Gurometer: Gabor Maté
Added 2024-08-29 09:00:14 +0000 UTCWe process our decoding trauma with the aid of the Gurometer and see where Gabor fits in the Guru Pantheon. Also, some responses to feedback and a discussion at the end on questions of authenticity.
Comments
I think this article in today's Guardian is an example of how egregious Maté's "one-shtick pony" approach to socail phenomena, that everything boil's down to early-life trauma, can get - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/06/authoritarianism-roots-origin Trump? Hitler? Nazism? All to do with early-life trauma, according to Maté. First of all, a single-cause explanation that explains everything, by the same token explains nothing. It's not an analysis, it's a "bit" that you riff off for any particular subject. It's the universal explanation that's a combo of galaxy-brained and revolutionary theory. Second, more troublingly, a relatively serious paper is publishing an article in which Nazism is stripped of all ideological content, including racism and antisemitism. This is the egregious bit - if you start saying understanding antisemitism isn't part of understanding Nazism, then what the hell are you at?
Paul Bowman
2024-09-06 13:17:02 +0000 UTCNow it's time to thank you for your thoughtful reply! I'm chuffed that you found it helpful. Although I have to say I'm not quite as nice as you think - I actually asked my psychologist about this a while ago because I was so interested in it personally. I can understand why identifying flaws or points of disagreement with the counselling/psychotherapy profession would be anxiety-inducing. People don't want to wed themselves to professions they are fundamentally at odds with! Except maybe the Weinstein brothers et al... At the same time, many professions are broad churches that can accommodate different theoretical and practical approaches. You clearly do not want to enrol in a hunting and butchering course if you're a vegetarian who also loathes firearms and knives. But my own psychologist would tell you (again because I already asked!) that while some psychotherapists are all babble and no psyche, others place a high value on knowing the academic literature and providing evidence-based therapy. So perhaps you can find your particular pew :) And perhaps your own way of thinking about things will be a perspective that is helpful to your professional peers.
Artemis Green
2024-09-05 03:29:33 +0000 UTCWell, weighing in while awkardly sidestepping the DTG responses (only because I don't have time to read them right now!) to say that I agree with you. Recently, I found myself in a spirited discussion with an academic psychologist who was developing a CBT-based course to improve the mental health of people with a particular medical condition. I was surprised by the use of a CBT-only model aimed at challenging 'unhelpful thoughts' around symptoms because the research base tells us that this particular patient population* has an average 5-10 year time to diagnosis from first presenting to a doctor and typically will report receiving dimissive, invalidating and incorrect comments from several doctors prior to diagnosis in addition to a general lack of family and social support. I suggested that these features meant that perhaps it would be helpful to consider utilising some other therapeutic models like ACT in addition to CBT and to think about whether in this particular patient population, there might be value in building in some course modules aimed at encouraging patients to take their experiences seriously and perhaps work through some of the grief and anger around interpersonal relationships *before* we got into challenging 'unhelpful thoughts' like 'the doctors aren't listening to me' and 'nobdy understands what I'm going through'. Well. You would have thought we'd suggested fellating our mothers before a collective performance of Oedipus Rex in which the chorus was played by the ghost of Sigmund Freud. If only I actually was a devotee of the man with the cigar as I could have had a field day. As I am not I can only say that the researcher's reaction seemed to me to contain some unhelpful thoughts worth challenging, perhaps through an online CBT course or similar ;) Now, anyone could say that this is an anecdote like Mate's and I would be inclined to agree with them. I am just a laywoman kicking around the internet. However, personal experience has shifted me from my starting point, which was being an enthusiastic member of Team AMRCTAP (As Many high-quality RCTs As Possible). I tried CBT, but it was EMDR and yoga which is far more woo woo that actually made the biggest difference to my mental health - done with the same therapist, so the differences can't be attributed to the practitioner relationship. And you are