Re: Psychotherapy claims

[Paul Smith]

I just read those responses (today's NYTimes), and was not at all surprised to find a certain kind of strange reasoning that I think deserves attention in our research classes. Two of the letter writers offered versions of "The effectiveness of psychotherapy can't be measured, but we know that it works because...". The illogic of that statement is typically hidden with some flowery language about the mystical complexity of the human experience while "mere grubby evaluation" is denigrated with mechanical, technical sounding words. I think it signals some kind of odd understanding of the notion of measurement, an understanding that simultaneously tries to include and to exclude forms of measurement that don't involve machines and numbers. I am very tempted to try to get at this with an assessment in my research methods class this semester.

I was also a bit bothered to see that one of the letter writers (and apparently the editor who chose the letters to print) seemed to be overly impressed by some study that showed changes in brain structure in response to some therapy. I see no reason why structural changes revealed by brain scans would be considered better evidence for effectiveness of therapy than, say, simple behavioral observations (Didja get out of the house today? Great!), or self-reported measures of mood.

Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee

On 3/2/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

An op-ed piece was published recently in the New York Times, in which
a psychoanalyst declared that his profession was beyond mere grubby
evaluation of effectiveness. The colleague who drew this to my
attention also sent me a collection of responses to it, among them a
great one from our very own Scott Lilienfeld. I'm sure he won't mind
if I reproduce it here (please excuse me if the formatting gets
messed up in the re-posting; it looks ok at the moment).

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