I don't think the problem is that people can't be helped, I think the problem is that most therapists are bad at their job. I would not meet with anyone that has not gotten a PhD equivalent or gone to med school at a reputable place.
Just a quick anecdote. One of my problems was public speaking. This was in HS so my parents and teachers encouraged therapy. Unfortunately, this now meant dwelling on my fear of public speaking 3 times a week. We went so "deep" with why I was afraid but tbh it was probably best to keep it as simple as "I'm afraid to mess up"
I was "cured" of this fear by a damn video game. It was coming out the day of my presentation and 90% of my brain was focused on the anticipation of the game, only 10% left to worry about the public speaking. I got up, did the presentation on autopilot and then realized "oh, this isn't the worst thing ever" and never had a problem after. Sure, I get nervous but before I would actually throw up on days I knew I had to speak so... I consider it cured :)
My therapist was a great and qualified person... but I think I would have never made any true progress... just dwell on and dissected my fear into adulthood.
For what it's worth, I have a family member who ran a non-profit mental health clinic. According to them, studies have found that advanced degrees have little impact on outcomes. From what I recall, he argued studies showed that the key elements for a successful therapist where following some sort of framework/plan (e.g. cognitive therapy, behavioral therapy, Jungian therapy, etc.) and to be contentious (keep records of each session, come into each session with a plan, etc.).
About me: tenured faculty at APA and APS accredited clinical PhD program. Went to a top clinical program in the US.
Your family member is correct. However, the "framework/plan" in that research is not necessarily a manualized empirically supported therapy, it's having some kind of guiding theory about what's going on and a plan for how to proceed. Much more basic than the EST idea. Research generally doesn't show any replicable differential effect of therapy paradigm, especially after you control for publication bias.
Many of those studies of experience and degree were done long ago though, and I'm kind of interested how more recent studies would hold up.
In general though the most important things are having some working theory and plan about the client, rapport and comfort between the client and therapy, things like that. What makes therapy work is sort of nebulous and hard to pin down.
There are studies, for example, showing that there are better therapists than others, but figuring out what makes someone a good therapist has been much more difficult, and to the extent researchers have done so, it doesn't really track well with the manualized protocol-driven paradigms that have dominated the scientific therapy literature for the last 30 years or so.
It makes me wonder if what someone needs is highly individual-specific, and part of the trick to doing good therapy is figuring that out all around, and successful rapport stems from that.
It’s not the degree that matters, it’s just that most people have no way to screen for properly trained practitioners of one of the above plans. A top school will be more likely to have trained the students in these plans correctly by experienced trainers
Absolutely this. Only trust phds from top schools practitioners of evidence based therapies. Unfortunately there is a lot of quality dilution in the field and good practitioners don’t get reimbursed any more than quacks
