Making things worse

Psychological Debriefing

The therapy was a single session treatment called "psychological debriefing", which involved working with disaster victims to encourage people to supposedly "process" the intense emotions by talking through them in stages. It was intended to prevent later mental health problems by helping people resolve difficult emotions early on. The only trouble was that it made things worse. Studies had shown that people given post-disaster psychological debriefing were subsequently more likely to suffer mental health problems than people who had had no treatment at all.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/12/natural-disasters-healing-psychology-worse