Quote:
Originally Posted by Wawrzyn
My understanding of the way therapy works is that if you have a psychological problem that you cannot solve on your own you hire a paid professional, you share your problems with him or her, he or she helps you understand how to solve your problems, and then you move on with your life and hopefully apply what you learned in therapy. The therapy itself should last only a few months. But then you have people who, by their own admission, have been working with the same therapist for as many as 3-15 years. I believe that keeping a person in therapy for so many years not only says a lot about the curative capacity of the professional but also suggests a lack of ethics on their part.
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Wawryzn,
I think it directly applies to the diagnosis of the person in therapy and their level of functioning. I know for myself personally I have a serious mental illness and I am not able to live a healthy functioning life without therapy and medications. It is tried and true. When I am in supportive therapy and medication management I am able to be a contributing member of society, hold down a full time job, not be abusive to my family, etc. If I were not in therapy I do not believe I would be able to have that level of functioning in my life. It would be unethical to deny a person like myself the psychotherapuetic resources that are needed to manage our mental illness.
Surely there are cases of people continuing on in therapy when it is not needed. I have seen several blogs here on PC regarding this very topic. I am fairly certain that it has more to do with the complex emotions of ending the relatioinship for both the therapist and the client than it has to do with blatant unethical behavior. How difficult and different the therapy road is. It does not compare to anything else does it?