[jdietrich]

This. CBT works as well as any other talking therapy, but is orders of magnitude cheaper.

As the article states, most talking therapies show the same efficacy, whether they involve six one-hour sessions or a decade of intensive analysis. To me, this is a clear indicator that nobody has beaten placebo and we really need a different model.

If we practiced surgery the same way we practice psychiatry, we would be routinely trepanning people if they seemed 'resistant to conventional treatment'. There is no sense in psychiatry that it is unethical to administer unproven treatments without clear informed consent. This has to stop. Psychotherapy needs to develop a firm framework to prevent patients from being subjected to pseudoscience, or it should be abolished and reformed from scratch.

To be blunt, psychoanalysts are vampires, extracting huge fees from vulnerable clients with absolutely no evidence justifying the time and expense. I see them as no different to psychics or faith healers. They obfuscate the argument by debating the merits of various therapies with no basis in neuroscience and no strong evidence of efficacy. We look back at the history of psychiatry and are horrified at what we see. I fully expect that our descendants will be horrified at how we practice psychiatry.

[j_baker]

If we practiced surgery the same way we practice psychiatry, we would be routinely trepanning people if they seemed 'resistant to conventional treatment'.

And if we practiced psychiatry the same way we practiced surgery, we'd give people MRIs, CAT scans, and plenty of other expensive tests every time they said they felt a bit sad.