On 2005-03-02 14:28:00, Anonymous wrote:
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On 2005-03-01 22:10:00, Rachael wrote:
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On 2005-02-27 09:32:00, Anonymous wrote:
"As far as traditional therapy for treating addiction, you surely must know that individual therapy, based on Freudian THEORY is sadly lacking. "
Oh dear "Higher Power of my choosing", please tell me that this evidently misguided soul doesn't actually believe what he just wrote. Does he truly think that the concept of individual therapy was only developed during the time of Freud? He must be joking, surely."
Rachael, my mother, father and stepfather are all registered psychologists in Alberta. I have a pretty good idea about the concept of individual therapy. I studied psych at university. I have also studied sociology and anthropology. I was simply pointing out that most forms of modern therapy evolved in the last century and a half, based on theory, and in very real terms have taken the spiritual aspect out of the teachings of early pioneers like Jung and Freud. As such, people languish for years and even decades excavating painful memories and never learning tools to cope with life. and when it comes to treating addiction in young people, individual therapy, usually conducted by a therapist who knows very little about addiction, and is seen as just another authority, it is not only useless much of the time, but dangerous. Thanks for encouraging me to expand on my first post, it was lacking in clarity."
Unfortunately, only a portion of Psychologists have a thorough, and I mean thorough, understanding of psychopharmacology, which is what you are dealing with when your talking about addiction. It's useful in checking the credentials of psychologists to see how much of a basis they have in the hard science of the brain which is to be found more in the B.Sc stream than the B.Ed or B.A stream at the undergraduate level.
This "anonymous" writer, of course, can say anything he wants without anybody being able to check out its veracity. But in any event he betrays considerable ignorance when he assumes that we are talking about people in AARC having been diagnosed as "addicts".
Perhaps he should read PIHKAL by Alexander Shulgin and the many excellent tomes on the use of entheogens if he wants to talk about the spiritual. Again, with his other soft science background of sociology I doubt if he would take anything but a moralistic view on anything critics of AARC would post here. Moreover, AARC like all the AA & NA or 12 step programs are most unreliable in the statistics they quote, because they are very selective. Oh, sure, their "successful" graduates can say, "well it worked for me" but really, you don't see the control group, the 90% who never went to AARC, survived and "succeeded" in life.
Dr Kalant, probably one of the world's leading experts on drugs who is often trotted out by the Crown in drug prosecutions freely admits that the types of programs that make these claims of success are very skewed and selective. "self-slective" in fact, and not subject to peer review. So... our anonymous AARC supporter friend can't produce any peer reviewed research anywhere that supports AARC's fantastic claims, and that really causes me to doubt the credentials of his relatives that he keeps bringing up, but never disclosing in private messages though repeatedly promising to do so. This guy and his arguments are highly suspect, as I'm sure you already realised, Rachael.
[ This Message was edited by: Hamiltonf on 2005-03-02 16:16 ]
