I had heard that some Psychiatric nurses liked it.
I always understaood that it was a modern extention of CBT. The go to, cheap as chips, not very good, therapeutic self brainwashing technique.
Big claims of curing depression, eating disorders and a raft of other mentally distressing diagnoses in a miraculous 6 weeks, have all fallen by the wayside. After 10 weeks the symptoms always return and the client is not fixed in any way.
governments love it, because its cheap, and they can say they are addressing the mental health crisis in society, of which, they are solely and fully responsible for.
The psychologist undergraduate go to, to prove that CBT works and they are good at using graphs and figures.
A new client felt 10/10 depressed at his first session. At session 3 he was 8/10 depressed. At session 6 he was 6/10 depressed. clearly CBT cures depression by filling in a few forms. Write that up in your dissertation and get your degree.
Could this possibly be due to the fact that the client, for the first time in his life, actually had the opportunity to talk about his problems. Nothing to do with being taught how to use a CBT model.
The incessant form filling is totally, for me anyway, anti-therapy.
I worked in many different organisations over the years that banned outright the use of CBT.
My impression of DBT compared to CBT, based on what my friends told me, is that DBT is much more confrontational. I remember one friend even specifically said that it took her a long time to "unlearn" the therapist's natural response to affirm and validate, but then redirect negative feelings with skills.
I'm trying to find a therapist after about 20 intermittent years of disappointing therapy experiences.
I find CBT trite ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/16/cbt-in-the-water-suppl... )
But psychodynamic is directionless and in a way that never seems to help either, and hides behind the lack of measurement. It could be amazing with a wise Irvin Yalom figure, but 99% of us aren't interacting with somebody that thoughtful.
How well, generally, do you think therapy works? What works best?
The scoring sheets are, pretty much, bullshit. So are the endless worksheets.
And just having the pleasure of this paragraph, I think, will impact me forever:
> Most people I spend time with — leftists prone to anxiety and depression — are skeptical of "self-improvement." Many of us, following the critic Mark Fisher, think that depression reflects an encounter with the harshness of reality, rather than a merely pathological distortion. We definitely want to feel better, but we don’t want to be hijacked by acronyms or worksheets or positive thinking in the process. We try to attribute suffering to crappy world systems rather than personal deficiencies. We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
If you do, sally forth, you've probably walked down this road before. You know it well. If you don't, it gracefully folds in to give you a glimpse into how the other side lives and thinks with just enough detail to feel real. Either way is a good time in a sense.
> We find ways to trust that our negative emotions signify something other than our own inadequacy — that they contain a deeply rational response to the world’s irrational injustice.
Believes suffering is caused by impermanent and changeable features of the world, and that the only alternative is a personal "deficiency"? Believes negative emotions are rational and arise due to clear causation by external forces? I've heard that one before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_marks_of_existence
What the article calls "dialectic" is called "non-dualism" in Buddhism; the author has gotten to the point where they recognize them, but maybe not to the important part which is to remember they aren't real. (Note that something being real or not real is also an incorrect dualism.)
There's a pattern to suicide: people don't commit suicide merely because they're miserable, or because they think their situation is hopeless. It is also necessary to believe that you have lots of options, but all of them are unacceptably bad.
Indian sustenance farmers didn't have high rates of suicide, until they got access to microcredit.
Schizophrenics, who often have distorted feelings of agency (e.g. seeing something on the TV, they may feel with deep certainty that they somehow caused that thing to happen), have sky-high suicide rates.
Men, for whatever reasons, have higher feelings of agency than women. And men of course have much, much higher rates of suicide than women - even though in terms of pain, misery etc. it's not clear women have it that much better.
Black Americans and Native Americans in the US both have a history of being subject to racism and oppression. But the former, stereotyped by racism as being basically good for nothing, have low suicide rates. Native Americans, whose racist oppression was historically accompanied by painting them as great noble spirits etc. have sky-high suicide rates. Economic conditions don't explain the disparity well, difference in sense of agency does.
So, blaming things outside yourself, whether correctly or not, may be a defensive psychological reaction to misery. Fisher thought something could be done; if he had had a weak sense of agency, he wouldn't have done all that writing for one thing.
(Namely cost of living in Anglo countries, which is largely caused by their practically feudalist land usage policies.)
This article situates Dialectical Behavior Therapy relative to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, dialectical philosophy, Zen/Mindfulness, and social movements. It lays out the limits of DBT, and shows why it is an improvement over (the dominant) CBT (which commenters seem to confuse it with).
Even if you're not interested in any therapy at all, it helps to understand the distinctions and how this therapy works, because it's close to what nurturing kids or friends or colleagues requires - closer than the pretend worlds of CBT or the hand-waving of hope groups.
This article and DBT in particular highlight the key dynamic for nurturing: understanding and sympathizing with one's difficulty, while getting one to take personal responsibility by showing practical ways to actually do that.
A lot sounds like basic socialization that should come from culture, but traditional culture has been generally shredded, and online culture is toxic, so I'm glad some of the wisdom is being captured and conveyed.
STEM/technical people will find the dialectic aspect difficult, since it's embracing conflicting terms/concepts. Just think of it like differentiation and integration: using a delta to identify common features alongside the conflicting ones.
(If I had any criticism of DBT and this article, it's that DBT (and CBT) aim to heal and maintain health, but doesn't actually address or treat the wide variety of injuries; it's nursing, not doctoring.)
I am generally very good at forming and maintaining habits, but often life gets in the way. Also, it is good to have an external view, sometimes you feel like you're doing shit when you're not. I need an accountability partner I guess. Let's see how it goes. Thanks.
The article is mainly a nuanced perspective on DBT (Dialectic Behavioral Theory) and it focuses on the conundrum of patients finding themselves between finding value in their identity as an victim, the consequenxes it has for them and the condition which contributed to that trauma that remain unaddressed if they do just that:
> People often share a manifesto called the “Emotional Distress Bill of Rights” (subtitled “#RightToBeSuffering”). “I should not be held so personally responsible to take actions to be better,” it says. “Others (and systems) should be held far more accountable for better treatment of me.”
Imagine you live in an ancient society where cannibalism exist. If cannibals tried to eat you and you have a trauma of surviving that, you could go at the problem in two ways: (1) Blame a society that allows cannibalism to exist and try to reshape said society or (2) Focus on yourself and figure out how to move on from the trauma, how to deal with the consequences of said trauma and so on.
Doing the latter without changing the circumstances that lead you becoming victimized can feel like you become complicit in perpetuating the problem (in our example cannibalism).
This, other than the retelling of the origin story of that form of therapy, is probably the main point this article makes.
