How to Spot Hype in the Field of Psychotherapy: A 19-Item Checklist, Meichenbaum & Lilienfeld, 2018

Exact same energy, spoon-bending edition:

Also too much same energy, when evidence doesn't even matter and everything is about belief and illusion:

 

Ah, the 70s. When I had a terrible, and very painful infection for which I was given a tranquilizer, and told my pain was real. The tranqs of course did nothing to help the pain or infection. Eventual biomedical treatment fixed the problem.

How many millions have gone through this same type of thing, decade after decade?
I'm too tired to count them.

 

I have heard and read multiple anecdotes, not just from people of school age, but from university students too, that expressing an opinion on a subject that was different from the teachers / lecturers would get marked down and/or failed. So I think your interpretation of the rules was most probably right in many cases.

I remember being a teenager in an English class and we were discussing the poem Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden by John Betjeman.

It has this verse :

Pam, I adore you, Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl,
Whizzing them over the net, full of the strength of five:
That old Malvernian brother, you zephyr and khaki shorts girl,
Although he's playing for Woking,
Can't stand up
To your wonderful backhand drive.

I had forgotten after the early discussion what "zephyr" meant so I looked it up in a dictionary at home. This is an internet definition :

zeph·yr
(zĕf′ər)
n.
1. The west wind.
2. A gentle breeze.
3. Any of various soft light fabrics, yarns, or garments, especially a lightweight, checked gingham fabric.
4. Something that is airy, insubstantial, or passing.

The teacher had told us about the wind/breeze meaning, but I discovered it could also be an item of clothing. When discussion continued during the next class I mentioned this meaning in class and got laughed at in a patronising way and told that No, it was a wind and Betjeman must have meant this because, it was implied, Betjeman was cleverer than me and so he wouldn't use a meaning that was so pedestrian. And my thought was that, Yes, he was cleverer than me which is why he could have used a word with more than one meaning, and meant all of them. I tried to explain that, but got more patronising responses so I just gave up.

And here we are, nearly 50 years later, and it still rankles.

 

Yes, clever, to put an iron ring around "hyped therapies". Segment these "unproven therapies" off from the rest of the..."unproven therapies".

 

I'm almost afraid to agree with any of you.

I never really understood why so many teachers were unhappy when students disagreed with them: year after year of teaching similar things made me yearn for some argument, some controversy.

 

There's a term for this, its called "demand characteristics", which is the inclination to affirm the researchers expectations, or to respond in a way that's socially desirable or acceptable. But there are a whole lot of other biases.

There is some really nice work by Norbert Schwarz on this. He viewed the questionnaire as a sort of offline social interaction, in which the respondent considers what the questioner's purpose is in asking you the question and uses the information provided in the range of response alternatives to decide on where their answer best fits.

Schwarz, N. (1999). Self-reports: How the questions shape the answers. American Psychologist, 54(2), 93–105. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.2.93

The nature of the response alternatives:

The length of the reference period:

Retrospective estimates of behaviour frequency and why they are influenced by the alternatives offered:

 

No, its considered a therapist-related factor, and its not seen as the responsibility of the client, but there is recognition that some therapists might "click" more with some people than others.

I see no problem with the idea that if you go to therapy, you'll have a much better experience if the therapist actually builds a relationship with you than if they don't. In fact, if anything helps people at all, its probably this. The opposite of the therapeutic alliance is by-the-book therapy - that would be the IAPT like approach of working thorough a workbook or checklist or set of procedures without bothering to give much consideration to the client as a fellow person.

We all implicitly endorse the view that the client-therapist alliance is important when we complain about by-the-book therapy approaches.

Of course, a good client-therapist alliance can falsely increase trust if the therapist is peddling woo. But the answer is not to become robots, its to stop peddling woo!

 

The first problem in psychotherapeutic trials is lack of objective diagnostic criteria. Potentially all large cohorts are tainted.

 

Yes, with one caveat ... I suspect many are taught this stuff so thoroughly, and supervised accordingly, that they are at best dimly aware of the biases.

 

This is an absolute requirement if psychiatric therapy, including psychotherapy, is to advance the science. Woo-science is not science as we expect it.

 

I read over forty years ago, a research paper that attempted to compare different types of psychotherapy. It was dated then and I can’t remember if it was any good as science, but I rather liked the conclusion, which I am now probably grossly misrepresenting, but basically it was that there were no good or bad therapies, just good and bad therapists.