FAQ 2 – Answered by Dr. Parth Goyal
Continuing with our FAQ series, we will try to find answer for another frequently asked questions by patient or relatives and seem to be of great concern to people.
This time, let us see what Dr. Parth Goyal, Consultant Psychiatrist in Ahmedabad, Parth Hospital, has to say about medicines or counselling confusion.
I don’t want to take medicines, will counselling work?
There is a recent fad that counselling can resolve all issues. A lot of movies and TV shows have glorified the idea of lying down on a leather couch in a therapist’s office and “talking about your feelings.”
There is a big difference between advice and counselling.
Most people confuse the two entities. Most patients come to us asking for advice. They want to hear something that makes them better, makes them feel good and more motivated. That is what self-help, spiritual healing and other forms of PEP talks do.
Counselling is a more rigorous and complicated process.
Counselling is a process where the therapist guides you into understanding yourself better. There are no suggestions, there is no direct advice. We explore what you feel, why you feel and how you react. There are multiple types of psychotherapies.
The most important is that in the process of counselling/psychotherapy, the responsibility of change and becoming better lies with the patient. Once the patient identifies the dysfunctional thinking patterns, which are responsible for the pain and suffering, he/she needs to make the effort to change them.
Counselling/psychotherapy sessions can last for weeks to months. In some cases, they might even go on for years together.
Psychotherapy can only be done in some cases of psychiatric illnesses. For e.g., a patient with mild depression/anxiety might benefit from psychotherapy, but “there is no role of it in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar mood disorder, etc.”
Intact insight and reality orientation are required for counselling/psychotherapy to work. For most psychiatric illnesses, psychotherapy is in addition to medicines and not a substitution. Patients with severe depression or anxiety can have severe, disabling symptoms which can prevent them from getting engaged in a dialogue, which is essential to counselling.
Medicines reduce the severity of symptoms and can prepare an individual to be more therapeutically engaged.