Potentially harmful therapies, also known as PHTs, are a serious issue in the field of psychology because they work to find new ways to improve certain illnesses but eventually worsen the symptoms of the patients in the process. The therapies that have "successful" outcomes make it easy to say that the positives outweigh the negatives and to ignore the possible downfalls or issues. Although these therapies are widely criticized for multiple reasons, they are just now being seen as a problem to psychologists conducting the different therapies. One problem with ignoring the weaknesses of a therapy is the American Psychological Association's ethics code, which states that clinicians are not allowed to put patients in any physical or emotional …show more content…
The researchers used, controlled and random quasi-experimental studies to show the effectiveness of the programs, which reported that there were minimal improvements in the number of adolescents that disobeyed the law. These studies showed that crime rates actually increased after being exposed to the Scared Straight Programs (Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, & Buehler, 2003). The main problems with this intervention are the resulted long-term outcomes or not taking into account the different types of people tested and the backgrounds they all have. At such a young age, putting a troubled teenager in a prison with people harassing them and telling their stories of how they regret what they did will have multiple immediate effects. The long-term effects are not as common, after a while the child will no longer remember the horrors of their day at the prison and return back to the same behaviors as before because of the situation that led them there in the first place. Another downfall to this intervention is that some children may not even be affected by being in a prison and they may even find it glamorous compared to their current