Comments by Marcus O'Shea

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  • Thomas Szasz is an extreme right wing fascist who’s entire project was to classify all people struggling with mental, developmental or psychosocial distress and disability as ‘malingerers’ who should be left to die alone on moral grounds. Epstein is a mid level social work professor of no note or intellectual rigour whatsoever who is publishing to gain prestige for a group many of my fellow working class people have described as ‘colonialist child kidnappers’.

    Psychotherapy is provably helpful, overwhelmingly evidenced. There are certainly criticisms to be made, specifically of the proliferation of pseudo-scientific modalities and theories as selling points when they make up 1% of the difference in outcomes. Good psychotherapy or counselling is the offering of the services of a person trained, practiced, and skilled in active listening, warmth, empathy, curiosity, and non-judgement who is not personally involved in your situation to talk things through with. it’s a service every single remotely complext society in human history has offered in some form.

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  • The headline’s pretty misleading in a seemingly deliberate, malicious, and potentially extremely harmful manner. Reading the full study, It appears that therapy was absolutely fine for minority women and they were very positive on it, not a single woman claimed it ‘failed her’. They were incredibly positive about their therapists, and only reported some annoyance with therapy wait times (btw, everyone has a problem with this, not just minority women), and session counts/durations that they felt weren’t long enough (which means they literally wanted MORE therapy, not less).

    The headline, if you weren’t deliberately aiming to scare minority women out of having someone to talk to, should read “Long therapy wait times frustrate minority women in the UK, but they report very positive experiences of therapists and therapy itself”.

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  • “but even there it is admitted that, for example, a person suffering from PTSD symptoms is not able to benefit from intensive psychotherapies.”

    Weird statement, Written Exposure Therapy and Narrative Exposure Therapy have incredibly high levels of evidence for effectiveness, without the pseudoscience, side effects, dropout rates, hyperindividualist approach, extreme cost or cultish nonsense of EMDR.

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