The mistakes that lead therapists to infer psychotherapy was effective, when it wasn't

How well can psychotherapists and their clients judge from personal experience whether therapy has been effective? Not well at all, according to a paper by Scott Lilienfeld and his colleagues. The fear is that this can lead to the continued practice of ineffective, or even harmful, treatments.The authors point out that, like the rest of us, clinicians are subject to four main biases that skew their ability to infer the effectiveness of their psychotherapeutic treatments. This includes the mistaken belief that we see the world precisely as it is (naive realism), and our tendency to pursue evidence that backs our initial beliefs (the confirmation bias). The other two are illusory control and illusory correlations - thinking we have more control over events than we do, and assuming the factors we're focused on are causally responsible for observed changes.These features of human thought lead to several specific mistakes that psychotherapists and others commit when they make claims about the effectiveness of psychological therapies. Lilienfeld's team call these mistakes "causes of spurious therapeutic effectiveness" or CSTEs for short. The authors have created a taxonomy of 26 CSTEs arranged into three categories.The first category includes 15 mistakes that lead to the perception that a client has improved, when in fact he or she has not. These include palliative benefits (when the client feels better about their symptoms without actually showing any tangible improvemen...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs