nemorathwald | How To Choose A Mental Health Care Provider

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How To Choose A Mental Health Care Provider

Several years ago, The Road Less Traveled suggested to me the idea that everyone could benefit from therapy, regardless of whether a crisis situation has developed to force them to consider themselves "sick." From observing the human race, I agree with the author that mental health is always a matter of degree. I'm dubious of the claim that a totally 100% perfect mental state needing no improvement should be considered "normalcy" and there are a few "sick" people outside that category. So I decided to take up therapy the way one takes up pottery.

One can really blow a lot of money that way if one isn't careful. Certain principles should be applied no matter what service is being provided: one should not go into anything without a clear definition of what one will get from it, how it's supposed to deliver that, and how to tell if it doesn't. I got a therapist who never did one single solitary thing except listen like some kind of glorified answering machine. Without his help, I carefully defined my therapeutic goals. (Have you? I recommend that you do.) I was doing a perfectly good job of achieving them without assistance. I'm certainly still attempting to do so. But even if some form of expertise could have accelerated the process of self-understanding, I demand to know the means and the metric for judging success before I plunk down cash for more than one session. He had no plan, refused to give advice or assignments or analysis, and no explanation for how anything he might have done would have acheived what I wanted-- that is, had he done anything.

I won't tell you how long it lasted. I like to style myself a skeptic, but after this experience I determined not to be so hard on people who go to criminal frauds like faith healers and "new age energy" alternative medicine blah blah blah. That's not what this guy was. I went to him because he had a degree and was accredited in psychology. Who knows what he learned from all that education. That's what I went to get, so I wish he had told me. I'm embarrased how long it took to disengage myself without seeming to insult this nice man. I appreciate the fact that he constantly marveled at how well we got along despite his biblical perspective and my committment to non-theism. Yes, he was a pastoral counselor. I actually couldn't find any other kind! How times have changed. But he never lectured me out of any inerrant revelation. Presumably he's helpful to a lot of people and just had nothing to say to me personally, or he would have gone out of business. Or, if his parishioners define no criteria to tell them when to stop throwing good money after bad (because of faith, hint hint), he might just be making their lives worse. I have no way to know which it is.

I already have people who will listen to me explore my inner space and offer feedback. You are doing so, gentle reader. And you aren't charging me a thing.

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The first therapist I had was trained in a method where it was, apparently, his job to just sit there and provide a silent reflecting wall for me. I got tired of this, and eventually left. From this, I learned to a) place a value on my money and my time, and b) exercise my right to vote with my feet, even at the risk of hurting another person's feelings.

I don't give him credit for these revelations, though. (:

very interesting. and helpful. ive never been to a therapist, but i had always figured that if i did go, i would get something out of it. i should pay you for the lesson learned!! (:~ <----i just invented a new smiley! thats me when i had my mohawk!

Just ask things upfront in the first phone call. First, what you will get from him? In other words, what techniques does he employ? If he states up front he never gives advice, you need to know that. How about analysis? Or personal growth "assignments"? Second, how it is that supposed to give you the result? Third and most important, how can you tell when to end it? In othe words, is this like one of those private investigators who keeps claiming he's hot on the trail of your kidnapped daughter, and it's only weeks away if you give him more money to follow up on a contact in the slave trade on a beach in the Bahamas.

Better yet, just read a lot and talk about it with others who do.

But, kindly use some respect. Not all people who use healing modalities which you may not understand are even close to being "frauds." Faith is a real essence with real power, and I do not need to prove that fact to you or anyone else. I am tired of people who subscribe to any given belief system - deists, non-deists, athiests, or whatever the hell - painting anyone who disagrees with their particular religion - and faith in human reason is nothing more than another kind of religion, or at least another kind of fundamentalism - as being fraudulent, stupid, totally inept, etc. I will not characterize your belief system that way. Kindly do not do so to that of others.

Consider that advice as free of charge.

OK, let's apply my comments to the ones who are charlatans and not apply my comments to the ones who are not. The same right that you have to characterize my point of view as a fundamentalist religion, I will excercise to characterize belief systems however I wish, with absolutely no regard to favoritism because of friends I happen to make, including you or anyone else. I have given up entire social circles before and I'm just glad I don't think it will need to come to that again. We have now characterized each other, which I've learned is inevitable, and having spoken where we are simply at during this moment, we hopefully can forget it and move on. From the day I met you I saw it coming, and I'm comfortable with it. After all, it's "my truth" isn't it?

I was not sufficiently clear. I was not characterizing you as a person, but rather the sweeping condemnation of alternative and/or faith-based modalities.

One of the things that create snappishness in me is fundamentalism of any kind. I know fundamentalist socialists - people who will not concede that there could be any use whatsoever for any kind of market system - and though I have socialist leanings myself, their closed-mindedness irks me as well. In other words, I tend to define fundamentalism as an unwillingness to concede that another viewpoint may have merit. I don't know you well enough yet to know whether your belief system falls into that category, but that part of your post certainly did.

Granted, I have made sweeping generalizations myself - about Republicans, for example - but I recognize such as a bad habit that I'm working at rooting out.

