Darian Leader, co-author of Why do People Get Ill? has written an article about the proposal to expand CBT on the NHS in today’s Guardian. He points out that CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) has a high failure rate when considered over time. It is effective in the short term but many patients have either relapsed or developed other symptoms over an 18 month period. This is a common problem with a lot of medical care based on the very time-limited RCTs conducted for most treatments – in other words, whilst treatments can often be shown to do what they claim to do in the short term, very few several year long studies are conducted and pretty much almost NO whole of life ones which follow a life-course approach (please draw my attention to the right places if you know I’m wrong about this). This short-term-ist approach to health care keeps us all spinning round on the same hamster wheel. Until we tackle the harder questions of how to improve health, resilience, and the causes of disease, we’re going to be stuck with all these protocols of health care created on the back of short term solutions.
The issue of the problems with this current obsession with RCTs which are narrow in scope and short in duration is explored by Professor Paul Verhaeghe, Professor psychodiagnostics at Ghent University in his paper presented at Health4Life. There’s a twelve page pdf of his paper available at that link (It’s worth reading)
Darian Leader concludes –
Real mental health policy has to recognise that there are no easy answers, that human beings are complex and contradictory, and, most important, that we can never know in advance what will be best for a patient.
A true exploration of psychological suffering is perfectly possible in the framework of the NHS – if policymakers can think beyond mental hygiene and start listening to the patient.
How true! There are no easy answers. Human beings are complex and contradictory. It’s time to start listening to the patient.
How true 🙂 And I thought CBT was a male torture lol
You know, Irving, you’re not the only person to have thought of that! I had no idea that this acronym applied to THAT! Well, you know what they say, every day is a school day! Thankyou for educating me – and for those who have dropped by here looking for that – I’m sorry! You won’t find it here!
And I thought it meant Computer Based Training, but now I know better.
We are a short attention span culture in a fast-paced world hurtling through the universe late for our next appointment. Surely we should slow down a bit and think what the devil are we up to?