Investigation into cognitive behavioural therapy for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, 2020, Clark

[Invisible Woman]

I remember reading some of these qualitative studies (interviews with patients who had received CBT or GET). The participants were mostly patients who found the therapy helpful, but it was interesting that the things they found helpful were aspects that aren't central and sometimes even contrary to the fear-avoidance model.

This brings us back to the issue where treatment provided by some clinics, while being called CBT, is not the standard recommended (directive) form.

Lack of records of harms by clinics, combined with the better clinics quietly operating outside the guidelines to the benefits of their patients, give a false and overly positive picture of the effectiveness of the standard treatment offering.

 

[rvallee]

Participants across studies often perceived interventions as narrow (Dennison et al., 2010, p. 177, [CBT]) and “prescriptive” (Denmark, 2017, p. 34 [psychotherapies]). Therapists were often perceived as inflexible and unresponsive to participants’ concerns (Chew-Graham et al., 2011, Gladwell et al., 2014; Reme et al., 2012):

That will always sting, the blatant lie that the BPS model is a broader model, when it is the narrowest and thinnest possible slice on which a bunch of unrelated stuff is tacked on. They claim to consider the individual but never listen to the substance of what we say, in fact completely contradict it from a model that assumes, with zero evidence and merely implied, that we are delusional. It focuses exclusively on imaginary concerns, the researchers', while dismissing all the ones that actually matter.

It's not even rearranging chairs on the Titanic, it's doing a feng-shui analysis of the chairs of the Titanic's sister boat and boasting that it saved everyone from drowning (as long as you don't go and look for the bodies, of course).

How they get away with claiming something this blatantly false is so disappointing, especially with the self-proclaimed professional skeptics. Shows how good they are at persuasion, which appears to be the main skill involved in the BPS model, probably the only one, in fact.