by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext – Oct. 2022 Updated: 4.1.2024
What the mainstream media is hiding
The experts agree that the media does not question them: Apparently, people with psychological problems definitely belong in the hands of scientifically trained professionals. It is said that laypeople could cause enormous damage. The risks and side effects of psychotherapy are concealed – it often only makes things worse.
“Is psychotherapy an option for you?” One in five people who are plagued by severe mental distress responds with a “no.” Most common reasons: You don’t think much of her, you’re afraid of her. (1) “The number of unreported cases here is probably much higher,” suspects psychologist Kirsten von Sydow from the University of Hamburg, who evaluated 103 studies on the public image of the psychological professions from 1948 to 2006. (2)
The suspicion is well founded; the remaining four-fifths would also do well to harbor it. Because supposed professionalism does not reliably protect you from damage. According to studies (3), almost every second patient does not feel better after psychotherapy than before. (4) “Around ten percent of psychotherapy patients experience serious and long-lasting side effects,” explains Michael Linden, neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychotherapist at the Charité in Berlin. (5) The common stereotype that “talking doesn’t do any harm” is misleading.
The risks and side effects are varied. Since January 2012, the new Patient Rights Act has forced therapists to provide detailed and understandable information about them before treatment begins.
A lot can go wrong.
Because clients always represent sources of income, some therapists succumb to the temptation to tie them to themselves. Through promises or threats, they exert more or less gentle pressure on those seeking help to continue treatment and not to stop it when it becomes increasingly apparent that it is of no use.
They often fail to consider possible physical causes. Not all depression is of psychological origin. There can be many physical illnesses behind this: metabolic disorders of the thyroid and brain, chronic inflammation, vitamin B12/D3 deficiency, hormone deficiency, and other pathological processes. (6)
Some mental health professionals don’t do enough to prevent the person seeking help from becoming unnecessarily emotionally attached to them. Against his will and resistance, they pursue therapy goals that seem more desirable to them than to him. They enjoy the position of power that the client’s need for help gives them: giving the know-it-all, exposing and directing, granting or withdrawing attention.
Or they talk him into fantasy. Especially in the 1990s, there were several lawsuits in the USA against analysts whose patients had falsely accused relatives of sexual abuse after probing leading questions. (7) In this country, the False Memory Germany association advises people who are accused of abuse based on a pseudo-memory.
Freud himself made the grotesque claim that patients’ supposed memories of being sexually abused in their childhood were never based on real events but rather on fantasy – to the chagrin of countless women who had actually experienced violence. (8th)
Sexual assaults, almost always against female clients, occur far more frequently in psychotherapeutic practices than experts would like to admit: depending on the definition of the term “sexual contact,” one to twelve percent are spared such experiences. (9)
For some patients, psychotherapy leads them to go on an ego trip. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, they learn to pay attention to their own needs. They then become so focused on themselves that they can no longer cope at work and home: they break up with their partner, quit their job, cut off contact with family and friends – and develop traits of a narcissistic personality. (10)
Depending on the procedure used, there is a risk of further unpleasant side effects. Approaching severe trauma – such as war veterans, victims of accidents, violent crimes, or disasters – by confronting the terrible experience can trigger extreme reactions. In addition to the “post-traumatic” disorder, patients then develop a “dissociative” disorder: they split off memories of individual stressful experiences or entire parts of their personality that are connected to these experiences. Symptoms range from amnesia to impaired perception and sensation to seizures and paralysis.
The so-called “debriefing,” in which the psycho-professional tries to protect those affected and witnesses to a terrible event from post-traumatic stress disorder by working through it with them immediately afterward, is more often counterproductive than relieving. In fact, after three years, those treated in this way experienced still-stressful memories of the catastrophe significantly more often than those who had not been treated. (11)
“Exposure” can also go wrong with cognitive behavioral therapy: in order to overcome an anxiety disorder, the person affected is gradually exposed to the situation that is tormenting them. Michael Linden, neurologist, psychiatrist, and psychotherapist at the Charité in Berlin, remembers a patient who was frightened by open spaces.
During the course of treatment, he learned to take short walks to the next street corner. However, while driving with his therapist, he suffered a panic attack for some unknown reason. From then on, he no longer dared to leave the house. He stopped the therapy. (12)
Group therapy also carries its own risks. The risk of infection is one of them: Anyone who hears the sometimes dramatic stories of others does not always draw strength from the shared suffering but instead feels demoralized.
