Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Isn’t a Catch-All Solution for Mental Health

0:01 what's wrong with cognitive behavioral therapy it's not what's wrong with it it's that its use is limited meaning it was originally designed to help people with things like PTSD or OCD or if they had habits that they were trying to stop it's it's a very symptom oriented relief and by the way psychoanalysts do use cognitive behavioral therapy in small doses when necessary at least again good ones do meaning I can work with a

0:33 patient where I can also under sort of uncover what's happened to them in the past but if they need some symptom relief can also do some mindfulness training or some breathing CBT therapists don't have the equipment or the training to go farther back in the past and help patients understand what is underneath those issues so um it's not what's wrong with it it has a limited use but the problem is it's being applied widely it's the best way I

0:59 can describe the difference between depression and anxiety is that depression is a preoccupation with past losses uh anxiety is preoccupation with future losses that haven't occurred and may never occur what they have in common is loss so if you treating a patient who has anxiety there's always loss involved and losses relate to the past and so if you're not dealing with the past at all then you're not really getting under the problem and so you might have some quick

1:29 symptom release some immediate gratification but it's not sustainable and a lot of the research is showing that people that go for CBT therapy a lot of them get immediate relief but it's not sustainable it basically believes that you can heal people's anxiety and depression by just getting them to think about it differently it's using your cognitive skills to think your way out of what are emotional issues and so what I always say is you can't think away something that is an

1:56 emotional issue you have to you have to examine it on an emotional level so we had um a a cognitive behavioral therapist Dr Ortiz on the show and um he talked about how you know a big part of it is the experiential part which is let's say I'm afraid I think an example he uses I'm afraid of being in elevators phobias phobias it's very good for phobias yes it's like okay here's what we're going to do we're going to just go to we're

2:24 just going to go into conditioning it's oh yeah yeah it's very good for phobias and does it have more sticking power for that so think about the fact that if you break your leg skiing you've had the experience of breaking your leg and so when you go to ski again you're scared that you're going to break your leg again and you can develop a phobia around you know breaking your leg skiing and so what it does it decondition you

2:48 and that's why it's good for things like phobias OCD PTSD what it's not so good at is if the thing that you're frightened of has nothing to do with an experience you've had meaning I'm scared of elevators but I've never had an incident in an elevator that means it's not about the elevator that means something is getting projected from the past that's a loss that has nothing to do with the elevator but it's getting projected onto the elevator so if you

3:16 get the person to not be afraid of elevators you might as well just uh it's a little bit like what I call plowing snow in the winter you push it from one place to another and so now you don't have a fear of the elevator but you may have a fear of something else and so Psychotherapy and psycho analytics like how what what yeah I think I think you know Sigman Freud is probably the most famous name in um psychology right to

3:41 what extent uh is the that work an extension of him where has it evolved past what he developed truth and advertising I was trained as a Freudian but I'm not a strict foradian so I have many influences I have influences from yungi and and from kleinan in my family there are three analysts I'm a Freudian I have a sister who's a kinian and a brother-in-law who's a yungan so we we are all together it's a very interesting

4:09 dinner conversation so your conversations about your parents must be completely crazy yeah that's never a trer word was said Freud was living in a time that there was a lot of sexual repression and so people want to judge Freud in these modern times when they can't really judge him because he lived in a a different time and in that time people were very sexually repressed and as a result they developed what what we call hysterical symptoms lots of hysterical symptoms

4:39 hysterical blindness women would lose their bodily functions and he was dealing with repression on a very deep level that would cause somatic physical symptoms right today we've moved away from that level of sexual repression so in his time he was brilliant because in his time he did cure a lot of those people that electric shock therapy and drowning them in ice baths almost you know uh the Sleep Therapy you know there were many crazy therapies that

5:11 neurologists and psychiatrists were trying in those days right but he actually cured people because he realized he he made the connection between sexual repression and hysterical symptoms what we now are dealing with because we don't deal with that level of sexual repression is we are dealing with a whole set of different issues you say it's evolved into what we call narcissistic disorders on a mass level and narcissistic disorders include depression anxiety addictions of

5:42 all kinds Eating Disorders alcoholism drug addiction all kinds of addictions uh narcissistic personality disorders so it's really evolved into something different so we're in a different time in a different place in terms of the kinds of symptoms sys and illnesses that we're seeing if you like this clip we've got more where that came from be sure to watch the full video and don't forget to subscribe to the channel so you won't miss our new videos as they come out

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