Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Does Not Exist – Jay Watts

http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/03/cognitive-behavioural-therapy-not-exist/

Interesting, politically savvy post by Jay Watts on the Mad in America site. Just as relevant here….

‘By conflating a number of vastly divergent approaches with strikingly different ideas of what it means to be human and to suffer, and calling them CBT, its proponents can delegitimize critics by claiming that they do not know ‘modern CBT’. Yet this response negates the actual reality – that for all the seeming variation, the overwhelming majority of CBT still operates through Becksian principles of normalisation, fitting a governmental agenda of producing good, quiet, working subjects who contribute to the economy and shut up. The price of locating newer therapies with very different ideas and promising research findings under the CBT mantle, despite the lack of family resemblance, is thus that it props up normalising therapies which cohere with an individualistic, neoliberal agenda that equates worklessness with worthlessness.’

Thanks to Mad in America, and Brent Dean Robbins for his Facebook link to Jay’s article on the page for the Society for Humanistic Psychology, Division 32.

Palace Gate Counselling Service, Exeter