Talk Therapy Effects and Benefits

Talk therapy, Psychotherapy, Psychological Therapy, or Talking therapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome problems. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual’s well-being and mental health, resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and improve relationships and social skills. Numerous types of psychotherapy have been designed either for individual adults, families, or children and adolescents. Certain types of talk therapies are considered evidence-based for treating some diagnosed mental disorders; other types have been criticized as pseudoscience.

Talk therapy Definition

The American Psychological Association adopted a resolution on the effectiveness of psychotherapy in 2012 based on a definition developed by American psychologist John C. Norcross: “Psychotherapy is the informed and intentional application of clinical methods and interpersonal stances derived from established psychological principles for the purpose of assisting people to modify their behaviors, cognitions, emotions, and/or other personal characteristics in directions that the participants deem desirable”.

Who needs Talk therapy?

In talk therapy, a psychologist will discuss previous traumas and psychiatric conditions with a person in order to treat, evaluate, and diagnose various mental health conditions. The psychologist will help people resolve and process issues verbally. They may also help individuals forge a path forward through disorders that have interfered with daily activities.

Conditions that might Talk therapy benefit

Anyone can potentially benefit from talk therapy sessions, from those who could use some more clarity and direction in life to people who are struggling with mental health conditions.

That said, there are a few conditions in that talk therapy might be particularly helpful:

• Clinical or situational depression,
• Generalized anxiety disorder or social anxiety,
• Bipolar disorder,
• Eating disorders,
• Substance abuse or addiction,
• Phobias,
• Schizophrenia,
• Post-traumatic stress disorder,
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and
• Adjustment disorder.

This is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of conditions that might benefit from talk therapy. Anything that interferes with a person’s usual daily life may benefit from talk therapy sessions.

Talk therapy Delivery

There have also been developments in computer-assisted therapy, such as virtual reality therapy for behavioral exposure, multimedia programs for each cognitive technique, and handheld devices for improved monitoring or putting ideas into practice.

Most forms of psychotherapy use spoken conversation. Some also use various other forms of communication such as the written word, artwork, drama, narrative story, or music. Talk therapy with children and their parents often involves play, dramatization (i.e. role-play), and drawing, with a co-constructed narrative from these non-verbal and displaced modes of interacting.

Talk therapy Regulation

The critical importance of client confidentiality—and the limited circumstances in which it may need to be broken for the protection of clients or others—is enshrined in the regulatory psychotherapeutic organizations’ codes of ethical practice. Examples of when it is typically accepted to break confidentiality include when the therapist has knowledge that a child or elder is being physically abused; when there is a direct, clear, and imminent threat of serious physical harm to self or to a specific individual.

Europe

As of 2015, there are still a lot of variations between different European countries about the regulation and delivery of talk therapy. Several countries have no regulation of the practice or no protection of the title. Some have a system of voluntary registration, with independent professional organizations, while other countries attempt to restrict the practice of talk therapy to ‘mental health professionals (psychologists and psychiatrists) with state-certified training.

The EAP has already made significant contacts with the European Union & European Commission towards this end.

United States

Presentation of practice as licensed, but without such a license, is generally illegal. Without a license, for example, a practitioner cannot bill insurance companies. Information about state licensure is provided by the American Psychological Association.

Canada

Regulation of talk therapy is in the jurisdiction of and varies among the provinces and territories.

Members of certain specified professions, including social workers, couple and family therapists, occupational therapists, guidance counselors, criminologists, sexologists, psychoeducators, and registered nurses may obtain a talk therapy permit by completing certain educational and practice requirements. Their professional oversight is provided by their own professional orders. Some other professionals who were practicing talk therapy before the current system came into force continue to hold talk therapy permits alone.

Talk therapy Types

There are hundreds of talk therapy approaches or schools of thought. By 1980 there were more than 250; by 1996 more than 450; and at the start of the 21st century, there were over a thousand different named talk therapies—some being minor variations while others are based on very different conceptions of psychology, and ethics (how to live) or technique. Some of the talk therapies include:

Humanistic Talk therapy

These psychotherapies, also known as “experiential”, are based on humanistic psychology and emerged in reaction to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis, being dubbed the “third force”. They are primarily concerned with the human development and needs of the individual, with an emphasis on subjective meaning, a rejection of determinism, and a concern for positive growth rather than pathology.

Some posit an inherent human capacity to maximize potential, “the self-actualizing tendency”; the task of talk therapy is to create a relational environment where this tendency might flourish. Humanistic psychology can, in turn, be rooted in existentialism—the belief that human beings can only find meaning by creating it. This is the goal of existential therapy. Existential therapy is in turn philosophically associated with phenomenology.

