3 ms·
This article discards the boring, plausible thesis in the first paragraph. The rest of the article is given over to speculation. CBT requires a lot more work f
by neilk 10y ago
This article discards the boring, plausible thesis in the first paragraph. The rest of the article is given over to speculation.
CBT requires a lot more work from both the patient and the therapist. I can easily believe that as it's become more popular, it's being applied less well or to populations where it's less appropriate.
Anecdotally, in my experience, there are enormous differences between therapists. I have had very ineffective treatment which did seem a lot like "just get happy, stop thinking bad thoughts". And I've had effective treatment where a perceptive person cut straight through to reveal my self-defeating patterns and gave me skills to do better. It's a constant battle but I'm glad I did it this way.
CBT isn't for everyone or every problem. But I would be surprised if the main insights were totally wrong.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI think the immense amount of constant work is the biggest challenge. It may be that the use case for CBT is a lot narrower than current practice is selling it as. For mild to moderate anxiety though, it's pretty amazing if you stick with it, especially since the alternatives are all basically chemical.
- tssva 10y agoI wish I could site the study, but I read it many years ago. It was one of the major studies being touted at the time for showing the effectiveness of CBT. They actually stopped the study at one point to retrain the therapists on CBT. After retraining them they started the study from scratch and through the term of the study constantly evaluated the therapists and provided additional guidance to ensure they were properly applying CBT. What I gathered from the study was that proper application of CBT in the wild was likely to be rare and therefore the effectiveness of CBT in the wild would be limited.