How is distress understood in existential philosophies and can phenomenological therapeutic practices be “evidence-based”?

Abstract

The “evidence-based practice” movement frames counselling and psychotherapy as causal processes, something the therapist does to the client. The value of what it is that is done is measured by interpreting mental and emotional distress as an abnormal behaviour, by giving this “symptom” a numerical score, before and after interventions in a quantitative research approach. In existential therapies emotions are viewed instead as healthy responses to our being in the world; as transient communications in relational contexts, altered only through the client’s autonomous choice. Human distress will be encountered and explored by all practitioners regardless of their modality. This article is an attempt to reclaim that exploration, as a phenomenological enquiry founded in the radically different epistemological framework of existential theory. Less value might then be placed on systemized measurement and control, and more placed on human responses to emotionality. Those who are distressed might feel understood and validated.