please... "Grief Counseling" is nothing more than a business at best and a scam at worst!!! read the Careless Society by John McKnight... it traces it's roots back to around 1850 and it was just a business to make money
Posted on 06/03/2005 6:34:39 PM PDT by blam
Grief counselling a waste of time, say psychologists
By Raj Persaud
(Filed: 04/06/2005)
Bereavement counselling - long considered by psychologists to be vital in recovering from the death of a loved one - may be a waste of time, according to a new study.
The research challenges a belief that has been firmly held by psychoanalysts since Sigmund Freud proposed in 1917 that confronting feelings is the healthiest way to cope with bereavement.
Many psychoanalysts have even argued that failure to express grief indicates - or may lead to - deep psychological problems.
These days, bereavement counsellors often urge people to express their sadness in order to release "suppressed emotions". Now, however, a group of psychologists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who carried out their own research and reviewed that of others, has found no link between emotional expression of grief and a lessening of subsequent distress.
They assessed 128 recently bereaved people four times over two years and found no significant statistical difference between the continued distress in those who shared their emotions and those who did not.
The authors, Wolfgang Stroebe, Henk Schut and Margaret Stroebe, whose research is published this week in the Clinical Psychology Review, also challenged the view that it is beneficial for those who have suffered loss to "write about their very deepest thoughts and feelings".
They reviewed previous trials in which bereaved people had been asked to write for 15 to 30 minutes either about a recent traumatic loss or a trivial topic, and found little evidence that writing about emotions was beneficial.
The authors said: "The findings challenge beliefs about grief work, emotional disclosure and beneficial interventions that were considered as self-evident by bereavement researchers only a decade ago."
They claimed that counselling was more likely to benefit those with "complicated" grief - such as those whose loved ones suffered a particularly traumatic death.
Why, the researchers then asked, do bereaved people with "uncomplicated" grief fail to benefit from "grief work"?
They concluded that the most common difficulty suffered by bereaved people is emotional loneliness: the feeling of being utterly alone, even when in the company of friends and family. This type of loneliness, they say, only abates with time and nothing can be done to aid recovery.
The findings are supported by Dr Colin Murray Parkes, a consultant psychiatrist and the president of the charity Cruse Bereavement Care.
He said: "There is no evidence that all bereaved people will benefit from counselling, and research has shown no benefit to arise from the routine referral of people to counselling for no other reason than that they have suffered bereavement."
• Dr Raj Persaud is the Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry
Okay then. I 've been saying this for 20 years. What is my prize?
I once put a dog to sleep. I was sad. Then I got a new dog.
This makes me so sad I don't know what to do.
Me too. The people I knew in college and elsewhere who went into counseling usually had two things in common:
1) A fear of *real* math, and
2) Their own lives were screwed up.
I've gotten over my own "losses" on my own just fine, thanx.
Your prize is the great swell of satisfaction you may enjoy, knowing that you have more sense than 80% of the general population...and I will share it with you!
Focault's Pendulum wrote:
I once put a dog to sleep. I was sad. Then I got a new dog.
--No fair! I could never replace the beloved Jumbo Shrimp from outback steakhouse that i popped into my mouth. All the other jumbo shrimp just look the same.
Well duh. Counseling is for serious stuff. Grief is a part of life not a emotional disorder.
I would go as far to say that most of the counseling actually leads to more problems. Because then people think they aren't even grieving normally. How did the world survive without all this counseling?
I've said for a long time that anyone who goes into psychology or social work does so to figure out what is wrong with themselves. I've yet to find an instance where this is demonstrably not true - most, when questioned, will admit it.
LOL. I am honored to share my prize with you.
The only Rx for grief is time, not time on the shrinks couch either.
please... "Grief Counseling" is nothing more than a business at best and a scam at worst!!! read the Careless Society by John McKnight... it traces it's roots back to around 1850 and it was just a business to make money
Much of modern psychiatry causes more problems than it solves. The "Recovered memory" phenomenon is one example; these people are destroying innocent families and belong in prison.
Sigmund Freud tried to talk people out of schizophrenia his whole career, and failed utterly. The only psychiatry that really works is based on pills, and even that is pretty primitive.
-ccm
Does anyone have any wisdom on how to cope with the hell that is my life now?
Phooey! "Deep psychological problems" are a fidget of the imaginization.
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