I'm not psychotherapy's biggest fan, but I did do 2 years training in it, and I must say the world is a better place for psychotherapy's existence. Because before psychotherapy we were cutting bits of people's brains out and electrocuting them. For all Freud's frankly odd theories he was the first big name to stand up and suggest that well intentioned dialogue was enough to help traumatised people.
It's not rocket science, we don't need any big theories or research to know that talking helps. And of course by that same token some combinations of client and therapist are going to be constructive and some damaging. I believe psychotherapy is first and foremost an institution of accountability not academic theory.
>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?
...monasticism was never healthy. I really defy someone to read the Rule of Saint Benedict and not think of a modern prison at least once. Monasticism is even considered spiritually dangerous at times, and is linked to its own specific sin, Acedia:
I recommend Kathleen Harris's The Noonday Demon for a good account of that. If anything, monastic life would destroy you if you suffered from depression, not heal you.
It's not rocket science, we don't need any big theories or research to know that talking helps. And of course by that same token some combinations of client and therapist are going to be constructive and some damaging. I believe psychotherapy is first and foremost an institution of accountability not academic theory.