> I often read here that CBT doesn't work for a number of people. I wonder why so many therapists gravitate to it, then? I remember pinksoil saying once that most of the students in her program wanted to do CBT. (Hope I got that right, pink!) Maybe it is just as simple as CBT is the therapy that insurance likes to reimburse for (because it is shorter and not deep work), and the therapists in training are very concerned with the bottom line.
CBT is about the easiest variety of therapy that there is to systematise in such a way that you can ensure that therapists are all doing the same thing (hence the easiest variety of therapy to learn how to practice IMHO). The advantage of that is that it is comparatively easy to test CBT. That means that the majority of psychotherapy studies test CBT so that means that the variety of therapy with the most empirical evidence (arguably) is CBT.
Some clinicians believe that it is unethical to practice anything other than by the book CBT as it is by the book CBT that has been empirically shown to be effective. Practicing anything else is unethical - it is experimenting on clients rather than giving them what is empirically validated as the best treatment.
(Part of this is turf grabbing... They want to promote what they do and part of that often involves attempting to undermine the opposition)
This is severely critiqued by therapists who are not of a CBT mindset. Therapists often point out that brief psychodynamic therapy is about as effective. Some people maintain that theoretical orientation isn't as important as the fit between the clinician and the client and the fit between the client and the theoretical orientation. I think there is a study or two that attempts to show that.
Insurance companies like CBT because it is brief (though some people stay in it for years) and because it has been empirically validated.
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