How Long?
I'm really sorry if this isn't really appropriate to put here or if there's a different place to ask this sort of thing, but this was one of the only places where I thought I could ask this question and not be judged and get some actual help.
My husband deals with depression and has been seeing a therapist ever since he's been in high school, if not earlier than that. We married young, so he's been in therapy for a good 5-7 years. I know that he says it helps him, but I have concerns.
I was kinda under the impression that therapy isn't supposed to last forever. That it's supposed to help you handle your emotions yourself and give you the "tools" necessary to cope on your own. I wonder if he doesn't see it that way. He says he would rather talk out his problems with a therapist, who that's their job to listen, rather than me so that he doesn't make me feel down. Or that because I'm not a therapist then I can only do so much. I agree to some degree.
I know that this subject may be sensitive and I don't want to come off as rude or anything like that. I just wonder when (or if) there is an end to therapy.
@honeykitty1013 There are different schools of therapy, also known as orientations or modalities. Some of them have no time limit and therapy can last for decades. A well known article in The New York Times, My Life in Therapy, describes 40 years of therapy.
Other therapies are very short. The most commonly recommended therapy for depression, as far as I know, is CBT. According to the CBT therapists I know it usually takes a few weeks, or maybe up to a few months for very complex cases. In CBT the focus is on discovering the cause of the depression, addressing the cause directly, and then providing tools for preventing future relapse. Here in the UK, health insurers typically allow for 6 weeks of therapy, with a possible extension to maybe 20 weeks if the case is complex.
Therapist training is another issue. CBT is a challenging therapy for any therapist to learn, and therapists can obtain a basic qualification that allows them to see patients even if they don't have the level of skill to treat depression effectively. As a result, some therapists might spend the time discussing superficial day-to-day matters and never discover the cause of the depression. Therapy of this kind could continue forever.
If your husband has become dependent on an ineffective therapist of this kind, then I would agree with your concerns.
I have only found one organization that checks CBT therapists' ability to work effectively with real patients, the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. You can find a link here: Find a CBT Therapist Further down the page, the other organizations mentioned do not check their therapists to the same standard, as far as I can tell. A second organization is in the process of setting up an equally good certification scheme, but its directory doesn't seem to be public yet.
Charlie
