Chapter 16 of Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding deals with psychotherapy and biological treatments. The authors describe who gets and benefits from psychotherapy along with what psychologists do in their therapy sessions that are effective. One section of the book stated why so many people fall for ineffective therapies. Some therapies, including dolphin therapy, laughter therapy, and treatments for alien abduction and past life trauma, are not scientifically proven to be effective, yet many people still believe in them. Some reasons that the book gives for the success of these treatments are from the natural highs and lows that people have naturally, the placebo effect, and people telling themselves they are better only for the fact that they have spent a lot of time and money on treatment. Statistics show that if something starts bad that it can only go up and remembering past feelings as worse than they actually were, making it seem as though change has happened are also ways that make people believe that ineffective treatments work. There are many different psychotherapy treatments that claim to be natural and effective, but some are just strange treatments that are sometimes effective only by coincidence or by the reasons above. The article, Beware of weird, wacky psychotherapy treatments, attached to this blog entry below describes more about other strange treatments and how the psychologists running the treatments defend the therapies when they go wrong.
Strange Psychotherapies and why they "work". (Chapter 16)
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As someone who does therapy, I have thought about this a lot. I am not sure how I feel about the therapies. Of course, they should NEVER cause harm, but one of the things I've learned is that a client's belief that a treatment will work is one of the keys to its success. Another key is the therapists belief, and also the relationship between the client and therapist. The actual treatment itself has very little to do with success. So while I am very skeptical of many of these "therapies," if those conditions are met...I don't know....I actually just heard about a therapist doing "Nude Therapy..." Now that just seems unethical to me...
I think some people need to believe in SOMETHING or they will feel lost and confused about the world (this is only a guess of course). I don't think that placebo effects are all that bad, especially if it actually does help someone. And no one treatment is good for everyone, but at least (for the most part) one of the various treatments is good for everyone...if that makes sense!
I'm always so surprised to hear how powerful our brains are in creating belief systems, that we can convince ourselves that something worked just because we want to believe it. Your link also proves that these methods are clear pseudoscience because the people running the treatments are defensive and hostile to anyone or anything that challenges the validity of their claims.