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Most schools of psychotherapy are equally effective, with the very notable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders. For most patients, the school of psychotherap

Most schools of psychotherapy are equally effective, with the very notable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders. For most patients, the school of psychotherapy only matters insofar as they buy into it - nearly all of the therapeutic benefit is totally independent of the particular methodology or even the training and experience of the therapist. Even therapeutic approaches specifically designed to be pure placebo turn out to be just as effective as everything else. If IFS or Freudian psychoanalysis are metaphors for how we think, then they just aren't useful metaphors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.2021.20210041 https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy....

JimmyBuckets 2y ago
This just isn't proven at all. And likely untrue. There is a reason the dodo bird effect is controversial. 1. Most therapies have not received the number of RCTs as CBT so it's not possible to make statements like the one you made. 2. There is wildly varying quality in therapists and the quality of the therapeutic relationship is widely accepted to be centrally important to treatment outcomes. It is thus much more likely that a good therapist with a shitty tool is better than a bad therapist with a good tool. Averaged out, this would explain the same effect.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  You've inverted the burden of proof. If someone dreams up a new kind of therapy, it's their job to prove that it actually works; they can't just assert that it works based on anecdote. I'm flattering those relatively-untested therapies by assuming that they're all equally effective. In any case, the effect size over pill placebo is extremely small (again, with the honourable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders).
  - Izkata 2y ago
    I can't tell from either of your comments whether you're saying CBT has proven itself or falls short of the others. Just that it's different.

JimmyBuckets 2y ago

This just isn't proven at all. And likely untrue. There is a reason the dodo bird effect is controversial. 1. Most therapies have not received the number of RCTs as CBT so it's not possible to make statements like the one you made. 2. There is wildly varying quality in therapists and the quality of the therapeutic relationship is widely accepted to be centrally important to treatment outcomes. It is thus much more likely that a good therapist with a shitty tool is better than a bad therapist with a good tool. Averaged out, this would explain the same effect.

jdietrich 2y ago
You've inverted the burden of proof. If someone dreams up a new kind of therapy, it's their job to prove that it actually works; they can't just assert that it works based on anecdote. I'm flattering those relatively-untested therapies by assuming that they're all equally effective. In any case, the effect size over pill placebo is extremely small (again, with the honourable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders).
- Izkata 2y ago
  I can't tell from either of your comments whether you're saying CBT has proven itself or falls short of the others. Just that it's different.