We shouldn’t reduce health care to a mechanical set of “measurable” processes. Health care is about the human beings – human beings who are suffering, and human beings who are trying to relieve suffering. This paragraph at the end of an article which looks at the difference between psycho-analytic approaches and cognitive behavioural ones captures the idea beautifully
The respected therapist and writer Irvin Yalom, among others, argues that depression and associated forms of sadness stem from an inability to make good contact with others. Relationships are fundamental to happiness. And so a science that has the courage to include the doctor’s relationship with the patient within the treatment itself, and to work with it, is a science already modelling the solution it prescribes. What psychoanalysis loses in scientific stature, it gains in humanity.
Bob, what also suggests itself to me is why CBT proved so popular across a wide range of disciplines at a particular moment in time, which themselves had different aims, functioned in different contexts and so on. Why did this approach prove so popular to organisations?
One consequence is that the claims to science made by the approach need to be qualified not accepted- it seems to assume there are eternal answers for eternal questions. Another asks questions of why it was so readily took up by people across so many different contexts and used as a tool to interrogate, or perhaps create, a notion of people other than oneself.
I do not know enough about the procedure to make comment, all i can state is my observations about how i have seen it being used- one, as a technique to help people get back to work. Bracketing out what ‘work’ might mean to those who are being CBTeed to return to work, an essay in itself, what caught my eye, or heart, was the people who advocated it- they presented themselves to my consciousness as robots/ careerists/ jobsworths without any heart or feeling to those for whom they felt this technique was applicable.
this is very very true!
[…] pleasant surprise rather than reading about “brain eaters” I saw the blog post “The importance of the doctor patient relationship.” According the post, “Relationships are fundamental to happiness. And so a science […]