Posted by alexandra_k on July 19, 2005, at 21:52:07
In reply to Re: good session about sessions » alexandra_k, posted by Dinah on July 19, 2005, at 21:18:47
Therapists were making claims about how they could help people. Charging them lots of money and they said they helped people. It was hard to tell whether they were trying to make a quick buck or whether there was some truth to their helping people. It was hard to tell whether the therapists were masters at getting their clients dependent on them, or whether there really was some benefit to the process.
There was a call for therapist accountability. If you think therapy helps then PROVE IT.
I think the idea of being 'more like physics' is that physics was seen as the most scientific of the sciences, if that makes any sense. It is thought to be science at its best. You run experiments in tightly controlled conditions to learn about what things cause other things to happen.
With respect to therapy if therapy is about improving peoples lives then you need to be able to measure improvement. You need to be able to say how much someone has improved and whether one person has improved more than another.
You need to be able to scientifically test the claim that therapy is helpful.
You need to be able to deliver one KIND or type of intervention. Take lots of people with dx whatever. Give some treatment x give others treatment y let the next group get by by themselves. It is assumed that the people with the dx are the same in relevant respects. It is assumed that every therapist delivering treatment x is delivering the SAME KIND of treatment. So they have to do it by the book.
Then the trouble comes that there are certain kinds of therapy which have been shown to be relatively effective for some people with dx y when that type of therapy is practiced by the book. There is no evidence to show that some other idiosyncratic type of therapy helps. There is no evidence to show that a modified version of that type of therapy helps.
If therapists have an obligation to do their best to deliver on their promise to help people improve their lives then maybe they have an obligation to go with what has been shown to be effective. They may have an obligation to go by the book.
This is the line of community mental health.
CBT was found to out-perform other varieties of therapy with respect to the problems that the majority of clients present to community mental health with.
That is to say by the book CBT where therapists to this, followed by the next thing, followed by the next thing.So I go along to community mental health. They take a list of my problematic symptoms. Then they proceed by doing this, followed by the next thing, followed by the next thing.
They considered it unethical to deviate from that.
And there it was.And that...
IMO that...
Is an example of the worst kind of pseudoscience.
Something that has an understanding of science just enough to cause some serious damage.
Like one of my friends knew enough about computers to cause some serious damage - to install a faulty hard drive.Science is kind of about getting to kinds of types of phenomena. Things are the same in relevant respects. Science thus abstracts away from individual differences. Individual differences aren't so important. Individual differences are irrelevant, a side issue, an annoyance that we disregard by abstracting out what is the same. The relevant similarities.
That is why psychology can seem so impersonal sometimes. Impersonal. AKA (relatively) objective. Abstract away from individual differences in order to focus on similarities. Then you have predictions as to what will likely happen in other situations where things are relevantly similar.
If you focus too much on individual differences then you don't gain predictive leverage. And it is predictive power that is fairly much the best mark of a good scientific theory.
Some people do focus on individual differences. They like case studies. But how much you can generalise from one case study to other people... Well... I was reading something on personality psychology the other day about the conflict between theorists who focus on relevant similarities vs theorists who are focused on individual differences. It was an interesting read. I don't know all that much about it.
IMO psychology isn't a unified discipline. It needs to be subdivided. I think it probably will be in the future. There are too many different paradigms in operation at the mo. And its not just a matter of translating the findings on one paradigm into the findings of another. Quite often the findings contradict the findings of another paradigm. It is hard to find rules of translation.
> But I sort of hope not. I like to have the illusion that individuals are individuals. A lot more idiosyncratic than the subjects of some of the other sciences. :)Mmm. A matter of degree... But, as Quine was so fond of saying 'a big enough difference in degree can lead to a difference in kind'.
Interchangability vs individual uniqueness / irreplacability.
That seems to be a theme that a lot of people worry about.
me too.
i worry.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:530009
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20050716/msgs/530372.html