reading a woman who literally said to her psychologist that EMDR 'sounds like hippie bullshit to me and I don't think it will work, but I'll try anything once'. For pain psychology, again, it was ditching the CBT-based model that was being pushed at me and basically deciding to self-employ the strategies I learned from trauma therapy that actually made my life easier and reduced my pain symptoms. And I will sound like Mate but... after hearing so many people say CBT was of limited use to them and seeing the therapies I was taught to mistrust help so many people around me, Team AMRCTAP doesn't seem so great anymore. Like you I'm not an epistemic anarchist, I've just spent a lot of time around people who are in horrific physical and emotional pain. And I've been one myself. Evidence-based desperation is a great way to describe where you get to after a while. I think there are some therapies like CBT that are easier to standardise / isolate variables and so lend themselves well to RCTs and the like. But I would also like to see more of an openness to case studies and qualitative research to at least ask the question of whether the problem might not be the effectiveness of a particuar therapy... but whether the methods used to study it quantitatively need further thought and refinement given the complexity of what is being studied. I'm a wordcel so I don't know what this would involve beyond general shape rotator wizardry. Maybe none of these comments are of interest to anyone working in the field but it was helpful to me personally to thresh out my thoughts here so appreciate the space to do it :) *Full disclosure: I'm in it, so I'm biased.
Artemis Green
2024-09-04 17:47:35 +0000 UTCHi Artemis, Thank you for your thoughtful reply. It's nice of you to have approached your psychologist/psychotherapist (?) with this question and for them to come back with a sensible, relatable reply. I feel much better about going into the course now, with some of my more obstinate parts calmed. Knowing I want to study and become proficient at a job while being anxious about the way it is taught has been spinning me out quite a bit. I've only said things at the internet a few times in my life, and this experience has been rewarding. Much appreciated. Charlie.
charlie
2024-09-03 19:55:07 +0000 UTCThanks, DTG. I appreciate your feedback. I would like to do those things. The course is quite long and involves an MA. I may well come out all mystical and wearing vaguely ethnic clothing in the end, but having a sense of how to approach it is helpful.
charlie
2024-09-03 19:44:59 +0000 UTCGood on you for the late-in-life career change, and for your interest in such a socially valuable profession. I am not a psychologist, but I think that part of the answer lies in the fact that people aren't just widgets. Maybe research indicates that therapy X is beneficial to 70% of people but if you have 1 person sitting in front of you - where does that get you? How do you know they're going to be in that 70% and not the other 30%? Is the research sufficiently developed to tell you whether a person's personality, culture, gender, age, life experience, attitude to therapy etc is going to affect whether they're in the 70% or that 30%? Does it help you predict what obstacles they're likely to encounter engaging with therapy X? And is there a model out there that will help you weigh up the probabilities of therapy X, Y or Z working for your client? I talked to my own psychologist about this... although phDs seem rather a starter qualification in DTG territory, she does have one and splits her time between public/private practice in the area she wrote on. She said that practicing psychology is far more subjective than studying for it - a lot of the time you're going off instinct and experience as to what approach is going to be most helpful for someone and what isn't. She also said that as time had passed, she had actually come to think some modalities weren't less effective, they were just less easily studied in a standardised way i.e. RCTs, and she felt more comfortable going with what she had seen work for people in practice. If there is a tl;dr here, I think it is: research can tell you a lot, but it cannot tell you exactly what to do with the particular complex human being who will be sitting in front of you. By all means be evidence-based, but also be willing to be intuitive and relational and maybe even get a little experimental to find what therapy works for a person :)
Artemis Green
2024-09-03 14:27:06 +0000 UTCNow THAT'S a great point.
Janice L Kirsch
2024-08-31 16:14:21 +0000 UTCExcellent points, Jan. Given his own views that Trump is a victim of trauma, which I don’t necessarily disagree with, one would think Trump would have died by now from some disease or another.