Person-centered Talk therapy

Person-centered talk therapy, also known as client-centered, focuses on the therapist showing openness, empathy, and “unconditional positive regard”, to help clients express and develop their own selves.

Gestalt Talk therapy

Gestalt talk therapy, originally called “concentration therapy”, is an existential/experiential form that facilitates awareness in the various contexts of life, by moving from talking about relatively remote situations to action and direct current experience.

Derived from various influences, including an overhaul of psychoanalysis, it stands on top of essentially four load-bearing theoretical walls: phenomenological method, dialogical relationship, field-theoretical strategies, and experimental freedom.

Insight-oriented Talk therapy

Insight-oriented talk therapies focus on revealing or interpreting unconscious processes. Most commonly referring to psychodynamic therapy, of which psychoanalysis is the oldest and most intensive form, these applications of depth psychology encourage the verbalization of all the patient’s thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst formulates the nature of the past and present unconscious conflicts which are causing the patient’s symptoms and character problems.

There are six main schools of psychoanalysis, which all influenced psychodynamic theory:

• Freudian,
• Ego psychology,
• Object relations theory,
• Self-psychology,
• Interpersonal psychoanalysis, and
• Relational psychoanalysis.

Techniques for analytic group therapy have also developed.

Cognitive-behavioral Talk therapy 

Behavior therapies use behavioral techniques, including applied behavior analysis (also known as behavior modification), to change maladaptive patterns of behavior to improve emotional responses, cognitions, and interactions with others. Functional analytic psychotherapy is one form of this approach. By nature, behavioral therapies are:

• Empirical (data-driven),
• Contextual (focused on the environment and context),
• Functional (interested in the effect or consequence a behavior ultimately has),
• Probabilistic (viewing behavior as statistically predictable),
• Monistic (rejecting mind-body dualism and treating the person as a unit), and
• Relational (analyzing bidirectional interactions).

Cognitive talk therapy focuses directly on changing thoughts, in order to improve emotions and behaviors.

Systemic Talk therapy 

Systemic therapy seeks to address people not just individually, as is often the focus of other forms of therapy, but in relationships, dealing with the interactions of groups, their patterns, and dynamics (including family therapy and marriage counseling). Community psychology is a type of systemic psychology.

Expressive Talk therapy

Expressive talk therapy is a form of therapy that utilizes artistic expression (via improvisational, compositional, re-creative, and receptive experiences) as its core means of treating clients. Psychotherapists use the different disciplines of creative arts as therapeutic interventions.

This includes the modalities of dance therapy, drama therapy, art therapy, music therapy, and writing therapy, among others. This may include techniques such as affect labeling.

Postmodernist Talk therapy

Also known as post-structuralist or constructivist. Narrative therapy gives attention to each person’s “dominant story” through therapeutic conversations, which also may involve exploring unhelpful ideas and how they came to prominence.

Coherence therapy posits multiple levels of mental constructs that create symptoms as a way to strive for self-protection or self-realization. Feminist therapy does not accept that there is one single or correct way of looking at reality and therefore is considered a postmodernist approach.

Other Talk therapies

Transpersonal psychology addresses the client in the context of a spiritual understanding of consciousness. Positive talk therapy is a method in the field of humanistic and psychodynamic psychotherapy and is based on a positive image of humans, with a health-promoting, resource-oriented, and conflict-centered approach.

Hypnotherapy is often applied in order to modify a subject’s behavior, emotional content, and attitudes, as well as a wide range of conditions including dysfunctional habits, anxiety, stress-related illness, pain management, and personal development.

Child Talk therapy

Child talk therapy training programs necessarily include courses in human development.

Since children often do not have the ability to articulate thoughts and feelings, psychotherapists will use a variety of media such as musical instruments, sand, toys, crayons, paint, clay, puppets, bibliocounseling (books), or board games.

Computer-supported Talk therapy

Research on computer-supported and computer-based interventions has increased significantly over the course of the last two decades. The following applications frequently have been investigated:

• Tele-therapy / tele-mental health: In teletherapy classical psychotherapy is provided via modern communication devices, such as via videoconferencing.
• Virtual reality: VR is a computer-generated scenario that simulates experience. The immersive environment, used for simulated exposure, can be similar to the real world or it can be fantastical, creating a new experience.
• Computer-based interventions (or online interventions or internet interventions): These interventions can be described as interactive self-help. They usually entail a combination of text, audio, or video elements.
• Computer-supported therapy (or blended therapy): Classical talk therapy is supported by means of online or software application elements. The feasibility of such interventions has been investigated for individual and group therapy.

