Psychotherapy—the treatment method used to cure emotional disorders by counselling and communicating with patients—could be dangerous for some, a media report said on Monday.“The profession hasn’t shown much interest in the problem of treatments that can be harmful. Of the few psychotherapies that have been for safety, too many cause harm to at least some patients,” Newsweek quoted psychology professor Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University as saying. Few patients seeking psychotherapy know that talking can be dangerous and the therapies are not “exactly rushing to tell them so,” it said.The Food and Drug Administration requires proof while prescribing medicines, but for treatments that come from the lips of psychologists, there is no such requirement and they could prove harmful, it pointed out.“Stress debriefing” for instance, is designed to prevent symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in those who have suffered or witnessed a trauma. In a three- to four-hour group session, a therapist pushes patients to discuss and “process” their feelings and to describe in detail what they experienced or witnessed.But, many of those who undergo stress debriefing develop worse PTSD symptoms than thosrauma on their own, the report said, quoting controlled studies, adding that this might be because the intense relieving of the trauma impedes the patient’s ability for natural recovery. Burn victims who underwent stress debriefing had shown worse PTSD 13 months later than victims who had not undergone the treatment. Similarly, people who went through it after being in a car crash had greater anxiety about travel three years later than those who did not, the report said. Psychotherapy for dissociative-identity disorder (formerly called multiple-personality disorder) can pose even greater risks, Newsweek stresses. Some therapists believe the best treatment for these fractured souls is to bring out the hidden identities, called “alters”, through hypnosis.“Unfortunately, many alters cause self-injurious behaviour, suicide attempts, and verbal and physical aggression,” Lilienfeld says in a paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.In addition, the “let’s meet the alters!” techniques can actually create alters in ‘suggestible patients’. “As more alters come out the patient back to having one identity,” Lilienfeld adds.The naive trust in the treatment should have been blown out of the water when “recovered memory” therapy actually created false memories in patients, often of childhood sexual abuse, tearing families apart, the report said.A 2000 study, Newsweek says, found that four in 10 people who lost a loved one would have been better off without grief counselling (based on a comparison with people who were randomly assigned to a no-therapy group). This means the counselling sometimes prolonged or deepened grief, leaving more depression and anxiety in patients who underwent the treatment than those who worked out the problem on their own.Despite all these, the Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Therapy,” the clinicians’ bible, devotes only 2.5 pages out of 821 to adverse effects of the treatment, though documented risks of therapies could fill a small book, Newsweek says.
