The CBT announcement – who is going to tell them they’ve been had?
So far there has been silence form community/critical/really social
psychologists about the governments announcement of £170m by 2010 for CBT.
I propose a press release from the CPUK network making something like the
following key points:
CBT is overrated, its supposed effectiveness being based on the flawed RCT
strategy that under-researches other less treatments less capable of
reduction to a manual, uses short term timeframes, ignores those who don’t
improve, uses a restricted sample, excluding complex ‘cases’. When a
broader methodology is used, (e.g. as in Seligman’s Consumer Reports study
of treatments in practice see
http://horan.asu.edu/cpy702readings/seligman/seligman.html ) the evidence
for specific treament modalities disappears – the key factors seem to be
treatment duration and competence of the therapist. This is probably not
to say CBT has no place, but the claims for it are inflated.
We all know that CBT is ineffective and impossible to apply in many of the
situations that trouble Layard – multiple deprivation and associated
problems of everyday life (see the work of the W Midlands critical
psychology group on this).
An approach that individualises social problems and treats the casualties
does nothing to deal with the underlying causes in our profoundly unwell
social system.
The problem is I’m not particularly expert in this area so would need
others to contribute, work up the statement.
We could also link it to some of the work in the Birmingham /York statements.
Quite a good article in Saturday’s Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2190258,00.html
See also
http://www.dcu.ie/health4life/conferences/2007/resources/Health4Life2007_Keynote_Paul_Verhaeghe.pdf
for the talk referenced in the Guardian article.
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