Thinking Methodology

Mental Health Recovery: Slow is not a virtue.

5 May 2026

I want to say something I’ve been biting back for a long time, and I’m going to stop biting it back now.

The idea that meaningful inner work has to take years is a lie.

Not a half-truth. Not “depends on the case.” Not “the field is complex and slow is sometimes appropriate.” A lie. A culturally entrenched, professionally perpetuated lie that we’ve all agreed to repeat, even though everyone in the room knows of cases that contradict it.

Recovery from trauma takes years.
Healing from CPTSD is a long road.
The work has to unfold organically, in its own time.
The body needs to integrate.
You can’t rush this.

You hear it everywhere. In therapy rooms. In supervision. In trauma-informed training. In every wellness book on every nightstand. So thoroughly absorbed that clients now repeat it back to their therapists, and therapists nod along.

Meanwhile, some of us are sitting here with clients clearing CPTSD in six months. With clients moving 200–300 points on the Hawkins Map of Consciousness in under a year, against an average lifetime shift of five points. With clients walking out of single sessions lighter than they walked in.

We are not all using the same toolkit. And the difference in outcomes is not marginal.

Let me say what I’m NOT saying

Before I go further – because this is the bit that gets misread, and I’ve no interest in being misread.

I am not saying push people through faster than they can handle.
I am not saying skip stabilisation.
I am not saying drag a fragile nervous system into the deep end on day one.
I am not saying pacing in trauma work is irrelevant. It is enormously relevant.

When I work with someone carrying serious trauma, I work round the edges first. I clear the smaller fears, the surface patterns, the ambient charge. By the time we get near the central thing, the person on the other side of the table has emotional strength they didn’t have when they walked in. Three months ago they couldn’t have looked at it. Now they can.

That is sequencing. That is sensible. That is responsible.

What I am saying is this: sequenced is not the same as slow. Responsible is not the same as multi-decade. Trauma-informed is not the same as glacial.

You can sequence intelligently and still be done in six to twelve months. You don’t need ten years.

The question we are not asking the client

Here is what informed consent looks like, properly applied.

You sit with a client carrying CPTSD. You say to them:

Option A is the standard route – open-ended therapy, weekly sessions, gradual unfolding, somewhere between three and ten years. Option B is a faster, more directive route using methods designed for accelerated clearing. Estimate: around six months. Different trade-offs in each. Which would you like?

If you ask that question, what do you think people choose?

I have never met a CPTSD sufferer who said can you please draw this out for another decade, I’d like to keep struggling. Not one. People want to be well. They want their life back. They want to sleep without flashbacks, parent without freezing, have sex without dissociating.

But they can’t choose Option B, because in most rooms they walk into, Option B is not on offer. The practitioner hasn’t been trained in it. Or has been trained to be sceptical of it. Or sincerely believes the slow route is the safe route and the faster route is reckless.

So clients aren’t given a choice. They are given Option A, framed as the only route, dressed up in the language of “honouring the process” and “letting things emerge in their own time.”

That is not informed consent. That is informed consent’s evil twin.

I’ll come back to the bigger informed consent picture in mental health – the chemical imbalance story, the withdrawal scandal, the diagnostic expansion – in a future piece. For today, the question for the practitioner sitting opposite a CPTSD client is simpler: are you offering Option B?

Their numbers, not mine

Here is the part of this that nobody in the profession wants to sit with – and they are the ones who published it.

A 2021 meta-analysis of 228 randomised trials of psychotherapy for unipolar depression found that 41% of patients responded – defined as a 50% or greater reduction in depressive symptoms – within two months of starting therapy. About one-third reached full remission. The comparable rates were 17% for usual care and 16% for a waitlist with no intervention at all.

Therapy roughly doubles the response rate compared with doing nothing. That is the real, peer-reviewed, gold-standard finding. And the field has decided this result is good enough to build itself on.

Sit with the absolute number. Forty-one percent respond. Fifty-nine percent do not. One in three remits. Two in three does not. These are the figures from the field’s own pooled trial data, in the most generous time window – two months – for the most studied condition.

A 2024 living meta-analysis of 441 trials across eight disorders confirmed the picture and said it plainly. Response rates of 0.32 to 0.42 across major conditions. Borderline personality disorder was the outlier – 0.24, and the difference from control was not statistically significant. The authors’ own words: “absolute response rates are modest”, most patients “do not fully recover”, and “more effective interventions are needed”.

That is from the field. Not from a critic. From the meta-analysis itself.

And there is one more piece. A 2019 meta-analytic review examined 15 evidence-supported therapies for adult depression across 385 comparisons. After adjusting for publication bias and restricting to low-risk-of-bias studies, only two of those fifteen therapies remained significantly better than control. Two. Out of fifteen.

If a commercial airline landed planes safely 41% of the time, it would not be flying. The regulator would have grounded the entire fleet inside a week. We would not be debating whether the crashes were the passengers’ fault, or whether each one needed to be honoured as part of an organic landing process.

In mental health, we call it the standard of care. And we have managed to make this acceptable by reframing the failures as the client wasn’t ready, healing isn’t linear, you can’t measure these things.

You can measure these things. The profession has measured them. The reason the conversation has not happened out loud is because the field would not like the implications.

The ethical position I’m not going to soften

If methods exist that are demonstrably faster and more effective, and you’re not offering them or referring to them, you are failing your client.

Even if you sincerely believe the slower route is somehow purer. Even if your training told you so. Even if your supervisor never mentioned the alternatives.

The job is not to honour your training. The job is to get the person in front of you well, as quickly as it can safely be done.

Anything else is comfort cosplay – comfort for the practitioner, pretending to be care for the client.

I’m allergic to the lie that change has to take forever. I am building tools that don’t require it. And I’m going to keep saying so, loudly, until the conversation shifts.

Because the people on waiting lists, the people on year four of therapy still functionally identical to year one, the people who have been told their healing takes time and have organised their entire identity around the slow road – they deserve to know there are other roads.

Give them the choice.

Sources

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