissing them.
Thank you again for engaging with my work and for naming your truth so directly.
Report comment
I do appreciate your thoughtful response and your engaging with me in this discussion. Regarding the usefulness of psychotherapy, I don’t think that at this point in time you grasp just how fundamental the problem with the field of psychology is. That is understandable. It took me years until I got it myself, and that turning point came when I discovered Dave Hunt’s exposes of psychology.
The problem with psychotherapy goes back to the very inception and purpose of this field. Many do not know that the field of psychology was established in the West by atheists as a secular substitute for what the church used to offer people for healing of the soul and spirit and dealing with life problems. How secular they managed to be is debatable, because from the beginning they had no problem incorporating occult and non-Christian religious practices, like hypnosis, and trying to pass them off as “science.” I myself was tricked into getting into hypnosis, and thank God, I got out of that minefield before something bad happened, like giving someone a false memory.
As the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said, psychotherapy is just talk. The technique doesn’t matter that much. Psychologist Nigel MacLennan says it, too: “Yes, as many people have successfully therapeutic experiences over a coffee and chat with friends as with paid professionals.”
I have a background in psychology, and I can attest it didn’t do much for my life. I have worked with other mental health professionals and observed a number of them struggling with unresolved issues. Drunk driving and eye-bulging levels of anxiety are not just things I can ignore in people who were supposed to have the answers. Obviously, they were not able to fix themselves with what they learned.
However, when I accepted Jesus as my Savior and learned about deliverance, I myself found freedom from 2 decades of depression, binge-eating issues, and insane food cravings. I got real results in the span of 1-3 months per problem area. Compare this to people who get therapy for 10 years straight and never see results. You see, the problem with psychology (and psychiatry) is that they discount the spiritual due to their atheistic origins. This is exactly why they keep trying to find a biological cause for mental illness, and this is also why they don’t cure people. There is no supernatural power. They have rejected that, and instead just charge people to unload their traumas on them hour after hour, year after year. The therapist Daniel Mackler (on Youtube) tells of how he developed ulcerative colitis after years of listening to people’s terrible life stories. What he didn’t say is, however, whether or not he actually ever healed anyone or equipped them to heal themselves. If he had, I think he would make a big deal of it, which makes me think he went through all that for nothing, just a paycheck.
More relevant quotes why all these different psychotherapy techniques and ideas just don’t matter:
“If the type, length and intensity of therapy generally have no significant effect on clients’ improvement, one would hope that at least the therapist’s training does. To examine this, Strupp and Hadley randomly assigned thirty clients with neurotic depression or anxiety reactions to either university professors who had no background in psychology or psychotherapy, or to professionally trained and accredited psychologists. They found that the professionals were no more effective than the untrained professors, as assessed on a number of measures of clients’ functioning. The only difference was that those treated by the professional therapists showed a bit more optimism; nevertheless, it failed to show any effect on their symptoms or functioning. ”
– Tana Dineen (1996). Manufacturing Victims (2007 ed.), page 54
‘Let me draw your attention to one of these, a classic study which examined the results of a number of other studies. In a review of therapy factors that account for significant client progress, Lambert calculated the per cent of improvement that could be attributed to each of several variables… He found that “spontaneous remission” (improvement of the problem by itself without any treatment) accounted for 40%, an additional 15% of the change resulted from placebo effects (which he referred to as “expectancy controls”, that is that the patient expected to get better no matter what was done,) while a further 30% improved as the result of common factors in the relationship such as trust, empathy, insight and warmth. Only 15% of the overall improvement could be attributed to any specific psychological intervention or technique. Based on these findings one could conclude that 85% of clients would improve with the help of a good friend and 40% without even that. ‘
– Dineen, T. (1998). Psychotherapy: snake oil of the 90’s. Skeptic Magazine 6(3
Report comment
Wow, Tahira. Thank you for this article. I had no idea that the mental health system was like this. You’ve opened my eyes… unfortunately in a way that I’m uncomfortable with, and yet in a way that’s necessary. I’ve been through a countless number of counselors, only resonating with one or two. And several psychiatrists too. A couple of which have been rather good for me. I often feel like they “just don’t get it.” You’ve indeed confirmed that they *don’t* get it. What does one do in such a system? How can a client feel heard and seen when the counselors themselves aren’t heard and seen?
Report comment