Note: Real names have been withheld. All names mentioned are pseudonyms.
The mental health system operates on a peculiar logic: endless treatment without expectation of cure. Nearly six in ten patients show insufficient improvement through psychotherapy. From there, things get sketchier. For veterans with PTSD, remission rates hover around 39% despite specialized treatment. Only one-third achieve full remission. More than 3.5 million Americans currently wait for mental health treatment, with average delays approaching seven weeks. 80% report worsening of their condition during this interval.
“Not so,” says Tracy Cassity, LCSW, and author of Extraordinary Mental Wellness, A Proven Pathway Out of Darkness and Despair, Trauma Conversion Therapy Remission Outcomes, with data in hand that is difficult to refute. “Remission” and “full remission” never meant zero symptoms and no need for more care before TCT. Specialized care only means there wasn’t an active threat of suicide at discharge. 3.5 million people are waiting because, before TCT, endless therapy was expected, and no one remitted. Mental health budgets thrive on endless treatment, returning customers, demeaning diagnoses, and controlling the narrative.”
“750 remission outcomes across diverse diagnostic categories: bipolar disorder, PTSD, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive presentations, anorexia, depression, and the rest, outplay all so-called evidence-based worldwide,” he explains. “No one has matched TCT in 100 years.” It’s worth considering. In 2020, 86% of Cassity’s clients remitted within 6 sessions or fewer. By 2021, 21% achieved remission in a single session. “The stories speak for themselves. The metrics were identical to what every clinician used worldwide,” Cassity notes. “Outcome Questionnaire Analysis is a widely respected family of measures backed by more than 500 empirically valid control studies with before-and-after symptom tracking, self-reported by clients themselves.
Cassity’s book raises uncomfortable questions: Are clients difficult to treat, or are treatments ineffective? The United States Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) uses the best practices in diagnosing and treating, yet statistics show that VA patients with standard mental health diagnoses die by suicide at rates more than double those without such diagnoses. “In contrast, Patrick Poor, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who developed Trauma Conversion Therapy (TCT) over 32 years, built his practice on taking clients no one else was able to help, and healing them to remission; meaning done with symptoms, diagnoses, and mental healthcare. Why isn’t that the standard everywhere in the world?”
Healing PTSD & Marriages at the VA
Randy returned from Afghanistan carrying trauma that the VA diagnosed as permanent. His intake assessment registered 116 on a standardized distress scale—typically warranting hospitalization. He’d spent his days in group therapy, replaying and reinforcing trauma narratives as instructed, while medication dulled symptoms without resolving them. His wife, Sharla, and their marriage were soon under fire as though she was at war too. When they arrived at Cassity’s practice, they expected the familiar protocol: detailed trauma processing and symptom management.
Instead, Cassity saw them separately, and sessions focused on walking them through how to address what Cassity describes as their “God-given natural ability to self-heal.” “They only needed to know how. Not exploration of psychological wounds, nor medication, nor gradual exposure, nor analytical reprocessing, just a release of the pain,” he adds. “Three sessions reduced Randy’s distress score to 38 points. Subclinical starts at 64 points. By the fourth, symptoms had resolved entirely. Four years later, he’s asymptomatic and plans to train and bring TCT to the VA. Sharla’s healing took two more sessions. But only because she expected Randy would relapse, and then she would too, like what happened with other treatment programs. She didn’t, and years later still hasn’t.”
Outcomes That Challenge Convention: A Paradigm Problem
Randy may never be allowed his dream job with the VA. “Secular bias can’t reinvent faith or science but can corrupt both. Pain is a signal, not a physical pathology,” Cassity explains. The human spirit possesses an innate healing ability stronger than the body. Once the underlying injury is addressed—not analyzed indefinitely but actually resolved—symptoms dissolve. But secular care (no spiritual or religious basis allowed) is universal to best practices, and all secular outcomes are about the same regardless of the treatment used.
The Institutional Reckoning
Cassity and Poor’s data is history-making, but professional conundrums abound. TCT won’t or can’t be overseen within the scope of secular authority, even within widely respected institutions. Supervision or peer review under secular bias refutes the notion of scientific objectivity. No one else has a large body of remission outcomes. Having dismissed key spiritual and scientific considerations, every mental health leader is out of scope. Even religious mental health institutions are secularly trained and licensed. Mammoth budgets depend on high recidivism, waiting lists, and session counts.
Standardization itself produces unintended negative consequences, perpetuating a system dependent on permanence rather than resolution. Fundamentally, the field is optimized for institutional sustainability rather than therapeutic success. Administrators are motivated to reframe human experience as illness. Clients internalize narratives of permanent pathology, transferring responsibility for recovery to professionals who profit from poor outcomes.
The Question Before Us
Whether Cassity’s work proves comfortably secular, his outcomes outplay institutional chicanery and force a fundamental reckoning: If one practitioner achieves 86% remission in six sessions while the field baseline stands at 33% minimal stability with no end-of-session endpoint, what does this reveal about conventional practice? Either his outcomes are a new standard of care—indicating that standard practice operates far below human healing capacity—or the field must explain why it settles for inferior results while suicide rates climb.
For millions trapped in systems designed to perpetuate institutions and symptom management rather than healing, it is the difference between a life suspended in misery and one liberated from it.