Linda Sears
2024-08-31 13:49:42 +0000 UTCI've been wondering about Gabor Mate and thank you for this interesting examination. In his book, When the Body Says No, he mentions Gilda Radner's ovarian cancer being due to her personality, especially her tendency to perfectionism, whereas she may well have had the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genetic predisposition to the disease. He also claims that Lou Gehrig's meticulous hard work caused his ALS. Modern epidemiology reveals that athletes AND all those who do physical labor seem to have higher rates of ALS, but the causative factor is likely exposure to toxins (e.g. athletes are chronically exposed to pesticides used on playing fields). Basically, he's pushing very poor theories of disease causation to fit his hypothesis. Jan Kirsch, M.D., M.P.H.
Janice L Kirsch
2024-08-31 00:09:45 +0000 UTCThanks Linda
charlie
2024-08-30 20:30:22 +0000 UTCI agree with your assessment. As a person who experienced extreme abuse as a child, I am personally believe and have been professionally diagnosed with PTSD. I know very few folks who can relate to my experiences. That being said, I drives me berserk when I hear about being at the effect of, shall I say, bad parenting, and how that “trauma” determined unsatisfactory lives as adults. Life itself is not trauma and when everyone is traumatized it gives the impression that we are all playing on a level field. Not so! So go find your “authentic” selves and stop “processing” yourselves like you need to learn to walk again. Sorry. And guys, if I hear “authentic selves” again…..
Neely McCormick
2024-08-30 18:44:06 +0000 UTCIt seems to me that one way in which it is difficult to know if a form of treatment works or not is that a person could be doing better for a while and then relapses. Does this mean that the treatment was effective because, for some time at least, the person was doing better? Or is the treatment deemed ineffective since it didn’t last?
Linda Sears
2024-08-30 18:01:44 +0000 UTCThanks Roland, I will check out that pod. The psychotherapy schools acknowledge that the data say's it's not the style of therapy but the therapeutic relationship. This seems so peculiar, like saying it doesn't matter which religion you follow as long as you believe in it. Yet, each religion thinks it is unique. Or am I being a pedant?
charlie
2024-08-30 17:39:27 +0000 UTCThanks, that was interesting! 😃 Are you going to release the initial section on the public feed, so that everyone can listen to your responses to the feedback? Also, I couldn't help observing... on a scale from 1 to 5, the middle is not 2.5. 😉
Roland Weber
2024-08-30 16:05:26 +0000 UTCI think there is a lot of value to things like empathetic listening and having an outside perspective from someone who is trained to help identify counterproductive behavior/thought patterns and help you develop practices and techniques to address them… and that almost all of that can be achieved without recourse to mysticism or pseudoscientific pronouncements and claims.
Christopher Kavanagh
2024-08-30 16:00:12 +0000 UTCI heard that it basically doesn't make a difference what method is used... as long as the patient/client and the therapist/professional/doctor get along with each other, it helps. Unfortunately, I don't remember who said that. Might have been Gregg Henriquez, or else some of the psychoanalysts that appeared on Robinson's podcast.
Roland Weber
2024-08-30 15:55:53 +0000 UTCI listened to Mate’s interview with the CEO guy and then Matt and Chris’ show, which I really enjoyed. I also read The Myth of Normal, Mate’s latest book. At the time of reading (about a year ago) I was excited about getting new insights into something or other, but I found myself constantly fighting the author. I’m pleased to have listened to this decoding because it makes me feel vindicated. I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with almost everything Matt and Chris have to say. I followed him for a while on Instagram and saw him repeatedly hammering away at the same message, often with wide-eyed people reverently looking up at him. At one point, he even took to sitting cross-legged on an important-looking cushion. I have a question for like-minded cynical folk. I’m having a late-in-life career change and am due to start a counselling and psychotherapy course next month. I volunteer with the Samaritans in the UK and see the value in connecting with people. I do, however, have a bullshit radar that goes off quite a lot around talking therapy, particularly when a scientific moniker, or neuroscience of this or that, is casually picked up and put down. How does one reconcile a sense of cynicism about magical, unproven therapies while believing there is value in talking to a trained professional about troubling thoughts and feelings? The short answer is I’ll find out. But I’m interested in knowing others’ thoughts.
charlie
2024-08-30 13:52:47 +0000 UTCYou mean something like comparing how well Gabor conforms to a list of core guru features and providing some sort of rating and rationale? ;) I think if you do the first thing you mention without all the guru stuff it isn't much of an issue and when you do it with the guru stuff it is more of an issue.
