Debate over cognitive, traditional mental health therapy

Debate over cognitive, traditional mental health therapy
Psychologists who favor the more medical-minded cognitive behavioral model point to growing evidence of its efficacy. Proponents of psychoanalysis deride a one-size-fits-all approach.
By Eric Jaffe

January 11, 2010


If your doctor advised a treatment that involved leeches and bloodletting, you might take a second glance at that diploma on the wall. For the same reason, you should think twice about whom you see as a therapist, says a team of psychological researchers.

In a November report that's attracting controversy the way couches attract loose change, three professors charge that many mental health practitioners are using antiquated, unproved methods and that many clinical psychology training programs lack scientific rigor.

The accusation has reignited a long-standing "holy war" within the psychological profession.

On the one side sit the report's authors and other like-minded psychologists who say that too many clinicians favor personal experience over scientific evidence when deciding on a patient's treatment. They are particularly unsettled by the number of therapists -- especially from training programs that grant a higher degree known as doctor of psychology, or PsyD -- who ignore the most-studied type of treatment: cognitive behavioral therapy.

"Evidence-based therapies work a little faster, a little better, and for more problematic situations, more powerfully," says psychologist Steven D. Hollon of Vanderbilt University.

Research shows that many patients respond to the therapy within 12 to 16 sessions, far more quickly than in traditional psychoanalysis, making the treatment highly cost-effective.

England is convinced. In 2007, the British government -- a "decade ahead of us," Hollon says -- adopted a massive program to train 3,600 therapists in cognitive behavioral therapy with the hope of weaning 900,000 people off medication.


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Debate over cognitive, traditional mental health therapy