When I look back over my history of depression I sometimes consider whether having the years of counselling really improved things for me or actually made things worse.

Much of the counselling I received was from a very friendly and supportive counsellor who I believe practised a psychodynamic integrative approach. She was extremely good and at the end I really felt that I had progressed enormously and felt more able to handle life. We spent most of the time talking about my family and my childhood, investigating my feelings and trying to understand why I might be feeling that way. She never told me what to think, never blamed my parents or anyone for my problems and just guided me through my thoughts and feelings. Although I have thoughts about whether counselling was right for me I still have total respect for her.

So, if my counsellor was that good, why do I still have depression and why do I now question if it was the right thing to do? Whilst I don't really believe in the phrase "ignorance is bliss" (in other words: if you don't know something then it can't hurt you) I do feel that recalling bad memories, sometimes years after the event and then drawing your own conclusions without the benefit of knowing what the other people were thinking or having a complete picture of what was happening can cause a possibly small issue to become much larger. I am confident that some of the events I recall in my childhood memories are at the root of my problems but I also think that memories are usually a distortion of real events and typically only represent a single viewpoint (your own) of an event. There seem to me a risk that the pain and suffering relived through memories which originally would have been spread out over time are now present at in your thoughts at one time and coloured by experiences and thoughts that have taken place since the memory was put into place.

I'm not sure how well I am conveying my thoughts so perhaps it might be beneficial to try to relate them to something else? 

Are you a reliable witness?
The police frequently have to rely on the evidence provided by witnesses and this is not always reliable and can sometimes prove quite problematic. A Wikipedia article on Eyewitness Identification suggests that out of 200 people exonerated by DNA evidence that 75% of them were convicted on the basis of erroneous eyewitness identification evidence. I particularly like the quote from a US supreme court judge - there is "nothing more convincing [to a jury] than a live human being who takes the stand, points a finger at the defendant, and says 'That's the one!'". There doesn't seem to be any suggestion that these cases were intentionally mislead by the witnesses but is a reflection of the fact that there are a number of factors that influence the accuracy of our memories. However real our memories may seem I'm not convinced that we are always the most reliable of witnesses.

Is that what really happened?
Another police scenario that I think about is where a road traffic accident takes place and two separate and independent witnesses describe the same accident but contradict each other. In this situation neither witness is intentionally causing problems, it's just that they had different viewpoints of the accident and things can seem different depending on where you see things from. For me, our recollection of past events suffers from the same problem - we frequently only have our own viewpoint to see things from and whilst this may be an accurate reflection of how we see things it might not be seen the same in the eyes of someone else. 

Does counselling make depression worse?
Presumably, counselling is effective for many people and for a short time I considered it to be effective for myself. But now my memories are more fresh and vivid than before and I wonder how much they have been effected by time and my ability to see the full picture. At the moment I see more benefit from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which relies less on memories and instead focuses on how you feel now and looks to change behaviour to help you better cope with life.

Elephants have such great memories - I wonder if they have the same problem? ;-)