Christopher Kavanagh
2024-08-30 07:09:34 +0000 UTCI would like to see you guys define the difference between someone wanting to share the experience and perspective they feel they've gained through a long life experience in a specific area of study, and a guru. Honestly, the evidence in the Mate episode felt a bit thin. I've loved your podcast, but I can't help but feeling like you've been huffing your own farts a bit too much lately. I would invite you both to make more of an effort to steelman your subjects' points of view FIRST, in addition to providing your critiques.
Andy
2024-08-30 03:39:49 +0000 UTC@Demostix: That they list CBT as a potential treatment is trivially true, but much different to providing an assessment of its quality of evidence. After already writing one a tome of text and having errands, I can't do a lit review, but you will at least find APA Division 12's Research-Supported Psychological Treatments resource having pulled its assessment of research literature back from "strong support" in 1998 to "pending evaluation" in 2015. Two categories where this is true is "Cognitive Processing Therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" & "Cognitive Therapy for Depression".
Exai
2024-08-29 19:06:59 +0000 UTC"Software development is a different thing than therapy and I could spend quite some time on why that analogy is inappropriate but suffice to say I think that if software engineers applied the same standards you suggest then we would have much less functional software." It's a miracle of our century, but trust me, their standards are much lower. You can have "your standards" on spacecraft, military grade and some financial/medical/FAANG software. Most of the rest... like walking a tightrope between two skyscrapers, try not to think about it too much. "[Exai believes that] 2. Focusing on valid empirical evidence and replicability is too reductive for assessing therapeutic interventions. (Strongly disagree)" We're not quite there. I didn't talk about reductiveness, but about how this is a discrete set of multiple requirements. I tried to disassemble it to say "measurability" or "evidence" does not require "replicability". It seems you might be talking about replicability in measurement. I meant replicability on the level of therapy, like with manualized therapies where one size fits all and that's that: everyone gets more or less the same treatment for the same problem. You can't write a human's owner's manual that covers very much, I'm saying. One can be helpful in some situations (perhaps like CBT+OCD), but this kind of requirement of replicability requires justification through patient outcomes, not holy scripture. I'm then somewhere between you and what you're saying here. Measuring isn't the focus -- the job is in turning abject misery into dull suffering -- but I'm all for more empirical study of psychodynamic/all clinical work and, less self-isolation of more humanist clinicians. Another distinction is we're not just designing assessments for interventions. It's that after axiomatizing how measuring has to be, therapy then has to be designed to fit this mold. For example, as infamously deigned by many CBT advocates and insurance companies, treatments cannot be evidence-based if they last longer than 12 weeks, because studies run up to 12 weeks (of course there are exceptions, but I understand it's a nightmare). So, we've rolled out a whole lot of evidence on these measurements, and what's left standing is celebrating the discovery that many of our best therapeutic interventions boast some 30%ish success rate. Without going into the economics, what if the problem is in the test and its inscribed limitations? Well, I wish we were interested enough in evidence to figure it out! So, instead of laying out the law top-down, standards of evidence must remain open to interrogation, starting from how the evidence show that we suck miserably. If a tarot reading served with unicorn therapy makes someone feel whole, it's probably better than nothing. To complain about this is in some sense the privileged position of the culture war nerd (bless us). This isn't epistemic anarchism, but evidence-based desperation. It bends my mind to imagine Gabor Maté is a big contributor to the problem. "If you think that Maté's claims around trauma are modest" Trauma is where I think he's "overplaying his hand" as mentioned above. I don't like Maté that much, to be clear. Don't think much of his analytic mind, and people who talk my ear off about him can be a pain in the ass. Yet I also guess his mistakes sum up to a net positive. Just like the fashions, overreaches and follies of psychoanalysis & cognitivism! I was more referring to the impression that his more intuitive, inferential explanations about subjective experience, say something like Maté historicizing his childhood trauma, was hystericized into some Proustian explosion of total recall. I figured he'd have no issue admitting such memories are often retrojected, brought from the present into the past. That's how I think of how we work, anyway, and my limited exposure with Maté doesn't contradict this. There's something lost in translation in expecting anyone thinks such memories are video files played in the brain. Anyway, as Patreon (awful software) wiped my message and I hadn't backed it up in a couple minutes, I'll leave some lost thoughts hanging in the air. I think we managed to line out some misunderstandings towards the more foundational disagreements, which is always some success. I didn't think you were a cognitive psychologist, but I could've sworn I heard Matt called one! Crazy!
