Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [372]
Attacking psychotherapy as nonscience has continued ever since, the attackers ignoring or belittling the many hundreds of controlled studies and meta-analyses of those studies validating aspects of the discipline that have been performed over the decades (we’ll hear about them later). Typical of such attacks is one of the latest, an op-ed piece in the New York Times in 2006 by Adam Phillips, a British child psychoanalyst:
Psychoanalysis is having yet another identity crisis. It… [is] trying to make therapy into more of a “hard science” by putting a new emphasis on measurable factors…It would clearly be naïve for psychotherapists to turn a blind eye to science, or to be “against” scientific methodology. But the attempt to present psychotherapy as a hard science is merely an attempt to make it a convincing competitor in the marketplace. It is a sign, in other words, of a misguided wish to make psychotherapy both respectable and servile to the very consumerism it is supposed to help people deal with.13
Thomas Szasz, a perennial gadfly to his fellow psychiatrists and other psychotherapists, made a different and radical attack on clinical psychology. Mental illness, he charged, is a “myth” fabricated by clinicians who, acting as lackeys of the establishment, diagnose forms of socially disapproved deviant or individualistic behavior as mental disorders.14
Still others have charged that psychotherapists falsely claim therapy to be useful against a wide variety of disorders although, these critics assert, it is helpful against only a limited number. In 1983 Bernie Zilbergeld, an Oakland psychologist and psychotherapist, said in his Shrinking of America that psychotherapy is effective for a few problems but that for most others it is of little or no value and is inferior to drugs or simply talking to a friend.15
Another favorite criticism in recent years has been that a number of conditions psychotherapists say they can treat are actually of physiological origin and are poorly remediable by psychotherapy but far better dealt with by medications.
Clinical (severe) depression, for one, has been shown to be of biological origin in many cases. Particularly in elderly people, it is often associated with an age-related imbalance in certain neurotransmitters. Research studies of recent years have shown, according to current information from SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), that antidepressant drugs “chemically restore the balance and relieve the depression… [and] are effective across the full range of severity of major depressive episodes in major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. [The named drugs are the tricyclic and hetero-cyclic antidepressants, MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors), and SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.)]… The mode of action of antidepressants is complex and only partly understood. Put simply, most antidepressants are designed to heighten the level of a target neurotransmitter at the neuronal synapse.”16
Tourette syndrome—uncontrollable tics, grunts, barks, often the compulsive repetition of foul language—was long attributed by psychotherapists to profound psychological disturbances and interpreted as having hostile and anal meanings, but psychotherapy consistently failed to help. What has helped is the administration of dopamine blocking agents, which suggests that the disorder is due to a dopaminergic excess of organic origin.17
Compulsive gambling and other forms of sensation seeking have been seen by psychotherapists as disorders for which psychotherapy is appropriate, but by 1989 studies