Discussion Have you asked your mental health professional for a recovery ETA?

[CuriosityAndCat]

Have any of you asked and gotten an answer from mental health professional on when you'll get better or do well enough to function happily?

My first therapist said 3-6 months on the first session, which sounded excellent, but later said it was C-PTSD not PTSD, and I'd recover and to focus and stay in the moment.

4 years later: I'm doing significantly better, but still dealing with main symptoms I started therapy for. I asked if there was any ETA on Wed. My psychologist said idk in an intentionally positive and vague way. He said it could be as soon as tomorrow or even a month.

A lot of other mental health issues are completely gone so I do have belief that it's treatable. Just don't know if it's 2 days or 20 years.

 

[KafkaF]

Have any of you asked and gotten an answer from mental health professional on when you'll get better or do well enough to function happily?

My first therapist said 3-6 months on the first session, which sounded excellent, but later said it was C-PTSD not PTSD, and I'd recover and to focus and stay in the moment.

4 years later: I'm doing significantly better, but still dealing with main symptoms I started therapy for. I asked if there was any ETA on Wed. My psychologist said idk in an intentionally positive and vague way. He said it could be as soon as tomorrow or even a month.

A lot of other mental health issues are completely gone so I do have belief that it's treatable. Just don't know if it's 2 days or 20 years.

The problem is that people are extremely complicated.

Psychology is a humbers game. When you do experiments on what therapy works and how mental illnesses respond, etc. you're generally doing those on large groups of people (as large as possible, preferably). And the effectiveness of therapies is gaged in significant part through the comparative odds that people in one group get better than those in another.

For example (and this is not a real experiment, just an illustration) let's say you're testing out cognitive behavioural therapy for depression. And you have Group A which receives it for 6 months, and Group B which receives a different kind of therapy for 6 months or a placebo pill or something, and then Group C yet another type of intervention for 6 months. And, of course, they randomize the groups, make sure to sift out confounding variables (things they don't want to measure), etc. And in the end they find out that in Group A 80% of people got better, whereas in Groups B and C only 20% of people got better.

That would probably be a VERY good result for the effectiveness of CTB. But as you'll notice 80% is still not 100%. So despite the therapy being very effective, it still didn't work for everyone (at least not within that 6 months). If you ran another experiment but made it go for 12 months, it might go up to 90%, and 24 months maybe to 95% but there will almost always be outliers. And that's because this stuff is really complicated and psychology is still an active area of science. In other words, we don't have all the answers yet by any means.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it's really, really hard to predict for any individual person how they're going to respond to a certain therapy or over what period of time. There just isn't a way to do it. At best you can look at the research and see what the average/median time until recovery with a certain therapy is. And you can potentially plot out when it hits 50% recovered, when it hits 75%, when it hits 80%, etc. But there will always be people who take shorter or longer to get better. Cuz individual variation is just really huge.

I'd say the important thing is just that you keep at it. You're getting better and that in itself is already very, very encouraging. You're making progress, focus on that and take it day by day.

 

[CuriosityAndCat]

The problem is that people are extremely complicated.

Psychology is a humbers game. When you do experiments on what therapy works and how mental illnesses respond, etc. you're generally doing those on large groups of people (as large as possible, preferably). And the effectiveness of therapies is gaged in significant part through the comparative odds that people in one group get better than those in another.

For example (and this is not a real experiment, just an illustration) let's say you're testing out cognitive behavioural therapy for depression. And you have Group A which receives it for 6 months, and Group B which receives a different kind of therapy for 6 months or a placebo pill or something, and then Group C yet another type of intervention for 6 months. And, of course, they randomize the groups, make sure to sift out confounding variables (things they don't want to measure), etc. And in the end they find out that in Group A 80% of people got better, whereas in Groups B and C only 20% of people got better.

That would probably be a VERY good result for the effectiveness of CTB. But as you'll notice 80% is still not 100%. So despite the therapy being very effective, it still didn't work for everyone (at least not within that 6 months). If you ran another experiment but made it go for 12 months, it might go up to 90%, and 24 months maybe to 95% but there will almost always be outliers. And that's because this stuff is really complicated and psychology is still an active area of science. In other words, we don't have all the answers yet by any means.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it's really, really hard to predict for any individual person how they're going to respond to a certain therapy or over what period of time. There just isn't a way to do it. At best you can look at the research and see what the average/median time until recovery with a certain therapy is. And you can potentially plot out when it hits 50% recovered, when it hits 75%, when it hits 80%, etc. But there will always be people who take shorter or longer to get better. Cuz individual variation is just really huge.

I'd say the important thing is just that you keep at it. You're getting better and that in itself is already very, very encouraging. You're making progress, focus on that and take it day by day.

Thank you. That's probably heathy to just focus on what I need to do each day and celebrate the successes.

 

[Ambivalent1]

One therapist said that after 25 yrs of going untreated from trauma, it was very unlikely that I would recover in a way that I would accept. Other therapists say different.

 

[KafkaF]

Thank you. That's probably heathy to just focus on what I need to do each day and celebrate the successes.

I think that would be a good idea and a great way of putting it. =)

 

[Bianka]

It's hard to put a deadline on it. You'll arrive to that conclusion together. I'm not in therapy anymore because we discussed that I'm feeling shitty but I have the tools and knowledge to deal with it