Let’s take a quick look at yet another Dutch study of CBT for adolescents,
a 2004 trial published in the BMJ. This one offers a superb example of over-interpretation. The small trial, with 71 participants, had two arms. One group received ten sessions of CBT over five months. The other received…a place on a waiting list for treatment. That’s right–they got nothing. Guess what? Those who got something did better on subjective measures at five months than those who got nothing. The investigators’ definitive conclusion: CBT is an effective treatment for sick teens.
I mean, WTF? It’s not hard to figure out that, you know, offering people some treatment is more likely to produce positive responses to subjective questions than offering them a place on a waiting list. That banal insight must be right in the first chapter of
Psychological Research for Dummies. Aren’t these investigators presenting themselves as authorities on human behavior? Have they heard of something called the placebo effect?
Here’s what this BMJ study proved: Ten sessions of something lead to more reports of short-term benefits than no sessions of anything. But ten sessions of what? Maybe ten sessions of poker-playing or ten sessions of watching
Seinfeld reruns while holding hands with the therapist and singing “The Girl from Ipanema” in falsetto would have produced the same results. Who knows? To flatly declare that their findings prove that CBT is an effective treatment—without caveats or an iota of caution—is a huge and unacceptable interpretive leap. The paper should never have been published in this form. It’s ridiculous to take this study as some kind of solid “evidence” for CBT.