Salvaging psychotherapy research: a manifesto
June 10
Sub-heading: Fueling Change in Psychotherapy Research with Greater Scrutiny and Public Accountability
http://blogs.plos.org/mindthebrain/2014/06/10/salvaging-psychotherapy-research-manifesto/
James C. Coyne is an influential psychologist who isn't afraid to highlight problems in psychological research.
It starts:
John Ioannidis’s declarations that most positive findings are false and that most breakthrough discoveries are exaggerated or fail to replicate apply have as much to with psychotherapy as they do with biomedicine.
We should take a few tips from Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma and clean up the psychotherapy literature, paralleling what is being accomplished with pharmaceutical trials. Sure, much remains to be done to ensure the quality and transparency of drug studies and to get all of the data into public view. But the psychotherapy literature lags far behind and is far less reliable than the pharmaceutical literature.
As it now stands, the psychotherapy literature does not provide a dependable guide to policy makers, clinicians, and consumers attempting to assess the relative costs and benefits of choosing a particular therapy over others. If such stakeholders uncritically depend upon the psychotherapy literature to evaluate the evidence-supported status of treatments, they will be confused or misled.
He makes lots of criticisms of the field, but of course, knowing about such problems is useful for understanding and critiquing any type of research.