[0xcde4c3db]

I'm not saying that there's anything more effective (for the conditions for which CBT is commonly studied and recommended; much like any other "school" one might name, a handful of true believers are out there suggesting that it would cure conditions such as obesity and ADHD if only we could raise sufficient awareness and belief), I'm saying that:

1) The margin of CBT's superiority in robust studies (AFAICT, most published psychotherapy studies are of sufficiently poor quality that if you cited a similar one for a medical intervention, you'd be accused of being an industry shill) is likely sufficiently small as to be of little practical importance [1], and there are credible reasons to suspect that even that small apparent superiority might be an illusion caused by biases among both individual researchers and institutions [2].

2) Even if we did have robust evidence that CBT works substantially better than other modalities as a treatment, that wouldn't represent a validation of its underlying theoretical model per se; it would just suggest that any model telling us to take blatantly opposite material actions is unlikely to be valid. Consider the scenario of an isolated, highly religious society encountering leprosy. Probably the most effective intervention would be for a religious leader to tell the people that it's a punishment from the gods and sufferers must be shunned. That would work, but it would work because leprosy is caused by a pathogen spread through close contact, and the intervention provides a strong incentive to avoid close contact, not because that society's gods actually exist and care who people hang out with. That's arguably an extreme example, and my point is not to suggest that belief in CBT is akin to religion (indeed, one could reasonably argue that CBT is the flavor of psychotherapy least guilty of stumbling into a religious mode of thought), only that just-so stories are all too easy to spin.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36640411/

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.0015...

[antonkar]

Good, I especially like your first cited meta analysis: “CBT appears to be as effective as pharmacotherapies at the short term, but more effective at the longer term” (I have nothing against the meds). I view it this way: modern CBT is actually vacuuming all the working approaches. CBT is something that you can use anywhere - it’s mostly a tool to notice and rewrite your unhelpful thoughts. The goal of the best approach is to eventually have no crutches - no need to have a permanent psychologist if you become one for yourself. Group therapies or approaches that are hard to use individually cannot give you that. I found CBT to be very easy to learn from their main book. Some people rave about meditation - I think they’ll eventually learn the basics of thought-rewriting from CBT and will rave about it even more)