Beware of weird, wacky psychotherapy treatments

Imagine you are in the midst of a crippling depression that is sapping your will to live. Or perhaps your anxiety has gotten so bad that you are housebound — unable to go to work or even to the grocery store for fear of having a panic attack. You decide you need therapy, but you're unsure what could help you.

So you open the Yellow Pages, or you go on the Web. But there you find hundreds of possible answers — a dizzying array of "revolutionary new" options from which to choose, many of which claim to offer pain-free, trouble-free solutions to all of your problems.

Here are just a few of the therapies available to the consumer for depression or anxiety: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, Emotion Freedom Techniques, Be Set Free Fast, Neurolinguistic Programming, Dolphin-Assisted Therapy, Past Life Therapy, Recovered Memory Therapy and Alien Abduction Therapy.

Plenty to choose from. But here's the problem: You have no way of knowing which are legitimate and which are fraudulent. You have no standard by which to make comparisons.

Other than being grossly negligent, licensed psychotherapists are given almost complete discretion as to what they do for their clients. In the eyes of the public, psychotherapy has always been a quasi-magical process. You go into the therapist's office, he or she asks you to talk about the things that are on your mind and — hocus pocus — you start feeling better. The public's lack of knowledge can provide fertile ground for charlatans offering snake-oil cure-alls for psychological problems.

A few years ago, I came across a psychotherapy being heavily promoted on the Internet that promised to eliminate depression and anxiety in minutes. Developed by California psychologist Roger Callahan, it is called Thought Field Therapy and is a kind of psychological acupuncture in which therapists instruct patients to tap on parts of their bodies in a prescribed formula to correct disturbances in their "energy meridians."

Callahan claimed once on a BBC documentary that he had "cured" more people of phobias than all other clinicians in history put together. Then, from his California residence, he proceeded to treat a woman in England over the telephone for a phobia of mice. She hung up on him after tapping on herself as he prescribed and feeling no better. Afterward, Callahan suggested that the woman's T-shirt might have been energy "toxic" and that the treatment would have worked if she had simply removed her clothing.