It seems to me that there are three main buckets the therapy world draws ‘evidence’ from but one is routinely left out - the first bucket includes the usual suspects, those making grandiose claims about this model/therapy/technique and its leaders - bucket two is the common factors folks and three are the critics.
People like William M Epstein is a critic and his three key books regarding therapy and its cultural position ought to be standard texts. Over the years he’s taken the best of the available therapy research and pulled it apart on methodological grounds and he shows none of it has any robust evidence supporting it and the harms it can and does cause are routinely minimised and often ignored. Try:
The Illusion of Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy as Religion: the Civil Divine in America
Psychotherapy and the Social Clinic In the United States, Soothing Fictions.
Or try David Smails books - David was a clinical Psychologist who worked for years as a therapist in the NHS in the 1970/80’s and he wrote several excellent books and some can be found here:
Or see these sorts of large scale umbrella reviews, by notable figures - however, its worth considering that all of these sorts of reviews utilise studies that are themselves based on highly dubious psychiatric labels. Labels that despite decades of searching and billions spent nothing has been found to support them - its a subjective house of cards, yet guidelines and all sorts of claims are made from this.
There are plenty of others, but for some weird reason its rare to find therapists that have read these and other critical writers, while themselves are writing publicly, confidently and even mildly critically about therapy.
Or Paul Maloney’s book The Therapy Industry and his colleagues work over here
It seems to me that there are three main buckets the therapy world draws ‘evidence’ from but one is routinely left out - the first bucket includes the usual suspects, those making grandiose claims about this model/therapy/technique and its leaders - bucket two is the common factors folks and three are the critics.
People like William M Epstein is a critic and his three key books regarding therapy and its cultural position ought to be standard texts. Over the years he’s taken the best of the available therapy research and pulled it apart on methodological grounds and he shows none of it has any robust evidence supporting it and the harms it can and does cause are routinely minimised and often ignored. Try:
The Illusion of Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy as Religion: the Civil Divine in America
Psychotherapy and the Social Clinic In the United States, Soothing Fictions.
Or try David Smails books - David was a clinical Psychologist who worked for years as a therapist in the NHS in the 1970/80’s and he wrote several excellent books and some can be found here:
https://www.karnacbooks.com/Author.asp?AID=9508
And here:
https://www.pccs-books.co.uk/products/power-interest-and-psychology-elements-of-a-social-materialist-understandin/
Or see these sorts of large scale umbrella reviews, by notable figures - however, its worth considering that all of these sorts of reviews utilise studies that are themselves based on highly dubious psychiatric labels. Labels that despite decades of searching and billions spent nothing has been found to support them - its a subjective house of cards, yet guidelines and all sorts of claims are made from this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8751557/
There are plenty of others, but for some weird reason its rare to find therapists that have read these and other critical writers, while themselves are writing publicly, confidently and even mildly critically about therapy.
Or Paul Maloney’s book The Therapy Industry and his colleagues work over here
https://midpsy.uk/
This is also useful by a former president elect of the BPS
https://www.psychreg.org/why-most-psychotherapies-equally-ineffective/
Very thoughtful and thorough analysis! Thanks for putting it together.
Wow! Thank you for this detailed and very well researched article. I truly enjoyed reading it:)