A brief history of cognitive behavioural therapy [part 1]

Sunday, February 23, 2014 SPORK! 0 Comments

sometimes explode
Feb 18 2014 08:24

Part One: Psychoanalysis & war

There are no panaceas in mental health. There is not a single mental health professional who will disagree with that statement. For some this is because there are and can be no magic bullets, for others it is because those magic bullets have yet to be found. While people like Joana Moncrieff [1] do great work on showing how psychiatric drugs don’t treat mental illness, and others like David Healey [2] and Robert Whitaker [3] continue to reveal how long-term psychopharmacological therapies do significant harm, still more have shifted their hopes to other territories. Among these territories is the resurgence in the field of talk therapies. Service-users themselves regularly call for better access to these therapies, rightly looking to them as less restrictive forms of treatment. But the thirst for a panacea merely displaces itself from drugs to talk and does so in such a way that it seems to answer the call from service-users. The consumer has spoken: long live CBT!

Cognitive behavioural therapy has become the dominant form of psychotherapy in our society, displacing psychoanalysis as the way of understanding the psychopathology of everyday life. Today, CBT is recommended for almost every psychologically codified ill, from mild depression to schizophrenia, and it has fast become a linchpin in the UK’s early intervention strategy (alongside neuroleptics) in managing first episodes of psychosis in young people. Just as psychoanalysis was once regarded as a self-sustaining industry, so CBT has now become a thorough psych-factory churning out thousands of qualified practitioners. While psychoanalysis could only be performed by psychoanalysts, a variety of subject-groups are trained in CBT including GPs, nurses, psychiatrists and social workers. Unlike most other forms of psychotherapy, everybody in the UK can get at least 6 sessions of CBT entirely free on the NHS. All of this sounds welcome, and up to a point it is; but just like its predecessors in psychotherapy and the drugs it complements and increasingly replaces, CBT is far from an entirely neutral tool being wielded in the patient-consumer’s best interest. To understand what CBT is we first have to look to those earlier forms of therapy that form part of its ontogenesis.

Read the full article at Libcom

(http://libcom.org/blog/brief-history-cognitive-behavioural-therapy-part-1-18022014)