In a recent Sunday’s New York Times article, a psychotherapist with a freshly hung shingle describes the challenges of earning clients in a market crowded with professionals willing to listen, but with a dwindling number of patients. Her solution? Turning to a “branding consultant” who advises her, among other things, to sell herself as a specialist treating a particular type of patient and to start doing “life coaching” instead. But the trend toward “branding” may be diverting attention away from deeper problems with psychotherapy that are dissuading people from trying it and discouraging insurers from paying for sessions. MORE: Phone-Based Psychotherapy Helps Depression, At Least in the Short Term In the article, therapist Lori Gottlieb writes: What nobody taught me in grad school was that psychotherapy, a practice that had sustained itself for more than a century, is losing its customers. If this came as a shock to me, the American Psychological Association tried to send out warnings in a 2010 paper titled, “Where Has all the Psychotherapy Gone?” According to the author, 30 percent fewer patients received psychological interventions in 2008 than they did 11 years earlier; since the 1990s, managed care has increasingly limited visits and reimbursements for talk therapy but not for drug treatment…Three months into private practice, I had exactly four regular weekly clients. Her branding consultant tells her “Nobody wants to buy therapy anymore. They want to buy a solution to a problem.” While that sounds to me like a hopeful desire among people seeking help for mental illnesses, to Gottlieb, it’s a shocking development and reeks of seeking “immediate responses and constant gratification.” MORE: Do We Really Need Psychiatrists To Do Therapy? She sees therapy in a more “Woody Allen” mode, like the endless sessions of psychoanalysis practiced in the 1950s and 1960s.  She wants to explore “unconscious feelings” about other people transferred to the “blank slate” of the therapist and to provide the “opportunity” for a patient to “truly understand himself and, ultimately, change.” But psychological research on effective treatment for disorders like … Continue reading The Trouble With Talk Therapy