they need 5 times as much talk therapy to gain the same benefit this is where i disagree. a friend of mine is a therapist, and she won't take people for more t

they need 5 times as much talk therapy to gain the same benefit this is where i disagree. a friend of mine is a therapist, and she won't take people for more than half a year. if in that time she can not help them, then this most likely means that these people are simply not receptive to the therapy that she was able to provide. so more therapy won't help them. my reading of therapy being 20% effective means that it is 100% effective, 20% of the time, and completely fails 80% of the time. (well, i suppose there are also cases where therapy is partly effective, but i do not believe the relationship is linear, and that a partly effective therapy can be turned into a fully effective one by simply adding more time) (and i am aware that 20% is a made up number, we can fill in what actual statistics provide if there are any) so basically i believe any specific form therapy is effective with some people and fails with other people. that doesn't mean that there is no working therapy for those people, just that they haven't found it yet, or haven't found the right therapist yet. (sometimes the success of therapy depends on the personality of the therapist and the patient) i agree with the end goals, but the examples you list are the extreme cases, that i hope are actually easier to address because i think they are caused by some very painful experience that a therapist should at least be able to detect. (i don't really know, but i hope anyways) the cases of concern in this thread are the more subtle ones that prevent people from sharing their feelings, and the cause for that i believe is much harder to detect and address.