"...my experience in the mental health system fed a growing disillusionment and skepticism [in regards to his opinion of psychotherapy]. I was working as a Mental Health Worker (MHW) on a locked ward at McLean Hospital outside Boston. One day a young woman named Mary slashed herself with a broken bottle. As we dressed her wounds and sought to calm her, she wailed inconsolably, 'Who will love me? Who will love me? Who could love me? Who could love me?' Drugs eventually quited her down. But her anguish and guilt made the psychologies I believed seem like thin gruel. Her distraught cry was realistic and heart-rending. Nothing I knew could really answer her, not her psychiatrist, medication, parents, job, boyfriend, or peers in the small group I led. We could manage Mary - sort of - but neither our theories nor techniques could really touch what ailed her. I now see that her cry of desolation could only find answer in the mercy and hope of Jesus, one thing that our theories, therapies, and institution made a point never to offer her. [My emphasis]"
[David Powlison in Speaking the Truth in Love pp. 155]
It's almost impossible to do his argument against psychotherapy justice in a blog post, but he has some very strong points!
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