[svnt]

The study you linked is for specific narrow treatment techniques in intensive inpatient psychotherapy, as compared with more typical psychotherapy treatment in the community for people on the waitlist.

There are a handful of problems I can think of for using a waitlist in the community receiving traditional psychotherapy as a control for a group receiving intensive inpatient treatment.

But the article you linked does not support your point in the context of this discussion.

[philosopher1234]

It proves psychoanalysis is not discredited.

[svnt]

It doesn’t. It only proves there are still people trying to continue their careers in a field they have deeply invested in, in training, education, clientele, and professional network.

[philosopher1234]

Yes it does because it demonstrates its effectiveness. How can an effective discipline be scientifically discredited?

[svnt]

It does not demonstrate the effectiveness of psychiatric treatment by any reasonable standard.

The control group is corrupted, the control-treatment pairs for comparison were selected by the researchers, and the provided “psychiatric treatment” includes

> In addition to weekly individual sessions the inpatient program at both groups contained two 75 min group sessions each week. In addition, VITA had shorter group meetings each morning (15 minutes). Patients in both treatments participated in two physical exercise sessions per week, weekly psycho-educational lectures and art-therapy groups, and both groups finish each week with end of the week status groups. On average, patients in both treatments received seven sessions of therapeutic activity each week.

“Both treatments” here is not control and treatment but both intensive treatments.

You can get large effects in almost everything by completely changing a person’s experiential environment from their prior environment, which is what they did here. In addition to everything listed, their sleeping conditions, diet, daily routine, and social environment were probably dramatically changed, although the researchers didn’t record that so we can’t know.

It’s impossible to tell if the actual psychiatric interventions were effective. This fact, though, is particularly damning as to the efficacy of the actual treatments provided:

>The analysis also showed minimal differences between the two intensive inpatient treatments, suggesting that the differences in effect may not be due to the theoretical rationale within the inpatient treatment but rather the treatment context.

There were no significant differences between two very different treatment modalities. This essentially admits that “something else” and not the psychiatric treatments were responsible for the uptick. My guess is regular schedule, connecting with people (community formation) and mattering to someone, none of which do you get from psychiatric treatments.

[philosopher1234]

The very same Wikipedia article cited at the top of this thread includes links to several meta analyses demonstrating psychoanalysis’ effectiveness. The evidence is not conclusive, because it is apparently difficult to study psychoanalysis, but it falls on the side of it being effective.

Very far from discredited, as you seem to want to claim (with no evidence). Difficult to study != disproven

[svnt]

I’m not claiming it is discredited, but you seem to think that it must be either discredited or proven.

My position is that the extended difficulty over the past hundred years in supporting it scientifically means it is in essence not a science. It is too complex to measure using these means and so science in pursuit of “proving the efficiency of psychiatric treatments” where psychiatric treatments are anything more than medications is largely a waste of time and effort, and will remain so until or unless we develop better methods of addressing complexity in a rigorous way.

[bowsamic]

I wonder what this person thinks of SSRIs if they think what they’ve shown proves that psychoanalysis is discredited