My thoughts on therapy and counseling.

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I think therapy is the biggest money-making scam going, and both the patient and doctor are to blame.

The patient because he or she goes in with petty problems and complains for an hour (or more likely 50 minutes since most therapists cut the appointment early) and basically just gets a release from telling a paid stranger things that they're too afraid to tell people in their life that know who they are and are more likely to be able to help them.

The doctor because most of them are incompetent. I say this after seeing several therapists for over a month and 3 therapists for over a year.

They really don't care about you. Whatever connection you have with them, you're just a person that they're collecting a paycheck from. They get paid whether they help you or don't help you.

And while I'm only speaking for two therapists, if you were ever in a crisis situation, and not just a complaining/venting/analyzing situation, they wouldn't be there for you. I attempted suicide under one therapist's belt...(not his fault that I attempted suicide, but maybe his fault that he wasn't helping me feel any better) and he was no where to be found when I was in the emergency room. The ER had to track him down, and when I was in the hospital, I never heard from him. When I had an appointment after being in the hospital for two weeks, it was like he didn't even realize or care that I had been hospitalized for a couple weeks. He just pretended it was any other appointment.

The other, knew about this previous therapist, and when I landed in the hospital (not over a suicide attempt) she was nowhere to be found.

I'm not a genius, but if I were a therapist, to me the worst possible news would be that one of my patients had a breakdown and ended up in a temporary mental facility. It would mean that I failed as a therapist and also I would care that a patient of mine was feeling that bad...not care like a parent, never said that, but care that not only was the patient not making progress, but that they were getting worse.

To the therapist's credit, though, they aren't given a lot to deal with. When you go in and talk like ToadOFSteel from the forum...resistant to any change, thinking you know everything and that nothing will work...you're put in a tough situation. But the answer to me is to kindly tell the person what they are doing wrong. If I was called out by either of those therapists and told "You don't want to change. You just like complaining. If you want to change, these are the steps you take..." They would never do that though because 1.)They would be afraid that the patient would be over-sensitive, think the therapist was being mean and never come back again. 2.)They make a paycheck off of complainers. If they didn't have people coming in with insignificant problems and complaining, 90 percent of their business would be gone.

Let me also say that my confidence has improved two-fold since I last saw a therapist (June 2008)...I've felt rock-bottom depressed, and not been hospitalized over it, and have dealt with it on my own without the help of a professional. It makes me feel great that I can hit rock-bottom, and rely on people who actually care (My family) instead of random paid strangers. I feel emotionally independent.

I agree. I've seen 3 therapists. With the first one, I was so nervous that I just put on a show pretending that I was stable and ok, and she seemed to really enjoy it. Another one wanted to analyze why I dyed my hair from blonde to black, so I quit going to her ---Like "oh, my heart is black so I figured my hair should reflect that". No, dumb a$$, I'm a girl ---- The last one I saw, seemed to overreact when I was being honest, like she thought I was nuts. If my therapist thinks I'm nuts, she needs more experience, or at least enough to learn to keep her shock to herself.

That being said, to each his own. Some people really don't have anyone to talk to and are willing to pay someone to listen.

I'm twenty-six. I started therapy at ten. I've seen at least 12 over the years -- throught school districts, through the freaks who sided with my mom on everything, psych wards, boarding schools, and a couple even I hand-picked.

99% of the time, yeah. THis is true.

There /are/ good therapists out there, who do care. It's really, really difficult to find them. And it was tremendously scary and disturbing to sort through them, constantly put myself out there, and be horribly let down.

I just recently started therapy with someone who is actually a PsyD student. My reasoning, basically, is that I've seen lots and lots of as*holes who have had their PsyD for *decades* and still can't figure out wtf they are doing --- Someone who actually has a gift for helping people was probably like that from the start. The place I found her at couldn't say enough about her, and overall the center was different from any other place I called - which ran into the dozens last October when I decided I was going to find help no matter what.

It might seem early to say positive things - I think I've had about ten sessions. But she knows AS, she seems to know the BS from the truth, she posts small bits about AS in her spare time on FaceBook, and has none of the apathetic and uncreative behaviors of past therapists. And I emphasize creativity because, when no two people with AS are alike --- it takes creativity to figure out how to manage each person's symptoms and quirks without stepping on their individual style.


The fact that she is only two years older than me is weird, though. :-p


ETA: I should add, that of that 1% that are good therapists, probably most of them are not experts in AS. They are great with NTs, because they are easier to relate to. Which sort of screws us, as we don't function the same way at all.

Although I haven't felt to the extent that you have that a therapist didn't care, I have been frustrated with the amount of "talk" therapy that did little to help me other than to empty my wallet. I have had chronic depression most of my life and nothing helped until I finally went to a psychiatrist (on my own initiative) who put me on anti-depressants. It ticks me off to think of all the years I spent seeing psychologists who, for whatever reason, were way too reluctant to refer me to someone who could help by prescribing meds. I think of all of the years where I could have felt better but didn't because I was using "talk" therapy for what was (in hindsight) clearly a chemical imbalance.