Just for once?
Therapist circles, of course, ignore such lists of defects. After all, black sheep, beginners and bunglers, incompetents, and inexperienced people roam around in every professional field, and they are dismissed. Of course, they readily admit that psychotherapists, just like doctors, make serious mistakes from time to time.
But these, they reassure, can fundamentally be remedied: through even more thorough training and supervision, through even stricter professional jurisdiction, through stricter control measures, and also through the legislature strengthening patients’ rights. Furthermore, risks and side effects are part of every effective therapy; What is good can always do harm. The main thing is that the benefits outweigh the benefits.
What they fail to realize is that psychotherapy has characteristics that make it fundamentally dangerous. It constantly threatens to cause harm.
First, it stigmatizes psychotherapy. As part of the medical care system, it labels those affected as patients. Anyone who undergoes it agrees to be pigeonholed as a sufferer of a “mental disorder.” To do this, he will be given a diagnosis; otherwise, the health insurance company will not pay. This label excludes him from the world of ordinary people and defines him as a symptom carrier in need of therapy.
Second, psychotherapy can damage self-image. Because it devalues. Before it begins, a judgment is made that seems to be scientific but, in reality, is disparaging: “What you are doing and experiencing deviates from usual experiences and behavior – it is abnormal. You must not grieve, fear, withdraw, argue, be inattentive, angry, listless, moody, or shocked for that long, that much. You can’t stay the way you are.”
Under the disturbing impression of no longer being normal, the client’s self-image gradually changes in the direction of widespread prejudices. This process is accelerated and intensified when the therapy focuses on one’s actual or perceived weaknesses. This leads him to view everything and anything as a symptom of his illness.
Once he is considered disturbed, everything he does or says becomes suspicious because he is now under increased scrutiny – by outsiders, but also by himself. From an initial, perhaps preliminary diagnosis, which may soon turn out to be hasty, would then all too easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Third: Psychotherapy can make you dependent. Declared mentally ill, the person affected is denied the ability – and is spared the necessary effort – to recover on their own. The medical field he has entered awakens and reinforces his belief that this requires experts’ support – without them, he would not be able to do this. Mockers speak of the “Woody Allen syndrome,” named after the famous American actor and director, who professes his life motto: “I’ll have to ask my therapist first.”
Fourth: Psychotherapy can lead to neglecting social relationships. Those who get involved in this often don’t look for or find anyone who makes them feel accepted and understood. No one to whom he can speak out, whom he trusts completely. Nobody who shows interest and concern.
Nobody who is prepared to listen to unpleasant, stressful topics for hours and more than once without showing boredom or weariness. No one to spare him admonitions and reproaches. He feels misunderstood and disregarded by relatives, friends, and acquaintances, among colleagues, and even by his partner, and he feels lonely.
In contrast, psychotherapy seems to him to be a gift from heaven: finally, there is someone who gives him his full attention. He suppresses the fact that the therapist only turns to him for professional reasons and only for payment. Psychotherapy is convenient, in contrast to the strenuous, time-consuming, and always uncertain effort to find understanding, helpful friends.
And because it is human nature to avoid hardship as much as possible, there is a risk that you will choose the pleasant route over the more complex one, especially if your health insurance covers it or as long as your own account balance allows it. In this respect, a visit to a psycho professional is definitely like going to a brothel, as the psychiatric critic Hans Ulrich Gresch acidly notes.
The danger of preferring the convenient solution is “even greater” with psychotherapy than with commercial sex because the health insurance company does not pay for the latter. (13) She sells the illusion of friendship like the whore sells the illusion of love.
Fifth: Because the therapist’s attention is professional rather than truthful, it lacks depth and authenticity. The temporary relief and satisfaction it provides do not last long but soon fade away. 45 minutes of therapy go by quickly. This constellation has addictive potential, combined with the need to increase the dose and increase withdrawal symptoms constantly.
Psychotherapy can become the nicotine of the soul just as quickly as cigarette consumption awakens and increases the desire for more. “Basically,” admits the US psychologist Catherine Johnson, “there should have been special treatments for therapy addicts long ago.” (14)
Sixth: Psychotherapy can blind you. Life problems never arise, just “inside.” They result from a highly complex interplay: between everything that makes up a person – their own experiences, experiences, perceptions, memories, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, expectations, habits, abilities, needs, wishes, all the strengths and weaknesses of their personality -, with their social environment, their financial circumstances, their socio-cultural framework in the past and present.
