Why therapy doesn't work

There are so many people of my generation who are, or have been under the care of a therapist of one sort or another. The choice is vast, NLP, CBT, drug therapies, electromagnetic therapy, colour therapies and all the rest, but there are two things that all of these share in common. Firstly they currently have little or no basis in medical fact, and secondly they, like most medical treatments are designed to deal with symptoms, not with causes. This second point is contentious because the claims for many of these therapies is that they address the deep seated issues that are at the root of many neurological conditions, but I would content that this is a nonsense. Having experienced several of them, what they offer is a series of coping strategies to deal with the worst of the symptoms. The idea as I understand it being that by alleviating the symptoms, one is better able to function and therefore deal with the underlying condition.

However, there does not seem to be any direct method offered by any of these therapies for doing that, so one is left in a position where the symptoms are diminished but one is left to try to resolve the causes alone. This often causes additional stress which causes the symptoms to re-emerge, thereby negating any beneficial effects. It should be pointed out that there are questions over the prevalence of mental illness in the first place. It has to be asked why there has been an upswing of epidemic proportions in the cases of mental illness in many categories in the last 20 years. There is an arguement that we better understand the brain and are therefore better able to assess and analyse abberant mental states, but this can only be part of the story. If we go back to our parents and grandparents generation, can we honestly say that they faced any less stress than we do? Were they spared any of the tradgedies that we deal with? I would argue that if anything they had it far tougher than we did, but certainly in my own case, my parents were expected to just get on with life, and in the main they did.

I know that were my parents alive today and in their prime, my father would be diagnosed with depression and addictive personality disorder and my mother would almost certainly have a diagnosis of paranoia and obsessive compulsive disorder amongst other things. Yet they successfully, in the main raised two children, one of whom had a developmental disorder, held down jobs for the most part, created a relatively safe and secure relationship and generally just got on with things. They both coped with the stress of termainl illness, they coped with the stress of infidelity, they coped with the nightmare that is now described as a "difficult" child, so why are they so different from me, my friends, my peers? I would argue that they aren't, they just didn't have our resources......

......Which brings me back to my opening point, therapy is a waste of time and money, resources that would be better spent teaching children to cope with the ups and down of life.....