“I would never say that, over the long term, anyone is absolutely untreatable,” the sexual trauma counselor Dr. Yael Margolin-Rice told Broadly. “Certainly the symptoms can be absolutely insufferable, and the misery it causes can be unfathomable to anyone who has not experienced them.”
Nevertheless, “people absolutely do recover” over years of therapy, she says. Many of her patients once felt hopeless but were able to overcome their anguish, but it’s not something that can be achieved quickly. “I have to stress: This can take over 20 years of therapy.”
Although several outlets have reported that the Dutch patient was deemed “incurable,” according to Margolin-Rice, the idea of being “cured”—or not cured—of a long-term psychological disorder is fallacious. “The mind-body connection doesn’t work that way,” she says. “People heal. With good, skillful, patient, slow work, they heal,” she said. She explained that there is an important distinction between an “incurable” disorder and one that causes insufferable emotional pain to the patient.