Is marriage counseling ethical?

FallenPaladin said:

I was talking to a friend who is in school to be a counselor and she told me 95% of couples that go to marriage counseling end up getting divorced. That is worse than regular odds! Is marriage counseling ethical in light of the fact that it fails a vast majority of the time?

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You are forgetting that the group of couples going to marriage counseling is only a subgroup of the general population, and therefore that 95% is really only a subset of the other statistic. Of course there will be drastically more divorce in the subgroup, because you have eliminated everyone who has a happy marriage and are only looking at the troubled couples.

FallenPaladin said:

If 95% of people who went to the doctor died I suspect insurance would be more skeptical about paying them.

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What do you want to bet that the percentage of people who die when visiting a hospital is dramatically higher than the death rate in the general population?

Where did this person pull 95% from anyways?

Marriage counselling can only be successful if BOTH parties are interested in actually attending, facing and solving their problems.
I'd wager many couples attending counselling do not consist of two parties who are in that situation.

Healing a sick relationship is absolutely nothing like healing a sick person.

FallenPaladin said:

If a couple goes to counseling doesn't it strongly suggest at least one of them is not that interested in solving problems? When people want to solve problems they do it. That is how things get done. People get motivated and they do them. To have to go to a third party suggests one of the people or both are too lazy, disinterested or demotivated to take action.

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Those aren't the only options. They may be willing to solve problems but unsure of the steps needed to take.

FallenPaladin said:

I was talking to a friend who is in school to be a counselor and she told me 95% of couples that go to marriage counseling end up getting divorced. That is worse than regular odds! Is marriage counseling ethical in light of the fact that it fails a vast majority of the time?

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CPR fails most of the time, too. Is it unethical? I wouldn't say so.

A 95% failure rate (if that number is real) for marriage counselling is indeed unfortunate. But what would be the failure rate without the counselling? 99%? That would mean it's 4% better to get counselling. Not great, but better than nothing.

FallenPaladin said:

If 95% of people who went to the doctor died I suspect insurance would be more skeptical about paying them.

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If the mortality rate was 95% for all patients, then you might have a point. But to parallel the marriage counselling, you aren't talking about all patients, you're talking about patients who are already in pretty bad shape. A better comparison would be patients who show up in the ER with multiple gunshot wounds. Say 95% of those cases end with a dead patient. Is the doctor unethical for trying to save them even though success is unlikely?