I've talked to a councilor ten to eleven years ago. She didn't help me out, at all. She only cared about herself. I've fired her off, in 2000 after two years of frusterations.

I have to disagree. My CBT therapist is very good. She respects me and is very helpful.

I started seeing a therapist about a year ago. I decided to do so after a really bad bout of depression last year, and having realized that I was probably an Aspie I looked for a therapist who specializes in ASD. She is awesome! I feel so much more able to cope with life now than I did last year and my self esteem is *way* better. A lot of it is stuff that a therapist would tell an NT, but the most valuable insight I get from her is when she tells me that my weird mannerisms are actually common among people on the spectrum. She doesn't think my aversion to talking on the phone is silly, and has been very patient with me. It's kind of funny, the NT suitable stuff (like dealing with self-destructive thoughts) were really easy for me -- but my telephone phobia is still there even after three months of work.

So my advice is to find a therapist who deals specifically with Autistic Spectrum patients. I would not feel comfortable going to a general practice (or whatever they are called) therapist (good luck finding a therapist who is on the spectrum themselves, I think that's unicorn territory). Another thing you might try is to adjust scheduling, I see my therapist every other week and it seems to be just often enough. You can always increase the frequency.

Oh, and this is my first post here! I have been lurking for a little while, but I felt like I finally had something to add to the discussion. Thanks for putting a place like this on the internet, it looks like a very valuable resource.

G

hello glarbl_blarbl. Welcome home to WrongPlanet. I have been going to 'therapy' for 6 months now, and on ssri re-uptake inhibitors and a psychic energizer. I am not certain I like what it does and where it takes me. Before, I could stop being less than conciliatory and pleasant, now the words or attitude just blurts right out and I irritably express myself. The therapist says it is good that I don't 'stuff' down the feelings, but I am not interested in having conflicts and have to back track and apologize and try to fix things that could have been avoided in the first place.

That was nice to realize, and it was from reading your post, glarbl_blarbl. I am glad you have decided to post as well as lurk

Merle

I saw my shrink when I was 11 and 12 and she sure cared about me. She let me talk about my obsessions and she was the one who kept ruling things off the list on what I might have and then she suspected AS and told my mom about it. My mom said she wanted someone else to look that over so she recommended a psychiatrist. So mom started taking me to him and we saw him for a while for a few months and then I was eventually diagnosed.


There are some therapists out there that do fire their patients because they don't want them wasting their time with them taking up their time while someone else could be in there using their time to talk about their problems and wanting to fix them. I would say only the good ones would do that.

Agree there.

Thanks for the welcome, Merle. I'm glad I was able to help, but I'm not sure exactly what I did

I know what you mean about blurting out what you're thinking without control... I often disclose more information than I should or fail to take into account how someone might feel about what I'm saying. Which is dangerous since I'm a musician by trade -- sometimes it's a journalist I'm talking to. Luckily everybody in my band understands my lack of a filter, some even like it. Unfortunately it makes me quite unsuitable for a day job. One of the things my therapist has helped me to vocalize is just how stressful I found the few jobs I did hold down.

I had never heard about psychic energizers before, but the google shows papers mostly from the 50's and 60's. Do you know of any recent studies? I did a short course of Prozac about ten years ago for depression (long before I knew I was on the ASD) which didn't agree with me... I felt kind of emotionally flat. And I used Wellbutrin (along with nicotine patches) for about 90 days when I quit smoking in 2003. That was extremely successful. I have only had a few drags of tobacco since then, and never had an urge to buy a pack.

I think it totally depends, and therapists have a lot stacked against them, starting with the "they're only in it for the money" bit. Seriously, you don't go through all that schooling and then spend the rest of your life listening to crazy people talk "just for the money." There probably is a point, however, when they get disillusioned and stop caring, but I think that at least towards the beginning of their careers, most therapists care.
Then there's the issue of diagnosis. They can't help if they don't know what's wrong. I've seen a few good therapists in my life, but their main focus was on eating disorders. An eating disorder therapist is going to work almost exclusively with girls and won't know about autism except in the vaguest terms. (I would hope that this is changing.. perhaps is has changed somewhat in recent years. But my therapist couldn't suspect a disorder she didn't know about.) She told me all the time that a therapist's goal should be to make themselves obsolete, and that she worked for me, she was supposed to help me.. so I definitely don't think any of that stuff about fostering dependence and all applied. I think she cared about me and I think she did help at least some. I remember her being incredibly obsessed with food, though, which was probably why she became an eating disorder therapist, but was definitely not helpful to me. She also believed that ridiculous myth about how it's not possible to be simultaneously anorexic and bulimic. I don't understand why so many professionals believe that, because it's utter crap.
Problem was I guess that nobody knew what I needed, although she did ask all the time what I needed.. So I was still so clueless about people, so desperate to be liked but without a clue so far as how to go about making friends, or how to tell people's intentions, and I guess partly I was fooling myself too, trying to convince myself that I knew when I didn't, because that's what I kept being told girls with eating disorders were like... the 20% with undiagnosed ASDs are kinda left out of the stereotype, even among eating disorder specialists. I would certainly hope that that's something that will change in the future. (or may even be changing now.. there's some literature about the connection.)

