Talking Therapy Episode 41: When Therapy Makes a Patient Worse: Part 2

Hosts:

Producer:

Alan Kian, MA, York University
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Marvin Goldfried is a distinguished professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, where he helped to develop the graduate program in clinical psychology—he is the cofounder of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration. Allen Frances is a professor of psychiatry and chair emeritus at Duke, and was chair of the DSM-IV task force.

Marvin describes the evolution of his psychotherapy orientation as psychodynamic, behavioral, CBT, and eventually integrative. He practices, teaches, and supervises what works clinically using direct and indirect evidence base.

Allen describes his approach to psychotherapy as “whatever works” or “no one size fits all”. He was trained and taught at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center, but remains equally interested in brief, supportive, cognitive, behavioral, interpersonal, and family therapies.

Please enjoy this week’s episode!

[Ciskuss]

Suppporting therapy is also minimizing shame and normalizing and de-pathologizing

[marielarsson]

I hear this. My PDT therapy just ended and I feel worse than ever because I’m still depressed. Now I have to live with the feeling of failure and shame and abandonment forever.

[jrti]

Lots of gold and wisdom here. Thank you.

[AnnaPrzebudzona]

I really wish you could elaborate on ”the people who develop excessively intense relationships with therapists”. If these people cannot benefit from therapy, where are they supposed to seek help??! Isn't it paradoxical that psychotherapy has nothing to offer for people who need help with interpersonal relationships and emotional regulation.
Please, could you do an episode on this topic of ”people who develop excessively intense relationships with their therapists”? I'm sure this phenomenon is non very rare and it would be useful for therapists as well as clients. I'm such a client and I'm really desperate, I don't know what to do. I have various psychological problems and my functioning has deteriorated over the years and I don't know where to seek help.

[lau-guerreiro]

In the past two days I've listened to all your previous episodes and thoroughly enjoyed it! I'm looking forward to many more.

[Degrassigirl]

I have a therapist that is strictly person center approach. I needed an ACT therapist or CBT therapist.

[albussnape]

The topic of harmful therapy surely requires several episodes to better address.

Would you address models beyond CBT and psychoanalytic approaches? A currently en vogue model involves indoctrination bias to view people as unrecognized “parts of self”—essentially the same destructive bias involved in MPD (now DID).

Confirmation bias is a topic worthy of discussion. So is informed consent vs. the insidious employment of indoctrinated approaches and quasi-hypnotic techniques with clients naive to “therapy world”.

How many naive clients understand that “Family Systems Therapy” is not about considering factors within one’s family. It is a “benign” name for an approach dividing people into unrecognized parts. Harmful and popular modern, undisclosed DID conviction bias.