Exai
2024-08-29 18:59:10 +0000 UTCI also don't get how you go from the article you linked criticizing ESTs to the dodo bird hypothesizing being debunked. This is also the first time I'm hearing of it
Demostix
2024-08-29 18:43:15 +0000 UTCA 30 second google search of "apa guidelines depression therapy" gave me a list where CBT was named as a treatment for depression. Any source for that claim?
Demostix
2024-08-29 18:37:24 +0000 UTCA minor quibble, prestera sure psychoanalysis dont have a great deal of evidence behind it. There however newer psychodynamic treatments that so say ISTDP for example.
Demostix
2024-08-29 18:25:23 +0000 UTCAppreciate the detailed response so I'll try to answer in kind and be as succinct as I can. Matt isn't a cognitive psychologist and probably has a much less positive view of CBT than you imagine. I'm not a cognitive psychologist either nor do I have any strong investment in CBT beyond preferring it to more mystical approaches or ones based on discredited claims about the mind and body. I mentioned in the episode that I think any claim that the evidence base for CBT blows other therapies out of the water is overstated. That said, I think your response (though maybe not the paper cited?) is making two different arguments, only one of which I think is valid: 1. Invoked evidence standards are often not met and existing research for various therapies often displays exaggerated claims and poor methodology, including for CBT. (Valid) 2. Focusing on valid empirical evidence and replicability is too reductive for assessing therapeutic interventions. (Strongly disagree) As stated in the segment, I think if you have good quality studies with strong methodologies then you will be able to identify effective and ineffective/unreliable treatments. There is no reason why preregistration, appropriate power, proper blinding, and relevant control conditions are impossible in clinical studies focused on therapies. This I would argue should be the baseline expectation for anything that wants to consider itself offering science-based medical interventions. As you've explained you don't think therapy should be seeking to be science-based except in a more loose (dare I say Petersonian) interpretation, where therapy creatively interprets scientific evidence in line with the therapist's preferences/preferred approaches and models. In the weak version of there being studies and there being actual applied knowledge and experience I have no objection to this but in the stronger version where clinical experience trumps scientific evidence, I'm afraid I strongly disagree. That way lies pseudoscience and the inability to ever say that a treatment that people/professionals are invested in does not work. We do not accept that standard in most forms of modern medicine, except CAM. Software development is a different thing than therapy and I could spend quite some time on why that analogy is inappropriate but suffice to say I think that if software engineers applied the same standards you suggest then we would have much less functional software. And finally we will just have to agree to disagree on Maté's rigor and level of epistemic claims. Matt and I are social scientists who simply believe that anything wanting to lay claim to the mantle of science and empiricism has to put the bare minimum effort in. If you think that Maté's claims around trauma are modest and that our criticism of the low evidentiary standards in clinical research are equivalent to pseudoscience, fine but we just have wildly different standards then. In any case, I appreciate the engagement!
