Clinical Therapy and Medication Becoming Part of the Problem for Psychological Patients

5 December 2011 – Patients who are suffering from some of the typical forms of psychological ailments such as depression and anxiety are not finding surcease from their woes from most conventional forms of treatment.

Conventional Freudian talk therapy, medication to help alleviate symptoms, or both is the common approach people take to tackle their psychological problems. But their problems just got more complicated with the rise of several issues surrounding currently prevalent medications as well as an increasing rate of inefficacy in talk therapy.

Scientific evidence recently found that most medication prescribed for psychological conditions to at least help control or subdue symptoms only act as active placebos. Studies concluded that the efficacy of active placebos ranked slightly lower than prescription medicine possibly because of the marketing hype that supports them. Worse still, many of these prescription medications have unfavorable, if nominal, side effects.

The medication is also only used to control symptoms and not to deal with the source of the psychological problems. This means that they tend to be short-term and repetitive, which means greater possibility of all those side effects stop from being just annoying to becoming outright dangerous. This has a lot of concerns for patients.

At the same time, talk therapy is losing its touch, it would seem. People tend to build up an inevitable resistance to the nuances used in talk therapy which help bolster its efficacy in treating conditions. It is the same as the immune system starting to reject simple pain killers like ibuprofen or paracetamol when it is used too often. The result: much like most adults nowadays look at much needed talk therapy like teenagers would look at school counseling, with one major difference – the efficiency of talk therapy really has declined.

Psychological sciences and the field of medicine are coming up with ways to circumvent the growing issue, but perhaps too slowly. People are already looking to alternative treatments and therapies such as the popular Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) therapy, which is reputed to not only handle psychological issues but also physiological concerns as well.