Podcast: Political deception and the CBT tsunami - Ivan Tyrrell with Farhad Dalal Feb 2020

"Today we are listening in on a fascinating conversation between Ivan Tyrrell - Co-founder of the Human Givens approach and director of Human Givens College - and Farhad Dalal, who is a UK-based psychotherapist and author. Farhad Dalal’s book - CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami: Managerialism, Politics, and the Corruptions of Science is a robust, detailed and psychologically sophisticated critique of the frightening place where modern managerialism, regulation and compliance have taken us."

https://www.hgi.org.uk/resources/podcasts/political-deception-and-cbt-tsunami


listening to this now, so far very good.
very critical of NICE, CBT research and IAPT.

More info
https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Farhad_Dalal

eta: references this paper (2006) which was main reason CBT was taken up by the Labour Govt of the time (primarily to save/make money) to treat unemployed people and get them back to work.
The depression report: a new deal for depression and anxiety disorders

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/818/

 

Haven't had time to listen to the podcast but I found this 2015 paper by Dalal very useful: Statistical Spin, Linguistic Obfuscation: The Art of Overselling the CBT Evidence Base
He explains the statistical shenannigans some researchers get up to in a language non-statisticians can understand.

https://www.researchgate.net/public..._The_Art_of_Overselling_the_CBT_Evidence_Base

 

There's a previous thread about Dalal. I found him a breath of fresh air.

https://www.s4me.info/threads/book-review-cbt-the-cognitive-behavioural-tsunami.8252/#post-145695.
Post #3 has a very good video, also entitled Statistical Spin, Linguistic Obfuscation

 

Old 'news' but worth reviving.
(note, the author of the piece is advertising his own form of therapy but the links to relevent stuff are there)

Swedish National Audit Office concludes: When all you have is CBT, mental health suffers
November 10, 2015 By scottdm
https://www.scottdmiller.com/swedis...en-all-you-have-is-cbt-mental-health-suffers/

 

I would say so and I think that it has worked for the same reason why CBT was "shown" to be "effective": it's persuasion. On the patients it's persuasion from a position of statutory authority and complete control over the process, what is written down about what happened is entirely at the therapist's discretion and we know that they are not only motivated but sometimes instructed to exaggerate and obfuscate, so it can be written down that patient has agreed to something they did not because their agreement is superfluous, as the whole point of CBT is to manufacture agreement, to persuade into responding one way to certain queries. If the patient has not been wholly persuaded yet it's OK all you need to accomplish is that by the end something has been "agreed".

This persuasion was used on the administrators to convince them they would save money, even though in the end IAPT-style boondoggles literally spend money in order to waste more in the end, and it is roughly the same skills that are used on patients to try and convince them that what they are experiencing in reality is not what is happening.

Deception is apt, and the method is persuasion, developed through decades of trying to control the flow of discussion with people who are not receptive, very convenient when it comes to extracting large budgets from officials and get them to agree to something even when they don't actually agree.

This is evident when you read the literature but especially so when you read the training material. The focus is almost exclusively over how to persuade people of impossible things. It's extremely effective from a position of absolute power but since it aims to only get the minimal agreement, the tiniest statistical bump above "no effect", it's also effective at convincing people that this act of being able to persuade some people using this enormous power imbalance and persuasion skills will mean enormous savings. As long as you never count anything, shut your eyes and wish very hard for it to be true.

There seems to be a strong skills overlap with good salespeople. Normally the process of science should weed this out as nothing but manipulation but the psychosomatic loophole is always wide open and accepting of any and all extraordinary claims that persuade people that it exists and so they rammed that straight through the heart of medicine, persuading officials to part ways with billions in real funding so they could lose much more the other way while giving the illusion that the process comes out as a cost-saving measure.

To persuade budget people, who are very protective of their ROI, that they can confidently spend money to lose money while actually believing it is saving money may be one of the most impressive feats of persuasion ever to succeed. On that CBT is very effective, you can't fault that. Effective at failing while giving the illusion of success, that is.