History rhymes — the conclusion that approximately all therapeutic modalities have about the same efficacy is at least as old as the Luborsky paper, Everybody Wins & All Must Have Prizes. The Method of Levels people think this is because the "active ingredient" of therapy is letting the person reorganize their own conflicting drives.
I find it fascinating how this dodo effect is interpreted that all is well and all modalities work. Whilst the comparisons used are pathetic and unrealistic. Wait list as a comparison, is one of those examples. Almost everything is better than a wait list, as waiting is depressing and boring. So if you compare anything with any social element to it to a wait list, I think they will all seem effective to some degree to that. The same goes for business as usual (copied from medical science I presume), whatever that may mean in most cases in clinical mental health practices. I think even homeopathy(placebo water) would be effective compared to these comparisons.
The same goes with many of the somewhat pathetic criteria of what is considered a met al disorder when it is surveyed among people, ones or twice I your live being depressed? Or having two or more symptoms of a certain mental "disorder", that seems a very low bar and does not seem surprising that you get high numbers with those criteria. Another thing with those criteria and those measures is how valid are they? I think that the test-retest reliability ovr the year with multiple measures in a year would be very poor, as the emotional state of people will shift significantly over a few months let alone over a year or more, how well can these tests seperate the natural variation of people from actual mental disorders? In these cases I think that faulty statistics should be the least of the worries in this science.
John Horgan (who is one of my favorite science writers) has written about the "Dodo Effect", the hypothesis that all psychotherapies are equal. This principle can also be extended to antidepressants, which are all about equally effective -- and just as effective (or ineffective) as placebos. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/cybertherapy-placebos-and-the-dodo-effect-why-psychotherapies-never-get-better/
History rhymes — the conclusion that approximately all therapeutic modalities have about the same efficacy is at least as old as the Luborsky paper, Everybody Wins & All Must Have Prizes. The Method of Levels people think this is because the "active ingredient" of therapy is letting the person reorganize their own conflicting drives.
I find it fascinating how this dodo effect is interpreted that all is well and all modalities work. Whilst the comparisons used are pathetic and unrealistic. Wait list as a comparison, is one of those examples. Almost everything is better than a wait list, as waiting is depressing and boring. So if you compare anything with any social element to it to a wait list, I think they will all seem effective to some degree to that. The same goes for business as usual (copied from medical science I presume), whatever that may mean in most cases in clinical mental health practices. I think even homeopathy(placebo water) would be effective compared to these comparisons.
The same goes with many of the somewhat pathetic criteria of what is considered a met al disorder when it is surveyed among people, ones or twice I your live being depressed? Or having two or more symptoms of a certain mental "disorder", that seems a very low bar and does not seem surprising that you get high numbers with those criteria. Another thing with those criteria and those measures is how valid are they? I think that the test-retest reliability ovr the year with multiple measures in a year would be very poor, as the emotional state of people will shift significantly over a few months let alone over a year or more, how well can these tests seperate the natural variation of people from actual mental disorders? In these cases I think that faulty statistics should be the least of the worries in this science.