Re:Have we overestimated the effectiveness of psychotherapy?
by jdietrich on Saturday July 14, 2018 @10:56AM
(#17530569)
>Because before psychotherapy we were cutting bits of people's brains out and electrocuting them.
The great tragedy is that cutting bits of people's brains out and electrocuting them worked. It still does. Electroconvulsive therapy is still available and highly effective. Here in the UK, we still have two specialist psychosurgery units that perform a handful of procedures every year to treat the most severe cases of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Psychosurgery used to be crude, dangerous and often ineffective, but that's because surgery used to be crude, dangerous and often ineffective. We pretty much abandoned psychosurgery before the invention of CT and MRI, before the invention of endoscopic surgery, stereotaxy and the gamma knife. There is tremendous potential for psychosurgery that remains largely unexplored.
For all the cheerleading about how humane and enlightened we are, for all the drugs and talking therapies we have, it remains the case that many people with severe mental illnesses never find an effective treatment. We were right to stop locking people up in asylums and stop hammering icepicks through their eye sockets, but we've become incredibly blasé about the millions of people living lives of misery who we are unable or unwilling to help. Take a walk around downtown San Francisco and you'll see the legacy of deinstitutionalisation - thousands of people who are incapable of caring for themselves, just dumped on the street.
What if future generations decide that our ideology is just as barbaric as the one it replaced?
The great tragedy is that cutting bits of people's brains out and electrocuting them worked. It still does. Electroconvulsive therapy is still available and highly effective. Here in the UK, we still have two specialist psychosurgery units that perform a handful of procedures every year to treat the most severe cases of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Psychosurgery used to be crude, dangerous and often ineffective, but that's because surgery used to be crude, dangerous and often ineffective. We pretty much abandoned psychosurgery before the invention of CT and MRI, before the invention of endoscopic surgery, stereotaxy and the gamma knife. There is tremendous potential for psychosurgery that remains largely unexplored.
For all the cheerleading about how humane and enlightened we are, for all the drugs and talking therapies we have, it remains the case that many people with severe mental illnesses never find an effective treatment. We were right to stop locking people up in asylums and stop hammering icepicks through their eye sockets, but we've become incredibly blasé about the millions of people living lives of misery who we are unable or unwilling to help. Take a walk around downtown San Francisco and you'll see the legacy of deinstitutionalisation - thousands of people who are incapable of caring for themselves, just dumped on the street.
What if future generations decide that our ideology is just as barbaric as the one it replaced?