Some parts were better than others, I thought the critiques throughout the thread were mostly about westerners not considering other cultures and backgrounds, and how isolation and alienation — especially to the degree you see in America — does adversely affect mental health outcomes.
Cultural differences play a pretty big and often overlooked role in psychotherapy. It's absolutely crucial that you create an environment where the patient feels cared for and can open up, and how that environment looks is entirely a cultural thing - retreating to a confidential environment with one trusted advisor serves that purpose for most Westerners, but a rural commuity in Western Africa will see these matters very differently. When you've ever seen how these communities treat healing ceremonies, it's just a completely different thing from what we consider a therapeutic setting, and it makes perfect sense to me that one would look for ways to apply all we've learned in psychotherapy through a more culturally appropriate medium. That doesn't mean to throw out the scientific state of the art, it just means to learn how we can modify methods in its application to other regions of the world.
It's not as if we're talking pharmacology or surgery here. Psychology deals with much less clearly defined phenomena, and is nowhere near the scientific accuracy that we see in other therapeutic disciplines. The therapeutic approach that helped me personally the most treats the human mind basically like a blackbox and focusses entirely on changing behavorial routines, and that kind of behavorial therapy also happens to be well supported from an evidence-based standpoint in spite of its agnosticism on the root cause of mental health issues (for treatment of phobias, for example, behavorial therapy works better than literally anything else out there) . Psychology isn't at a point where we can view things as set in stone and as being the only thing that works. Saying "it's inappropriate for our culture to do a therapy session in a 1 on 1 talk in a closed room" is pretty far from the "rejection of Western medicine" some people in the other thread perceived it as.
Some parts were better than others, I thought the critiques throughout the thread were mostly about westerners not considering other cultures and backgrounds, and how isolation and alienation — especially to the degree you see in America — does adversely affect mental health outcomes.
Cultural differences play a pretty big and often overlooked role in psychotherapy. It's absolutely crucial that you create an environment where the patient feels cared for and can open up, and how that environment looks is entirely a cultural thing - retreating to a confidential environment with one trusted advisor serves that purpose for most Westerners, but a rural commuity in Western Africa will see these matters very differently. When you've ever seen how these communities treat healing ceremonies, it's just a completely different thing from what we consider a therapeutic setting, and it makes perfect sense to me that one would look for ways to apply all we've learned in psychotherapy through a more culturally appropriate medium. That doesn't mean to throw out the scientific state of the art, it just means to learn how we can modify methods in its application to other regions of the world.
It's not as if we're talking pharmacology or surgery here. Psychology deals with much less clearly defined phenomena, and is nowhere near the scientific accuracy that we see in other therapeutic disciplines. The therapeutic approach that helped me personally the most treats the human mind basically like a blackbox and focusses entirely on changing behavorial routines, and that kind of behavorial therapy also happens to be well supported from an evidence-based standpoint in spite of its agnosticism on the root cause of mental health issues (for treatment of phobias, for example, behavorial therapy works better than literally anything else out there) . Psychology isn't at a point where we can view things as set in stone and as being the only thing that works. Saying "it's inappropriate for our culture to do a therapy session in a 1 on 1 talk in a closed room" is pretty far from the "rejection of Western medicine" some people in the other thread perceived it as.