I think that a lot of people with undiagnosed ASDs have trouble in therapy largely because therapists get frustrated that they can't understand them. Even though most therapists don't deal with medication, so much research in psychology is still based on what drug companies can make a profit off of, so there's so almost no education about autism for anybody who isn't specializing in developmental psychology. Research requires funding, and if there's not a profit to be made, where is that research money going to come from? Hopefully some of the government money allocated for autism research will actually go into researching therapy and such rather than that wild goose chase for a cure when nobody can even figure out what a cure would do.

Anyway, I don't have any experience with specialized ASD therapists, but it sounds as though most people who have seen them have had good experiences. I do hope I'll be able to find one someday, but professionals around here are so scarce in general, and at the beginning of this year I had some really bad experiences with a few psychiatrists, so I'm just really not able to go looking for professionals now.

glarbl_blarbl, how did you go about finding an autism specialist? I have a really bad aversion to the phone too, and that's another thing that makes looking for professionals really difficult!
A major problem with phones for me is that I don't tend to get good results when I use the phone. I say things wrong, or do things wrong, and the person at the other end usually ends up telling me "no" to anything, even if the "no" is completely ridiculous. (For example, I needed to contact social security. I was having issues with the toll-free number. This turned out to be my fault because I was reading it wrong, but I called social services and asked if there was another phone number for social security--I actually needed to contact the local social security office anyways. The person at social services told me that there was no other number for social security at all. I asked if there was anybody else there who might know another number. She insisted to me that a national agency with hundreds of offices and thousands of employees had only one phone number. I still don't have any idea why she refused to give me another number or connect me to somebody who would have known-- obviously there are people at social services who know how to get in contact with the local social security office.)

Maggiedoll:

I couldn't agree more with this. I can't imagine what a "cure" for autism would do to my consciousness. I don't think I'd want it, even if they could prove that there are no side effects. I'll take drugs like cannabis and the opiates with known side-effects any day --
I figure a few millenium is enough time to really understand what a drug can do

I had a good experience with a child psychologist when I was around eight or nine after I set the backyard on fire. I think she taught me about empathy without meaning to. I wasn't trying to hurt anybody, I was just running an experiment to see if string burned like a fuse (not that I could verbalize that at the time, I wasn't able to do that until I was in my thirties). Blame Wily E. Coyote I guess for making everything into a fuse. I only went a few times, but I was probably going to be a lot more careful with fire after that -- regardless of with whom I talked about it (does that grammar work? english is so damned weird). That was the last time I saw a mental health professional until last year. Those sessions probably helped me a lot with communication with my parents, also. Apparently it was suggested that I had ADHD as well, I'm so very glad I didn't get medicated for that. If I had been born a few years later I'm sure I would have been.

I found my therapist online. She has a website, so I wrote her a typically terse email asking for an Asperger's Assessment. She called me after I sent her my number (which is good, because I probably would have just put it off until I forgot about it) and we set up an appointment for my mother and I to visit her office. I don't think my mom realized how depressed I had been :/ It was such a relief to do that assessment and have a name for the way I am, though. She really understands people with ASD. Before becoming a therapist she worked as a recruiter and HR for some big tech companies in the Puget Sound area. So she dealt with a lot of people on the spectrum before picking her specialty (adults with ASD).

Man, that call to social security sounds excruciating! I've been putting off a call to my insurance company as well, for much the same reason -- even though it's a simple request. The really odd thing is that I don't mind calling companies if I have to accomplish a technical task. But then there are times when I won't pick up the phone when it's my best friend calling. It makes dating really effing hard, let me tell you

More than just what it would do to your consciousness, the cure topics on WP have seemed to generally conclude that nobody knows what a cure would be at all. There are anti-cure people who say stuff about how they wouldn't want to change, autism makes them who they are, and all that, but when it comes down to it, nobody seems to know what it would even mean to cure autism. There have been some various speculations about the autism spectrum extending so that NTs are in the middle and there's something else on the other side. (Somebody asked what that would look like--I posted a picture of Paris Hilton. ) Some people have made comments about how it would be okay to cure low functioning autism, but not AS or HFA (or was it just not AS? I'm not even sure) but all of that again forgets the entire concept of a spectrum. At some point Merle said that she thought that the entire "cure" debate was just an intellectual exercise, because how can we debate whether or not we want something if we have no clue what that something is? That kinda put the whole cure debate to rest in my mind, because I think she's right.. the whole debate is moot.



