RE: Understanding Psychotherapy: A Brief Introduction
Criminal psychologist! Interesting! A Mindhunter type of fella?
Always in these types of posts the same question comes to mind: what qualifies as an issue? The way I see it, the only thing that designates something as being an issue, is the client himself comes to the therapist asking for assistance. It's like me going to the grocery store to buy tomatoes. The teller is not going to question my need for tomatoes. My being there almost by definition means I need tomatoes. The whole relationship evolves from that.
But I think most people who are in need of therapists do not go to therapy. For example, scenario 1: it takes a person longer than 6 months to get over a depression caused by the departure of a loved one. Most therapists will say that qualifies as a reason to pay a visit to therapist.
Scenario 2: A person pays 20 dollars to buy more lives on candy crash or whatever, instead of spending that money to buy vaccines for Africans. A therapist could be sitting in the room hearing me telling this story, and he wouldn't flinch an eyebrow, much less recommend that that person should go to a therapist and have his head examined. Same for organized religion: the mere fact that it's a shared delusion means you're fine, you don't need a therapist.
So I always found the subjectivity of what we consider an 'issue' or an 'illness' quite interesting.
Hello and thank you for your thoughts !
Haven't seen the show, but I get the concept. I wouldn't say that my profession is something like it, given the fact that there's a lot of mythology on TV screens for entertainment purposes.
Usually the manifested issue by the client is not in fact the true latent cause of their need to go in therapy. Of course when it's an obvious circumstance like you said -
that's another case, but usually 'the issue' is on an unconscious level which takes a lot of time to uncover and fix.
As for your second scenario I don't think that any professional therapist would simply ignore any kind of information from their client. After all, the session is about the client not about the therapist.
As for you looking for more objective opinion on what is considered to be 'illness' I suggest you read the DSM-V :)
Thanks for your contribution !
Well the DSM is kinda notorious for terming everything a disorder!
I haven't watched the series, I read the book, which is a true story, but I linked to the series for ease.
Technically there is no 'completely healthy' individual.
I do not think everybody who lost a loved one needs psychotherapy. But some people´s grief is so overwhelming they need proffesional help.