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Common sense would say young adults with negative personality are more likely to start therapy. Logic says correlation does not equal causation. The authors ar

Common sense would say young adults with negative personality are more likely to start therapy. Logic says correlation does not equal causation. The authors argument about their renegade research/analysis, is not persuasive as to why correlation equals causation within the scope of their longitudinal analysis.

perl4ever 8y ago
I agree that correlation does not equal causation, but I wonder if that, reframed, is actually a reason why therapy can be harmful. Therapy tends to treat negative thoughts as things caused by events and/or other thoughts, and this itself may be a pernicious way of mistaking correlation for causation. I think a fair amount has been written about how harmful therapy is when applied to people with serious mental illnesses, because it encourages people to dwell on negative thoughts and come up with spurious and unhelpful reasoning about causality. But if it doesn't work in the most severe circumstances, why should we remain committed to the belief that it works in less severe ones?
- petra 8y ago
  True. Plus medication was one of the treatments under "therapy" in this study - and there's serious doubt whether medication(in general) is helping or harming.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  A lot of beliefs are neither true nor false, but rather "self-fulfilling". If you believe that you lack the ability to succeed professionally, you aren't going to put in the effort to try, which means you won't succeed. If you believe you're fundamentally unlovable, you will shy away from trying to connect with other people, because it just means you'll be rejected and hurt anyways. If you believe everyone is out to get you, you'll behave in a self-interested and paranoid way, which will scare off anyone who just wants to help so that everyone remaining really is out to get you. If you believe therapy is completely unhelpful, you won't listen to anything the therapist says and so it will be unhelpful. The role of therapy is usually to break these "causality loops" by first introducing the idea that there is another possible way of interpreting these perceptions, and secondly asking the patient "Well, what kind of life do you want to have, and how can you get there?" A good therapist doesn't encourage people to dwell on negative perceptions; rather, they should be encouraging you to acknowledge the thought, and then also come up with other possible framings, explore what you really want, and act on that. Causality vs. correlation is somewhat immaterial: the point is that your cognition is both a reflection of the world as it is and a driver for how you would like it to be, and so it functions as a feedback loop. If you're getting good results in your life it's a good feedback loop, but if something is wrong and you haven't been able to fix it, it can be helpful to have a trusted outsider who can point out your unspoken assumptions.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    This assumes a best case scenario and a good therapist. When it works, it's a good thing. But you can't ignore the fact that therapists are people too and may be injecting their own bullshit into the equation rather than helping the person sort their own crap out of the equation. I mean, I upvoted you and I think it's a good comment, but I have had lots of serious personal problems where other people wanting to "help" was really other people wanting to insist on keeping me down and expecting me to be grateful for it. Many of the more well meaning types wanted to help me, but not enough that I could genuinely stand on my own two feet. They wanted metaphorically get me out of the wheelchair and walking, but they wanted me to always need a crutch so that they could be needed because they needed to be needed or they couldn't imagine anyone could genuinely love them or want to friends if they weren't desperately needed by someone who couldn't cope on their own.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    "Well, what kind of life do you want to have, and how can you get there?" You sound like someone who believes in the power of positive thinking. I think if you wouldn't use your concepts of feedback loops in thinking to sober a drunk up and shove them in a car, you shouldn't consider them appropriate therapy for any other mental state.
  - projektir 8y ago
    > A lot of beliefs are neither true nor false, but rather "self-fulfilling". If you believe that you lack the ability to succeed professionally, you aren't going to put in the effort to try, which means you won't succeed. This isn't true. Satisfactory work is not always affected by perception or quantity of work (someone may be doing good work and thinking it's poor; someone's hard work can be another's easy work; someone can do a lot of quality work without huge effort). Quite a few successful people with imposter syndrome and depression exist. People don't have super powers in terms of causality. What people think or "think" often doesn't matter that much and it's rather dangerous to give it so much gravity. This is far more gravity than the individual themselves gives their thoughts. > If you're getting good results in your life it's a good feedback loop, but if something is wrong and you haven't been able to fix it The problem is this describes an incredibly linear, just-world model of reality. I.e., if someone is getting good results in their life, it's due to them. If someone is getting bad results in their life, it's due to them. There's no room for randomness here, while in reality our world is very random, and people may be getting very random results and assigning them all sorts of wrong causalities. It's really going to be a rather lousy therapist not realizing this and blaming some patient for reacting to some trauma. People's weird loops are often just adaptations to the random, erratic, and unfair world around them. > If you believe therapy is completely unhelpful, you won't listen to anything the therapist says and so it will be unhelpful. Well, that's useful, given that despair is pretty common in depression, one of those illnesses people go get therapy for. Good thing this isn't true, and people absolutely can be pulled out of ruts by random outside events or by well-placed conversation. I would say therapists are not very useful if they can't do something as simple as pull a person out of a standard "everything sucks and will always suck" loop.