That grammar is as good as most native English speakers could get it. I think most people would say "regardless of who I talked about it with" but that would be technically incorrect. Although I think somebody said that grammarians have decided that whatever sounds natural is correct. So it gets even more arbitrary! Fun, huh? What you said makes sense, though.


I've poked around online looking for autism specialists.. problem is that I'm on this peninsula where there's barely anything at all.. I think the closest place I might find a specialist would we Washington, D.C., which is about a two and a half hour drive, and I hate to drive, not to mention that Washington is particularly bad driving. I could get Kris to take me, but I don't think he could do that regularly, so the whole thing would probably be pointless. So I would go through all of that with phone calls and appointments, and not get anything out of it except to be told that I'm on the autism spectrum.. which I'm pretty darn sure of as it is, and since professional diagnoses can be wrong too, I probably wouldn't be much surer having gotten one. And I have no idea how I'd react if they said I wasn't on the spectrum.. it's the only thing that makes sense, and since I've been in so much therapy in the past that didn't get anywhere because it didn't recognize the problem.. I'd suddenly have a whole host of new doubts.


Yup.. I get nervous calling my psychiatrist's office for Adderall refills.. It's short and predictable and expected, and the receptionists are all quite nice and agreeable.. but I still just feel like an idiot on the phone. Probably partly because of the issues I had with social services and with the two horrible psychiatrists I saw when I moved down here before I found my current one (who isn't covered-- my parents pay for me to see her.) And maybe I should be in therapy to get over that.. but normal NT-type therapy probably isn't going to help me, because it's more than just the fear, it's also the trouble communicating and all. I was seeing a therapist in my psychiatrist's office for a little while, but all she wanted to work on was emotions and social anxiety and all, she wouldn't help me analyze why I come off in strange ways that don't make sense or anything like that. She said it didn't matter. (which makes no sense.. and ends up fostering the whole dependence on a therapist thing.. if we only address my emotions about being misunderstood but not why I can't express myself, or why I come off like somebody that should be treated like dirt, I'll keep making the same mistakes!) My psychiatrist told me that if I do find somebody who works with ASDs in adults, I should let her know, so she can put them on her referral list! (I don't think she thinks that there are such people.. when I first mentioned it to her, she said that she doesn't know anything about autism, because she's a general psychiatrist and not a developmental psychiatrist.)

I don't know if I'm interpreting it wrong, but the way you put it, it sounded like the main thing that you found helpful with the autism specialist was being told that things you do are common among people with ASDs? That's what everybody here does with all "do you do/thing/say/feel _____?" polls.. or was there other stuff she helped you with?

Wow, that was long! I guess I'm babbling again..

psychic energizers is what my mother called them when I would steal her 'Obitrol' from her back in the 60's. My father was forever using his Dexadrine inhaler and my uncle said when the law changed and it became a controlled substance and no longer available over the counter he went through really bad withdrawals.
Now I am no stranger to chemical enhacement and my cocaine habit in the seventies was as enlightening to my mind as it was distructive to my body (especially my teeth!). But this is some sort of ultra processed extended release Dextroamphetamine that minimizes the 'boost' and maximizes the sustained release.

I am on sertraline for 16 weeks now, and it still turns my stomach every morning. I told my therapist I felt like I have morning sickness for the duration. Ugh. She suggested welbutrin if I didn't stop the nausea.

oh, and you didn't do anything but prompt me to think in a different way. That is the difference between lurking and posting.

Merle

It sounds like you're talking about either Vyvanse or extended release Adderall, but I'm really confused by the "psychic energizer" term.

Well, I am a native english speaker.. so I'm glad I guess the important part of communication is being understood, so as long as that's true we're good. And I'm also glad I don't have to worry about being cured anytime soon

I have to go out of the county to see my therapist. It's a 1.5 hour trip one way, which is kind of a pain. But there is an awesome Indian buffet a couple of blocks away, so every other week I get a treat. I live in the other Washington, my therapist's office is in Redmond -- not far from Microsoft.

As for what she helps with, a big part of it is the traits I have in common with the spectrum. But she has also helped me out with strategies for reducing anxiety, tricks for avoiding depressive cycles of thinking, and of course she lets me vent. We discuss how to deal with issues in my life, and she gives me an insight into the NT mind as well. The really nice thing about it for me is that she helps me understand myself and gives me a type of support that I haven't had from anyone else in my life. I very rarely feel like she is judging me.

I am about to look into getting a formal diagnosis, my therapist has given me some referrals -- but it's all phone numbers, so it will probably take me a while to get up the nerve. Of course, first I have to straighten out my insurance stuff...