sarah darwins
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Lengthy article in the Guardian on questions being raised about the effectiveness of CBT (and the ubiquitousness of it). The article’s focus is on CBT for depression, though there seems to be a wider war going on in psychology in which the psychoanalysts are fighting back.
There’s nothing specific to me/cfs in here, but there’s some good stuff about the rise and rise of CBT.
More generally, I feel the very fact that these arguments rage constantly in psychology raises questions about the discipline’s claims to an empirical foundation.
Also a quote from Trudie Chalder which will surprise no one.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/...evenge-of-freud-cognitive-behavioural-therapy
And a certain Trudie Chalder fights back ...
There’s nothing specific to me/cfs in here, but there’s some good stuff about the rise and rise of CBT.
More generally, I feel the very fact that these arguments rage constantly in psychology raises questions about the discipline’s claims to an empirical foundation.
Also a quote from Trudie Chalder which will surprise no one.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/...evenge-of-freud-cognitive-behavioural-therapy
Seek a therapy referral on the NHS today, and you’re much more likely to end up, not in anything resembling psychoanalysis, but in a short series of highly structured meetings with a CBT practitioner, or perhaps learning methods to interrupt your “catastrophising” thinking via a PowerPoint presentation, or online.
Examining scores of earlier experimental trials, two researchers from Norway concluded that its effect size – a technical measure of its usefulness – had fallen by half since 1977. (In the unlikely event that this trend were to persist, it could be entirely useless in a few decades.) Had CBT somehow benefited from a kind of placebo effect all along, effective only so long as people believed it was a miracle cure?
Around the same time, the Swedish press reported a finding from government auditors there: that a multimillion pound scheme to reorient mental healthcare towards CBT had proved completely ineffective in meeting its goals.
Such findings, it turns out, aren’t isolated – and in their midst, a newly emboldened band of psychoanalytic therapists are pressing the case that CBT’s pre-eminence has been largely built on sand. Indeed, they argue that teaching people to “think themselves to wellness” might sometimes make things worse.
There’s little doubt that CBT has helped millions, at least to some degree. This has been especially true in the UK since the economist Richard Layard, a vigorous CBT evangelist, became Tony Blair’s “happiness czar”. By 2012, more than a million people had received free therapy as a result of the initiative Layard helped push through, working with the Oxford psychologist David Clark. Even if CBT wasn’t particularly effective, you might argue, that kind of reach would count for a lot.
And a certain Trudie Chalder fights back ...
“People who say CBT is superficial have just missed the point,” said Trudie Chalder, professor of cognitive behavioural psychotherapy at the King’s College Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience in London, who argues that no single therapy is best for all maladies. “Yes, you’re targeting people’s beliefs, but you’re not just targeting easily accessible beliefs. It’s not just ‘Oh, that person looked at me peculiarly, so they must not like me’; it’s beliefs like ‘I’m an unlovable person’, which may derive from early experience. The past is very much taken into account.”