Or-put another way - I have no problem with your saying that *you* have no use for faith, energy healing, whatever. Should you go further and postulate that these things can not and do not exist/have any use/etc. for *anyone,* and futher do so in a way that shows disrespect for those who disagree with you...I have a major problem with that.

One thing I do know - when the two of us pass, one of us has a surprise coming. If the "surpris-ee" is you - or, putting it another way, if my belief in the permanence and rebirth of the soul is correct - you owe me a drink in the next life, friend :-)

Thanks for the clarification. It's important to consider each person in parts. I value you very much.

If it's really as you say, that each person's truth is whatever works for them, then the afterlife will be for each person whatever they believed it would be in life. So I would not exist at that time, while the Vikings are in Valhalla, and the Christians are in heaven with no gay people, and the Satanists are having orgies on speed, and you are wherever you expect to be.

Just as there are things that you're sick of, there are things that I'm sick of as well, as I partially explained in "Is That God In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Happy To See Me," and "Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz." But I mostly reserve my harshness for authority figures, and only part of it for the followers that support them and then only if they give me a hard time. And even to the nice ones I just don't tell them what I really think. It's long past overdue that people stopped respecting credulity as a sacred cow. I make no demands that everyone has to respect me for my choice of a stance on this. I just look for those that do respect it, and get my affirmation from them. I expect them to do the same: find those who respect credulity and get their affirmation from them, not demand it from me.

I've had this discussion so many times, and argued it so thoroughly and so well, only to have to go through it again and again, that I can't pretend to still be unsure on the topic of the supernatural, or on belief through a firm inner conviction, or on belief in the authority of tradition and heritage. In fact it gets downright tiresome. I am not going to start over from scratch every time some new peddler comes along, and ignore the lessons I've learned. There are certain advantages to having suffered from stupidity, ineptness and complicity in fraud, which is that I fixed my baloney detector. I've put a lot of work into it and I like the results. So pardon me if it seems dogmatic, but can you blame me for not being excited and clapping my hands to hear that what I went through was for nothing? Basically we need to just focus on what we have in common and ignore areas of difference, because I don't need to hear from a friend the same statements that I have to put up with from my worst adversaries. This is Matt Arnold, love him or leave him, but don't expect anything to change.

Love him, love him. Matt Arnold has many, many good points. One of the things I love most about him is his zeal for honesty.

Let me further clarify that I don't want to take the lackadaisical attitude that you suggest, when it comes to the topic of the potential victimization of desperate people who are losing a lot of money. Especially if they are not complementing their treatment with conventional medicine. Anyone can think whatever they want without comment from me; until and unless it crosses the line of harm.

Open-mindedness means allowing one's claims to be robustly challenged by the best competing claims. The appearance of closed-mindedness can occur when someone has already done that and the standard claim has had a long undefeated winning streak. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome was once on a bumper-sticker as the definition of insanity. That's not what open-mindedness is.

if someone came along and said, "well look, here's a treatment that you perhaps haven't looked at before," I would look at it. I've learned what questions to ask. For instance, is it only efficacious under highly suspicious circumstances, such as not working unless the patient believes in it? Is it a panacea? Are the ingredients secret? Is its credibility based only on undocumented anecdotes? Are failures explained away with ad-hoc hypotheses? Do the practitioners progress in their understanding, or do they continue to mechanically go through the motions for centuries? Do they think that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event? Would the malady have gone away by itself?

I'm so glad I had a good therapist in my first experience. He gave me so much feedback and observation into my own mind. He practically preached at me sometimes. He also gave me specific mind goals to attain. I knew when I no longer needed his guidance and was quite capable of applying the mind tools he taught me, although I had grown attached to him and was rather sad never to see him again. It is quite comforting to have somebody who completely understands you and is helpful.

I've been to therapy off and on throughout my life, but this is the first time I've stuck with it for more than a few sessions. (Still, it's only been about two months.)

While I am not familiar with my therapist's specific methods, I did research psychologists, and finally picked my therapist based on her experience and theoretical alignments.

I think I find her helpful mostly because I "believe" in therapy. I consider myself to be very conscious of my inner workings, but I was aware that I was hitting a wall that I felt need to be breached. For me, it helped to go to someone and say, "These are my walls, I need to see what's behind them. Please make sure I bust them down, even if I'm hesitant to do so." I'm still doing all the work, but I kind of think of it like a memory device. Telling someone to remind me to do something almost always causes me to remember to do that thing anyway. Knowing there is someone there to hold me to what I've said I do is what helps me, I think. The hardest part for me was making myself go in the first place.

I think because I pay her, because she's a professional, and because she doesn't have the bias of my friends, that's why I trust her to keep me accountable for my development in a way I don't trust my friends to. My friends are too intimately involved with these walls I'm trying to break down, and I think I often don't expect them to tell me the truth about my character because they care for me and don't want to hurt my feelings.

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How To Choose A Mental Health Care Provider

Sounds somewhat familiar. (:

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You've a right to your opiniion

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Therapist

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