EDITORIAL: If It's Tuesday with Depressive Symptoms It Must Be Cognitive-Behavior Therapy

• Published in: Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.) Ill.), 1999, Vol.36 (4), p.317-319
• Main Author: Silverman, Wade H.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Evidence Based Practice; Human; Managed Care; Psychotherapists; Psychotherapy; Trends
• ISSN: 0033-3204; 1939-1536
• DOI: 10.1037/h0092419

The current trend in psychotherapy is toward an overly prescriptive orientation. Notwithstanding the pressures of managed care and the "politically correct" devotion to empirically validated methods, therapists must still find creative solutions to problems in living that are compatible with the unique expressions of their client's personal style. The "paint-by-numbers" approach to psychotherapy, as typified in the empirically validated movement (EVM), is hopelessly simplistic as well as scientifically impoverished. It ignores the participants in psychotherapy as well as the dynamics established between patient and therapist. The EVM is concerned exclusively with a circumscribed set of responses called an intervention or treatment. Psychotherapy as both a science and an art requires a more complex investigation, studying unique client characteristics as well as universal phenomena occurring in all forms of interventions. With the invasion of managed-care organizations (MCOs) into psychotherapy and the resulting mandate for the exclusive use of short-term psychotherapy, psychotherapists have become verbal prescription providers to their patients in a manner similar to pop psychologists. Therapists working under MCO mandates are coerced to mostly give advice and offer short-term solutions that may overlay more serious concerns. The reduction of severe symptomatology and return to a previous state of homeostasis through a problem-solving format has a long history in the crisis-intervention literature. Not all problems are crises, however, nor do most disappear in the magically determined six sessions. Let us not confuse these interventions with the type of growth experience that is affected through depth psychotherapy. How unfortunate that these growth experiences may never again be reimbursed through third-party payments. This is a fact of life that we must come to terms with in our professional careers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)