LIFE. Not one of us gets through it without an emotional battle scar or two. And given the strange times we have been living through recently, it is hardly surprising that the number of people seeking therapy for everything from work-related stress to anxiety, depression and trauma has skyrocketed. This raises important questions about how effective therapy really is and what it does for our brains and lives.
These aren鈥檛 easy questions to answer. For a start, anyone can set themselves up as a therapist, whether they are a fully qualified clinical psychiatrist, an executive turned life coach or a teenage influencer who has read a couple of self-help manuals. As the online world has filled up with people keen to share the benefit of their wisdom, it is increasingly difficult to work out what is worth listening to and what might do us harm.
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The body of science that could help us narrow things down has long been missing in action. Many forms of therapy were built on the back of ideas of how the mind works that predate any real understanding of the brain, and grew up organically, evolving over time. As a result, many talking therapies have come to be seen as inferior to drug treatments and are often dismissed as unscientific.
Then came brain imaging and, with it, the ability to see what, if anything, was happening in the brain in response to therapy. Over the past few decades, studies have begun to show that therapy can change the brain in meaningful ways that line up with improvements in symptoms.
The case is far from closed. Of the hundreds of types of therapy out there, only a handful have been studied in rigorously controlled trials. Even then, many studies lump together various types or look at one kind of therapy used in people with very different issues. So this line of enquiry is still in its infancy.
The good news is that, with more people accessing therapy than ever, we will be better placed to study therapy with the rigorous methods we apply to other treatments.
