The Value of Psychotherapy: The Talking Cure in an Age of by Robert L. Woolfolk PhD

By Robert L. Woolfolk PhD

Psychotherapy as a self-discipline is particularly a lot in flux. From a pro student, clinician, and instructor, this enticing publication deals a considerate and present research of the place the sector is now and the place it can be headed. Robert L. Woolfolk illustrates how the starting to be medicalization of psychological health and wellbeing care--in specific, the try to healthy psychotherapy to the templates of evidence-based medicine--have challenged psychotherapists to reaffirm the worth in their paintings. The publication explores ways that definite varieties of efforts to endow "the conversing medication" with larger medical legitimacy will be problematical. Woolfolk makes a robust case for the advantages of psychotherapy not just as a know-how for treating issues, but additionally as a convention which may advertise useful knowledge and human flourishing.

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But we have no people of the stature of Carl Rogers or B. F. Skinner on the present scene. Will such people emerge? Possibly they will, but we have been waiting more than 40 years for them to show up. Now some could argue that we are in a period of what Thomas Kuhn (1970) called “normal science” and that a great paradigm shift is just around the corner. I doubt such claims. My own view is that much psychotherapy research is not science at all, normal or otherwise. It is an activity that is not theoretically grounded, given a proper definition of theory.

Psychotherapy could be compared with any intervention for which adequate quantitative data had been collected to allow the computation of means and standard deviations relative to a control group. When meta-analysis was first used to analyze psychotherapy research (Smith & Glass, 1977), some rather startling results emerged. All therapies seemed to be effective relative to controls, and there was no indication of the broad superiority of any particular approach. Behavior therapists, who possessed an almost religious conviction that their methods were superior, demurred.

Among other effects, the use of multiple drugs on a single patient can be justified, and diagnosis becomes a tool of bewilderment as often as it is a helpful guide to treatment. The sea change we have witnessed in the mental health professions over the past three decades began with biomedical psychiatry’s overthrow of psychoanalytic psychiatry. Prozac quickly followed, as did the age of user-friendly, putatively nonaddictive medicines. Dusted-off, recycled, slightly modified neurotransmitter theories of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and practically every mental malady began to be confidently asserted.

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