The Naders of Psychology: Are Skeptics Heroes or Spoilers?

[BurtWorm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/09/health/psychology/09SKEP.html


Defying Psychiatric Wisdom, These Skeptics Say 'Prove It'
By ERICA GOODE

Published: March 9, 2004


They have been called assassins and parasites. They receive hate mail from the proponents of a variety of popular psychotherapies. The president-elect of the American Psychological Association has accused them of being overly devoted to the scientific method.

But the ire of their colleagues has not prevented a small, loosely organized band of academic psychologists from rooting out and publicly debunking mental health practices that they view as faddish, unproved or in some cases potentially harmful.

In journal articles and public presentations, the psychologists, from Emory, Harvard, the University of Texas and other institutions, have challenged the validity of widely used diagnostic tools like the Rorschach inkblot test. They have questioned the existence of repressed memories of child sexual abuse and of multiple personality disorder. They have attacked the wide use of labels like codependency and sexual addiction.

The challengers have also criticized a number of fashionable therapies, including "critical incident" psychological debriefing for trauma victims, eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or E.M.D.R., and other techniques.

"These guys are sort of the Ralph Naders of psychology," said Dr. David Barlow, director of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University....


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Personally, I think they're heroes, but they're making life awfully difficult for a lot of therapists and therapy patients by making it easier for insurance companies to restrict payments for psychotherapy.

Discuss...

[Az]

1. Heroes

But then I am not really being objective on the matter. So my vote doesn't count.

We get a bad rap because we are a destroyer of dreams and hope. What the people we strive to help fail to realize is that we seek to tear down false dreams and false hope. In particular we are insensed by those that know they are selling lies to people truly in need. We dismantle with a heavy heart the false perceptions of the merely deluded. But we will gladdly take on a charlatan in the name of skepticism.

[BurtWorm]

2. I'm sorry, what did you say? I was too busy watching dancing Spiderman

to pay attention.

[H2O Man]

3. my experiences:

I worked in a rural, upstate NY community mental health clinic from the 1980s until 2003. If a couple therapists went to a training on a new treatment for a diagnosis, lots and lots of clients would be labled with the "flavor of the month" diagnosis. Same with psychologists and psychiatrists. Remember, two out of three of these people graduated in the bottom 2/3rds of their class. Also, after working for years and years with people who served in Vietnam, or who were in serious car accidents, I never found one who had any problem remembering these incidents. In fact, most had trouble NOT thinking about them. There are many good, talented mental health professionals out there. There are more ordinary ones. And there are a lot of whack jobs. More, insurance companies and drug pharms are opting for less therapy and more drugs. Enough said.

[BurtWorm]

4. My feeling is that therapists have an interest in proving the efficacy

of their therapies. If they truly believe, as this article suggests, that their profession is more intuitive than scientific, then they have a lot of nerve expecting to be compensated by insurance companies for it. Should insurance companies reimburse people for movie tickets because they make people feel temporarily better? (In an ideal world, perhaps they would. Unfortunately, we live in this real one.)