New Study Shows the More Trained the Psychotherapist, the Worse the Results

     Enrico Gnaulati, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and a reformer of mental health practice and policy. Today he published an article on Mad in America which addresses the high number of people – around thirty percent — who are now discontinuing their psychotherapy. Half of these drop out after their first few sessions.

     Ironically, as these drop-out figures have risen, the number of psychotherapists who have undergone rigorous Ph.D. training in psychotherapeutic counseling has doubled. The more trained psychotherapists have become, apparently, the less effective they are in helping their clients.

     What are these doctoral programs teaching?

     Not the age old therapeutic values of true help. A full 75 percent of the counseling participants surveyed defined that help as “The most valuable aspect of therapy is sharing your thoughts and feelings without feeling judged or ashamed.” That client-validating approach is known in counseling circles as “alliance building” — good rapport rooted to relational sensitivity and responsiveness to client needs – and has been the cornerstone of any kind of successful one-on-one counseling for thousands of years.

     Only 17 percent of today’s doctoral programs require students to take an alliance building course, and only 13 percent of them even offer it as an elective.

     Instead, doctoral program psychotherapists are being trained almost exclusively in DSM-based descriptions of mental illness which prompt them to tell their clients what is wrong with them rather than listen to what the clients themselves say are their troubles.

     Labeling their clients – verbally or silently – is exactly what psychiatrists now do so they can write a prescription of risk-filled antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication. The DSM – the psychiatrists’ bible — has contaminated conventional psychotherapy.

     One other study that Gnaulati cites shows that a rigid adherence to protocol, therapist mis-attunement, and inert therapeutic relationships are three of the main reasons people drop out of toady’s psychotherapy so quickly.

     Advanced academic psychotherapy training is now replacing what was probably an innate desire to help and care for others by aspiring therapists with a rigid psychological system that forces otherwise well meaning folks into pigeon-holing their clients with DSM categories that are meaningless.

     That forceful type of evaluation only makes clients feel “judged or ashamed,” per their own words.

     Thankfully, thirty percent of today’s counseling clients see through this travesty of help and leave psychotherapy almost immediately.