Abstract: How can consumers of psychotherapies, including practitioners, students, and clients, best appraise the merits of therapies, especially those that are largely or entirely untested? We propose that clinicians, patients, and other consumers should be especially skeptical of interventions that have been substantially overhyped and overpromoted. To that end, we offer a provisional “Psychotherapy Hype Checklist,” which consists of 19 warning signs suggesting that an intervention’s efficacy and effectiveness have been substantially exaggerated. We hope that this checklist will foster a sense of healthy self-doubt in practitioners and assist them to become more discerning consumers of the bewildering psychotherapy marketplace. This checklist should also be useful in identifying the overhyping of well-established treatments.
The list as PDF file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RXZ75sEnpTpqExb_KP0buaL6V2yZagvE/view
---
Psychotherapy “Hype ” Checklist
(1) Substantial exaggeration of claims of treatment effectiveness
(2) Conveying of powerful and unfounded expectancy effects
(3) Excessive appeal to authorities or “gurus"
(4) Heavy reliance on endorsements from presumed experts
(5) Use of a slick sales pitch and the use of extensive promotional efforts, including sale of paraphernalia
(6) Establishment of accreditation and credentialing procedures
(7) Tendency of treatment followers to insulate themselves from criticism
(8) Extensive use of “psychobabble”
(9) Extensive use of “neurobabble”
(10) Tendency of advocates to be defensive and dismissive of critics; selective reporting of contradictory findings, such as the results of dismantling studies
(11) Extensive reliance on anecdotal evidence
(12) Claims that treatment “fits all"
(13) Claims that treatment is “evidence-based" on the basis of informal clinical observations
(14) Inadequate empirical support: Limited reports or omission of treatment outcome information, such as patient selection criteria, drop-out rates, and follow-up data
(15) No proposed scientific basis for change mechanisms; proposed theoretical treatment mechanism lacks “connectivity" with extant science
(16) Repeated use of implausible ad hoc maneuvers to explain away negative findings
(17) Comparison of treatment with weak and “intent to fail" treatment groups, or with only partial
(incomplete) treatment conditions
(18) Failure to consider or acknowledge potential allegiance and decline effects
(19) Failure to consider differential credibility checks across treatment groups; failure to consider the role of non-specific factors, such as the therapeutic alliance
No comments:
Post a Comment