Psychotherapy generally excludes these external circumstances. It focuses on the person affected – and encourages them to do the same. Who or what offends, harasses, overwhelms, or torments him disappears from view – the main problem appears to be his personal inability to cope with it.
Seventh: Psychotherapy can feed feelings of guilt, and this increases the level of suffering. If a psychological problem does not primarily arise from stressful external circumstances but rather from the person affected’s inability to adapt to them, the buck falls on him. He is supposed to change while his living conditions remain objectively the same.
The more stressful they are, the more likely he is to feel overwhelmed, especially if he perceives them as unchangeable and inescapable (and he could be correct).
Unlike organic medicine, the business of psychotherapy benefits from the fact that it can always blame apparent failures on the failure of those who use it. “While a surgeon has to expect a ruinous malpractice lawsuit for every blunder,” complains the science journalist Rolf Degen, “a soul doctor can disguise a failure with the ‘resistance’ or the ‘lack of insight into the illness’ of his entrusted person or defuse it with technical gibberish.” (15 )
In short, psychotherapy has what it takes to become a very dangerous disease-causing agent. All too often, it creates, intensifies, and prolongs the very mental stress that it claims to address.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
This text is a revised excerpt from H. Wiesendanger: Psycholügen, Volume 3:Seelentief: ein Fall für Profis?, Schönbrunn 1st edition 2017.
The consequences of this series:
1 Extensively researched: Many laypeople can do more
3 Dodo bird in the Psychotechnics race
4 How much does psychotherapy really help?
5 Why is psychotherapy beneficial?
6 Why some Laypeople are better Therapists
7 Embarrassing, telling: successful imposters
8 Psychotherapy as a source of danger
9 What many professionals can do better – and why
10. Pragmatism instead of lobbying – For wise psycho-politics
Remarks
1 M. Franz u.a.: „Warum ‘Nein’ zur Psychotherapie?“, Psychotherapie – Psychosomatik – Medizinische Psychologie 43/1993, S. 278-285.
2 Kirsten von Sydow: „Das Image von Psychologen, Psychotherapeuten und Psychiatern in der Öffentlichkeit. Ein systematischer Forschungsüberblick“, Psychotherapeut 52/2007, S. 322-333.
3 Immerhin liegen mittlerweile eine Reihe von Studien vor – aus Europa, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article/negative-effects-of-psychotherapy-estimating-the-prevalence-in-a-random-national-sample/1C4E7F900F5CAF2CFAD129D54E4CC00C den USA, https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0015643 und Australien. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00048670903107559
4 Zusammenfassend: https://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/psychologie/psychotherapie-hat-kaum-bekannte-risiken-und-nebenwirkungen-a-869344.html
6 Siehe https://www.schlosspark-klinik-dirmstein.de/depression-koerperliche-ursachen/
7 Der Spiegel 30/1994, S. 76.
8 Solche bestürzenden Fälle schildert Jeffrey Masson, ehemals selbst Psychoanalytiker und Forschungsdirektor der Sigmund-Freud-Archive, in seiner Streitschrift Die Abschaffung der Psychotherapie – Ein Plädoyer, München 1991.
9 Siehe die umfangreichen Quellenangaben bei www.christianeeichenberg.de/SUEPP_seminar.pdf
10 Mehrere solche Fälle schildert das Buch von Michael Linden und Bernhard Strauß (Hrsg.): Risiken und Nebenwirkungen von Psychotherapie: Erfassung, Bewältigung, Risikovermeidung (2012), https://www.amazon.de/Risiken-Nebenwirkungen-von-Psychotherapie-Risikovermeidung/dp/3941468642/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=11A7S7APNEGXT&keywords=Linden+%E2%80%9ERisiken+und+Nebenwirkungen+von+Psychotherapie&qid=1699033452&s=books&sprefix=linden+risiken+und+nebenwirkungen+von+psychotherapie%2Cstripbooks%2C114&sr=1-2
12 Zit. nach https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/plus241837735/Gesundheit-Die-unerwuenschten-Nebenwirkungen-der-Psychotherapie.html
13 Hans Ulrich Gresch: Lexikon der Psychiatrie-Kritik, online bei http://lexikon.ppsk.de.
14 Nach Der Spiegel 25/1998, S. 194.
15 Rolf Degen: „Die hilflosen Helfer“, Der Spiegel 36/2000, S. 118-132, dort S. 119.