Dr. Paul Conti

But when you really talk to those people, really good experienced therapists, it's all coming through the vehicle of the rapport, but they're practically shifting to what the person needs.

If you have that, you've got a winning combination.

Yeah, and I think that's why word of mouth is important, right?

If someone you trust tells you, hey, this is a good person, that says a lot, right?

It already makes the pre-test probability is quite high.

Yes, I think a lot of times it would be the therapist to say it looks more work, you know, more intensive work or can make a difference.

But I think the person also needs to, you know, take ownership, right, of their own therapy and say, if I don't feel helped enough, well, I have to think about that.

and talk to the therapist about that because maybe that therapist isn't a match.

People can get into a rhythm of therapy where it's really not helping them, but they either feel sort of nihilistic about it, like, oh, I'm no better and I'm going to therapy.

Do we really need to look at ourselves?

And this is where the insurance systems often are very difficult because it's hard sometimes for a person to say, oh, I need more therapy because that may not be possible.

So there are sort of negative factors in the world around us, but ultimately I think the answer to the question comes down to

observing ourselves and taking ownership of like what's going on in us and how we're feeling and feeling that commitment to self or to self-care to say, I need to go change this.

And I think that we tend to overutilize medicines in this country because we have a healthcare system that often is so based on throughput that we want to polish the hood when there's a problem in the engine, right?

So we overutilize medicines often as an endpoint, right?

Oh, we're going to make that person's depression better with an antidepressant.

Most of the time, for that person's depression to really get better and stay better, they need to unravel what's driving the depression.

So the first kind of branch point can be, what is the diagnosis?

What is the level of severity?

And I think that's very, very important.