[smokedetector1]

agree. This cant do as much as genuine therapy (which requires another person, no way around it). But it is helpful in some ways. It helped me talk through something last week and it genuinely enriched my life in that way.

[tonymet]

Does therapy actually work? Not by the numbers. tons enrolled, none cured.

[komali2]

Therapy keeps people alive that wouldn't otherwise be, and people coping that wouldn't otherwise be able to.

I've noticed that the human tolerance for extreme suffering leads sometimes to binary thinking. "Well they're still going to work even though they're made to piss in bottles, they must be fine with it!" Human experience is a wide array of emotions and states, I don't think we should try to separate into "cured/healthy" and "unhealthy/requiring adjustment by a mental health professional." Improving quality of life is also good.

[tonymet]

The suicidality blackmail

[komali2]

Pretty gross comment. Just say you're cool and awesome cause you don't care about people. Virtue signal and move on, why make try to make a fake discussion?

[tonymet]

I’m sincere . And blackmailing people this way is the gross part , not pointing it out

[komali2]

Oh, well, since you're sincere, the answer to your original question, "Does therapy actually work," is, yes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5509639/

You aren't sincere, though, since you followed it up with a clearly uninformed assumption: "Not by the numbers. tons enrolled, none cured." That you're uninformed is obvious: there's myriad papers demonstrating the efficacy of psychotherapy in treating all manner of diseases, furthermore, to say "cured" means you have a fundamentally uninformed understanding of medicine. Nobody that's spent any reasonable amount of time learning about medicine would so flippantly say something vague like "cured." How do you "cure" a limb with peripheral arterial disease? Well, you treat the patient by amputating the limb. Boom, they've been "cured" of PAD! You see, it's absurd.

Based on your site, you seem like a pretty smart guy, in engineering. Maybe when it comes to confidently dismissing entire swaths of knowledge, you should stick to your own field, rather than "sincerely" doubting an entire branch of medicine without even a single paper linked to support your position.

[HDThoreaun]

Not a single person who read this thread (including you) honestly believes you are trying to have a sincere discussion

[RickS]

Worked great for me. Big recommend. "Cured" is mostly an unspecifiable state, and while certainly there's lots still wrong with me, I am healed far beyond my expectations at the outset, so increment your count by one.

[tonymet]

Cured would mean you are healed . No more therapeutics , no more abnormalities

[everyday7732]

Healing probably is the wrong analogy.

Is a person with a crutch healed? No. But they can walk, when before they could not. Therapy can't erase the past, but it can give people tools to live more capable and rich lives. A crutch doesn't regrow an amputated leg, but it does help that person handle the injury, so in that sense, it 'works'.

[smokedetector1]

the psyche is not the same as the body, the model of “disease”/treatment/cure is not the same and analogies are of limited utility

[iammjm]

I dare you to find a single person without "abnormalities"

[tonymet]

Then which ones is therapy aiming to fix?

[plewd]

Those that start negatively impacting day-to-day life significantly, although I believe nearly everyone can benefit from some sort of therapy.

[thewebguyd]

With most therapy the goal isn't to cure, but to manage and help cope in a healthy way. There are also plenty of mental illnesses or disorders that have no cure, and a few that are in the DSM because they cause problems with how our society is structured, not necessarily because its a true disorder (its only disorder because it causes issues functioning within societal systems).

[tonymet]

They are made up. None of them are empirically or objectively defined

[bonoboTP]

I think it's neither made up, nor actual health care.

It's basically a replacement for having cultural and social guard rails, lots of community, lots of straightforward expectations of roles etc. Today, people are atomized and lost, so they need a friend-and-priest-replacement who has authority but also patience to hear you out and has experience with judgement calls about people's lives.

But all this talk about "healthy" ways of coping etc is basically just there for medicine-envy and insurance reasons.

I think having one's mind/spirit sorted out is quite important, but the specific textbook strategies of today may be indeed mostly hogwash through a strict healthcare lens.

[smokedetector1]

much therapy is basically what youre saying, but the real deal is not, and is a more genuine healing experience that can only be facilitated by an expert

[rendx]

Oh! Just like happiness then! /s

[TurdF3rguson]

It works at least as well as placebo!