A long thread about the psychotherapy (is it the right name?)

OKey, I can admit it, I have an anxiety problem. I am not formally trained in causal inference, but I am quite sure it is caused by isolation and absence of non-work related social contacts.

Should I go to therapy?

Tens of people were repeatedly telling me of course you should, for a year or more, but I still have not tried it even once. The reason is I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. I am not going to do something I do not understand at least in general.

First of all, how a therapist may help me with the isolation? Is (s)he going to drink beer with me in the evenings? Nah. We'll have hour sessions weekly. It is not gonna solve my problem at all.

A short remark: I do not discuss drugs here, only therapy.

Second, I am kinda a therapist myself - I can listen, have high empathy, not giving strong advices, instead, I just give a second look at the problem. Many of my friends told me that after talks with me they solved their psychological problems.

So is it really necessary for me?

Next. How do I understand that the therapy works? People say - if it does not help, then you need to change your therapist.

That's not how it works. You don't perform multiple tests, waiting for a small p-value. That's how you recognize a regression to the mean as an effect.

The Algorithm. How does a psychoterapist approaches a patient? "Oh this is an art, individualized metho..." - stahp. It. We all are more or less one-trick poneys. Each therapist must work in a scheme. Why can't it be at least somehow formalized?

One may think I have a way-too-sci-mind but it is not true, I am interesting in going beyond the natural sciences, but I don't really want to spend time finding who out of 100 psychotherapists around me is the best listener of my thoughts.

I dont have childhood traumas to discover, I know them all and I face them openly, I don't need to forgive some person from the past etc etc, it is simply a pandemic-caused anxiety (and being a natural introvert with some need of communication does not really help)

and a recommendation "go to therapy" sounds as "you need to eat more vegetables" for me - yeap, yeap, I know right, is gonna help a lot, or not, but there are tens of papers on pubmed that shows that it does.

Maybe it is not the end of this thread and I add something later.