Talk therapy Effects 

Evaluation

One issue with trials is what to use as a placebo treatment group or a non-treatment control group. Often, this group includes patients on a waiting list, or those receiving some kind of regular non-specific contact or support. Researchers must consider how best to match the use of inert tablets or sham treatments in placebo-controlled studies in pharmaceutical trials. Several interpretations and differing assumptions and language remain.

Another issue is the attempt to standardize and manualize therapies and link them to specific symptoms of diagnostic categories, making them more amenable to research. Some report that this may reduce efficacy or gloss over individual needs. Fonagy and Roth’s opinion is that the benefits of the evidence-based approach outweigh the difficulties.

Outcomes in relation to selected kinds of treatment

Large-scale international reviews of scientific studies have concluded that talk therapy is effective for numerous conditions.

One line of research consistently finds that supposedly different forms of talk therapy show similar effectiveness. According to The Handbook of Counseling Psychology: “Meta-analyses of talk therapy studies have consistently demonstrated that there are no substantial differences in outcomes among treatments”.

The handbook states that there is “little evidence to suggest that anyone talk therapy consistently outperforms any other for any specific psychological disorders. 

Mechanisms of change

In general, processes of emotional arousal and memory have long been held to play an important role. One theory combining these aspects proposes that permanent change occurs to the extent that the neuropsychological mechanism of memory reconsolidation is triggered and is able to incorporate new emotional experiences.

Adherence

Patient adherence to a course of talk therapy—continuing to attend sessions or complete tasks—is a major issue.

The dropout level—early termination—ranges from around 30% to 60%, depending partly on how it is defined. The range is lower for research settings for various reasons. , such as the selection of clients and how they are inducted. Early termination is associated on average with various demographic and clinical characteristics of clients, therapists, and treatment interactions. The high level of dropout has raised some criticism about the relevance and efficacy of talk therapy.

Adverse effects

Research on adverse effects of talk therapy has been limited, yet worsening of symptoms may be expected to occur in 3% to 15% of patients, with variability across patient and therapist characteristics. Potential problems include:

• Deterioration of symptoms or developing new symptoms,
• Strains in other relationships,
• Social stigma, and
• Therapy dependence.

Some techniques or therapists may carry more risks than others, and some client characteristics may make them more vulnerable. Side effects from properly conducted talk therapy should be distinguished from harms caused by malpractice.

General critiques

Some critics are skeptical of the healing power of psychotherapeutic relationships. Some dismiss talk therapy altogether in the sense of a scientific discipline requiring professional practitioners, instead favoring either nonprofessional help or biomedical treatments. Others have pointed out ways in which the values and techniques of therapists can be harmful as well as helpful to clients (or indirectly to other people in a client’s life).

Many resources are available to a person experiencing emotional distress—the friendly support of friends, peers, family members, clergy contacts, personal reading, healthy exercise, research, and independent coping—all present considerable value. Critics note that humans have been dealing with crises, navigating severe social problems, and finding solutions to life problems long before the advent of talk therapy.

How to choose a Talk therapist?

Similar to choosing a therapy type, a person should select a therapist with careful consideration. It is important to understand that therapists are all very different. That is to say, each person will have slightly different needs. It is perfectly acceptable to switch therapists if one is not adequately meeting a person’s needs, even if that therapist has experience with the person’s condition and comes highly recommended.

Talk therapy is a very personal experience that requires a great deal of honesty and opening up. This means the personality of a therapist may matter a great deal.

While the task of selecting a therapist can seem overwhelming, an individual may find it helpful to begin by targeting what their reasons are for seeking therapy. For example, if a person is constantly on edge, or experiencing frequent anger issues or depressive episodes, they might search for a therapist who specializes in anxiety and depression.

Conclusion

Because of the above, I am confident that you have learned about talk therapy, its definition, needs, conditions, benefits, types, talk therapy effects, and how to choose a talk therapist.

After reading this article, how would you rate it? Would you please let me know your precious thoughts? 

Frequently asked questions

Before posting your query, kindly go through the:

 

Who needs Talk therapy? In talk therapy, a psychologist will discuss previous traumas and psychiatric conditions with a person in order to treat, evaluate, and diagnose various mental health conditions. The psychologist will help people resolve and process issues verbally. They may also help individuals forge a path forward through disorders that have interfered with daily activities.

 

What are the adverse effects of Talk therapy? Research on adverse effects of psychotherapy has been limited, yet worsening of symptoms may be expected to occur in 3% to 15% of patients, with variability across patient and therapist characteristics. Potential problems include the Deterioration of symptoms or the development of new symptoms, Strains in other relationships, Social stigma, and Therapy dependence. Some techniques or therapists may carry more risks than others, and some client characteristics may make them more vulnerable. Side effects from properly conducted therapy should be distinguished from harms caused by malpractice.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy