In decades of reading your column this is the first time I’ve felt you missed the point completely. Psychotherapy is not like killing germs and healing a patient. It is about the relationship between the therapist and the client. So the therapist MUST be able to identify with the client and the client must share the identification, or it does not work.
In other words, if the therapist does not share the problem that the client has, s/he can’t identify with it and share it with the client. The therapist has to be just a little less crazy than the client, or it does not work. A “normal” person can never understand the problem of the client or help them work through it.
Proof – in what other therapy does the treatment often require patients to gather in a group and help each other in order to understand their issues?
I know this from more than 30 years of being a client in psychotherapy and several years in a group treatment situation.
The therapist must be just slightly saner than the clients in order for therapy to work. Otherwise, they just don’t get it!
Welcome to the board Harry. I disagree with you wholeheartedly. And I’m neither a therapist nor a client. I don’t want anyone slightly less crazy than me treating me for anything.
Correct, to a degree. The role of a therapist is to understand the client’s issues and provide tools for coping with those issues. Some tools are medication, some tools are different ways to think about the issues, some tools are actions to take, some tools are ways to vent safely. Etc. The relationship is important because the client must trust the therapist in order to open up and share thoroughly. Lack of trust defeats the ability to communicate properly.
This is nonsense. One does not need to have experienced the exact same thing to understand the issues at hand. You do not need to be schizophrenic to treat schizophrenia, nor do you need to be a woman with delusions to treat women with delusions. Or be a man with PTSD to treat a man with PTSD.
Sharing experiences and coping techniques is one tool, but not the only tool.
This was the first time I was disappointed by a response from Straight Dope. First, the question is about whether psychotherapists and other mental health professionals are “crazier”. The emphasis is not on psychiatrists; but all of the data presented is on psychiatrists. Second, do you know what psychiatrists do and how it differs from psychotherapists? Psychiatrists are prescribers. They meet with individuals and prescribe psychotropic drugs. Very few psychiatrists are trained in psychoanalysis of yesteryear. They barely know how to talk to people like so many other physicians! Even if they’re included as “other mental health professionals” to highlight them only by presenting tons of info on psychiatrists - in a column meant to give straight answers on phenomena - just disappointing Cecil. AND! The comments! Really? Seriously guys?
The work of a psychotherapist (I am one, so I am taking the liberty to enlighten) is to treat mental illness. To do this we establish trust and confidence in a client, explore emotional problems that occur internally, problems with our own behavioral and cognitive patterns (e.g. not “I can’t stand my wife, she always does X” but rather, "My husband and I are arguing constantly, he says stuff that makes me angry but I hide my feelings, I’m filled with anger but I withdraw, avoid work, get disorganized, become depressed…) help the client to understand problematic ways she/he deals with difficult emotions, and teach effective coping skills, interpersonal skills, emotional regulation, ways to tolerate distress.
Whether one has experienced those issues or not, the psychotherapist must be skilled at tuning into what the client is experiencing, watching for a ton of interacting variables - including the therapist’s own emotional response to the client or the client’s story.
Even if the tone of the column is generally flippant, mental health professionals really don’t need extra crap loaded on them - and neither do folks who might need help but are turned off by misinformation. Are “psychotherapists and other mental health professionals” more likely to have mental illness than other professions? Who knows! Not addressed in this answer. Two thumbs down man.
Psychiatrists do not “differ from” psychotherapists; they are rather one kind of psychotherapist. That you neither recognize this nor identify yourself or your school is cause to question the whole of your posting. So is your evident bias.
Cecil refers to “mental health workers” and “mental health professionals” frequently in that column. Most of his references to studies, however, refer to psychiatrists, so that is the term he uses when stating the results of those studies.
I suspect the reason those studies use psychiatrists rather than a broader sampling of mental health workers is that it allows the statistical comparisons to be on a more similar basis. They take medical doctors trained in psychiatric issues and compare them to medical doctors in other fields, vs comparing medical doctors in heart surgery or pediatrics against mental health workers that are not medical doctors, and thus have different training regimines, different degrees, and thus more confounding factors.