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knb comments on Schools Proliferating Without Evidence - Less Wrong
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You are describing old clinical psychology. Its gotten so much better. Rorschach tests are now only a very marginal measure within psychoanalytic psychology. Psychoanalytic/pscyhodynamic psychologists are themselves outcasts from mainstream clinical psychology, which is increasingly centered around evidence-based practice. For example, behaviorists are using systematic desensitization in novel and effective ways (for treating things like panic disorder), and cognitive-behavioral therapy is quite effective in treating depression: significantly more so than antidepressants.
The important thing to remember is that patients often get the treatment they want. If you're a self-absorbed neurotic, and you want to spend an hour a week for years talking about yourself, you can find someone who will take your money. If you want effective treatment, you can find that too. Most patients don't want to get better, they want to feel like they are doing something, and especially they want to talk about themselves.
Perhaps unwittingly, this comment suggests wherein the value of such psychotherapy lies. There's a social taboo against talking about oneself in this fashion, and a place that is "safe" from this (and other) conversational taboos may well be worth paying for.
Well, Dawes wrote in the 80s and I remember being Rorschach'd in the 90s, but I can imagine that things have gotten better in the 00s. Still, I have to ask - have there been any experimental studies showing the improvement?
(I do remember hearing that there was positive experimental validation for cognitive-behavioral therapy doing systematically better than other forms of psychotherapy.)
Yes, cognitive-behavioral therapy has come out ahead of other methods in a number of randomized clinical trials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
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Carl, following that link to its source brought me here: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/index.jsp?action=download&o=33188, where several randomized trials are mentioned. But I see no meta-analysis, so I still worry about publication selection biases, etc. Anyone know of a meta-analysis of this lit?
Here's a review of meta-analyses on CBT:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735805001005
I know I'm not teaching Robin anything, but it should be noted that meta-analyses often fail to overcome publication selection biases.
Were you too young for this to have led to an awesome story?
I don't know where you live, but in Germany or Austria this is not the case. This is part of a more general problem in Europe, which is under the terrible reign of continental philosophy.