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adbge comments on Methods for treating depression - LessWrong
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While I agree that depressives should try CBT, I've begun to think some of the enthusiasm is misplaced, especially when contrasted with the scrutiny antidepressants receive. Yvain has written about this before:
In the vein of non-risky interventions, you might also want to add a section on meditation, expressing gratitude (not sure of the citation -- maybe here? -- but I recall the best possible selves intervention mentioned in the paper being ineffective among the depressed), and expressive writing generally.
In psychotherapy, this is known as the Dodo bird verdict.
Thanks for the link to Yvain's article. The meta-analyses that I found comparing the efficacy of CBT and usual therapy didn't show CBT to be superior, with the possible exception of long-term effects. The points that I raise in favor of CBT are the potential for low-cost and the absence of a need to find a therapist who's a good match.
For those who want to try CBT, I've made available Burn's book together with an Anki deck and a Google Form here.
I share Yvain's skepticism, though. Insofar as there are reasons for experimenting with CBT, they seem to mostly derive from the comparatively low health, time and money costs of trying it for a while, and the benefits of using the knowledge gained during that trial period to make a decision about whether to try it for longer.
From the example cards that are shown in Anki:
That paragraph is too long. It violates minimum information completely. As a result it's hard to judge whether you answer the card directly and the card doesn't work well as an Anki card.
Thank you for your feedback. This material is not that suitable for Ankification because the purpose is to commit the material to procedural rather than declarative memory. My goal was to give users an easy way to be periodically exposed to the relevant techniques, so that they would eventually change the relevant habits and mindset, rather than to memorize the material in the usual way. If you have some concrete suggestions on how to improve the deck, feel free to send them to me.
I personally don't know CBT very well to be able to tell you what the basics of CBT happen to be.
From my own experience in other frameworks I think that having declarative knowledge of what you want to do procedurally is helpful for being able to perform the procedural part. Understanding the basics of a topic well enough to break them down into atomic bits is hard but I don't think that topics like CBT are inherently structured in a way that they can't be reduced to atomic bits.
But if you lack the ability to know the basics of CBT well enough to state them at a atomic level you fortunately aren't out of luck. A straightforward way is to to write Anki cards that ask: "Is A or B the right way?" The learner has to only remember one bit of information to answer the question.
From the start of the book, you could form the card:
Question: Do your moods get created by your thought and attitudes or by external events?
Answer: thoughts and attitudes
I think it's worthwhile to study the basics of CBT. I downloaded the downloaded the ebook. Hopefully I will have a good answer about the basics of CBT at some point in the future.