perl4ever 8y ago

I agree that correlation does not equal causation, but I wonder if that, reframed, is actually a reason why therapy can be harmful. Therapy tends to treat negative thoughts as things caused by events and/or other thoughts, and this itself may be a pernicious way of mistaking correlation for causation. I think a fair amount has been written about how harmful therapy is when applied to people with serious mental illnesses, because it encourages people to dwell on negative thoughts and come up with spurious and unhelpful reasoning about causality. But if it doesn't work in the most severe circumstances, why should we remain committed to the belief that it works in less severe ones?

petra 8y ago
True. Plus medication was one of the treatments under "therapy" in this study - and there's serious doubt whether medication(in general) is helping or harming.
nostrademons 8y ago
A lot of beliefs are neither true nor false, but rather "self-fulfilling". If you believe that you lack the ability to succeed professionally, you aren't going to put in the effort to try, which means you won't succeed. If you believe you're fundamentally unlovable, you will shy away from trying to connect with other people, because it just means you'll be rejected and hurt anyways. If you believe everyone is out to get you, you'll behave in a self-interested and paranoid way, which will scare off anyone who just wants to help so that everyone remaining really is out to get you. If you believe therapy is completely unhelpful, you won't listen to anything the therapist says and so it will be unhelpful. The role of therapy is usually to break these "causality loops" by first introducing the idea that there is another possible way of interpreting these perceptions, and secondly asking the patient "Well, what kind of life do you want to have, and how can you get there?" A good therapist doesn't encourage people to dwell on negative perceptions; rather, they should be encouraging you to acknowledge the thought, and then also come up with other possible framings, explore what you really want, and act on that. Causality vs. correlation is somewhat immaterial: the point is that your cognition is both a reflection of the world as it is and a driver for how you would like it to be, and so it functions as a feedback loop. If you're getting good results in your life it's a good feedback loop, but if something is wrong and you haven't been able to fix it, it can be helpful to have a trusted outsider who can point out your unspoken assumptions.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  This assumes a best case scenario and a good therapist. When it works, it's a good thing. But you can't ignore the fact that therapists are people too and may be injecting their own bullshit into the equation rather than helping the person sort their own crap out of the equation. I mean, I upvoted you and I think it's a good comment, but I have had lots of serious personal problems where other people wanting to "help" was really other people wanting to insist on keeping me down and expecting me to be grateful for it. Many of the more well meaning types wanted to help me, but not enough that I could genuinely stand on my own two feet. They wanted metaphorically get me out of the wheelchair and walking, but they wanted me to always need a crutch so that they could be needed because they needed to be needed or they couldn't imagine anyone could genuinely love them or want to friends if they weren't desperately needed by someone who couldn't cope on their own.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "Well, what kind of life do you want to have, and how can you get there?" You sound like someone who believes in the power of positive thinking. I think if you wouldn't use your concepts of feedback loops in thinking to sober a drunk up and shove them in a car, you shouldn't consider them appropriate therapy for any other mental state.
- projektir 8y ago
  > A lot of beliefs are neither true nor false, but rather "self-fulfilling". If you believe that you lack the ability to succeed professionally, you aren't going to put in the effort to try, which means you won't succeed. This isn't true. Satisfactory work is not always affected by perception or quantity of work (someone may be doing good work and thinking it's poor; someone's hard work can be another's easy work; someone can do a lot of quality work without huge effort). Quite a few successful people with imposter syndrome and depression exist. People don't have super powers in terms of causality. What people think or "think" often doesn't matter that much and it's rather dangerous to give it so much gravity. This is far more gravity than the individual themselves gives their thoughts. > If you're getting good results in your life it's a good feedback loop, but if something is wrong and you haven't been able to fix it The problem is this describes an incredibly linear, just-world model of reality. I.e., if someone is getting good results in their life, it's due to them. If someone is getting bad results in their life, it's due to them. There's no room for randomness here, while in reality our world is very random, and people may be getting very random results and assigning them all sorts of wrong causalities. It's really going to be a rather lousy therapist not realizing this and blaming some patient for reacting to some trauma. People's weird loops are often just adaptations to the random, erratic, and unfair world around them. > If you believe therapy is completely unhelpful, you won't listen to anything the therapist says and so it will be unhelpful. Well, that's useful, given that despair is pretty common in depression, one of those illnesses people go get therapy for. Good thing this isn't true, and people absolutely can be pulled out of ruts by random outside events or by well-placed conversation. I would say therapists are not very useful if they can't do something as simple as pull a person out of a standard "everything sucks and will always suck" loop.