Christopher Kavanagh
2024-08-29 16:41:26 +0000 UTC"I just fundamentally disagree that therapy is some mystical discipline where we shouldn’t be concerned about replicable and measurable results. " You're bundling a lot of disagreement here based on what I didn't say. I'm not saying you should give a full read of it, but this doesn't so much connect with Shedler (or me). The critique was about specific studies, previous gold standards of CBT's evidence-basedness, containing bias and incompetence verging on academic fraud. You can still hear these studies regurgitated, say, by cognitive psychologists working in academia opining on how there is only one form of clinical therapy which has any claim to doing anything. Worse, equating a critique of standards of evidence to being opposed to evidence -- like saying questioning the PATRIOT act is antipatriotic and tantamount to treason -- is not just a common, but the primary defense of this falsity. This is built into the whole bait-and-switch evidence game: it is structurally fraudulent. It's a history of scientific McCarthyism which doesn't just lead to but begins from unreasonable conflations like this. If it's not pseudoscientific, it's antiscientific. We owe it to ourselves to be better. On similar reasons, just as an example, I understand the APA's pulled back its _evidence-based_ recommendations of CBT in the treatment of depression & PTSD. I guess you already said this, but Matt's Dodo bird hypothesizing is also generally debunked by sources such as Sakaluk et al.'s "Evaluating the evidential value of empirically supported psychological treatments (ESTs): A meta-scientific review". My addition would be that this wasn't news for clinicians. So, the problem isn't evidence or questing for it. It's (at least arguable) scarcity of evidence being interpreted as an insurmountable triumph of proof. As I'm (the only one) talking about measured results, I can't imagine it fair to say it's me who considers psychotherapy ineffably mystical. I'm saying it's not reducible to the word "evidence". This would be the real mystification. On the more metalevel, I'm lamenting what academic psychologists hawkishly demand is often less about measuring human wellbeing, more requiring treatments planned for replicability. Just today, my country's health institute reported polling showing 70% of a student cohort self-reporting serious mental health issues. Working with this cannot possibly be what you guys think it is. So, replicability -- often in the most rigid definition possible in manualized treatment -- is being smuggled into your quote, and that's where we probably have a substantive disagreement. This presupposes a certain positivism which I don't find necessary or justified as a precondition/doctrine of therapy as such. I welcome treatments in such vein, but it's a far narrower, fundamentalist ask, certainly not included in regular standards of evidence in sciences tout court. It might sound quite incomprehensible to many who believe human beings aren't replicable. In other words (pardon me) I don't give a fuck how a patient doesn't kill themselves just like hostage negotiator Bruce Willis (pseudoscientist par excellence) doesn't care how he gets everyone home safe. Then, "Ultimately the logic you are invoking is the same as Doctor K. Therapy is so unique that we cannot hold it to the same standards as other areas of medicine. " I don't know about "ultimately", but on some level, he's right, and I'd bet this is what most people in the world intuitively believe. I'd rather go to his clinic than Matt's (<3), and let's be honest, so would almost anyone else. This is because he's a clinical psychologist who knows how to talk about human stuff in variable, engaging, personal ways. There are limits to any singular approach, which is why I'm for a plurality of competing paradigms where some are expected to work better on A, some B, both on an individual level and perhaps contrasted with measurable expectations against diagnostic categories. I might consider CBT's hegemony to be more firmly rooted in politics than evidence, but for OCD, I'd start there. I wouldn't mind piloting such high-demand and often quite menial CBT services on some kind of language models, either, leaving more humanier work for underpaid and understaffed humans. Yet I don't find therapy is necessarily a science: it should be informed by science and feed knowledge into its scientific study. This seems uncontroversial for most clinicians. Call it a Wissenschaft, which translates to science in many languages. There's nothing more mystical about this than saying software development isn't pseudoscientific based on failing to align with the demands of computer scientists. This is a category error. This doesn't make software development unique: it makes it a human, intersubjective practice. Of course this topic is messier. To say it's simple is the lowest mistake. To rigidly judge clinical work on academic standards which rarely exist in practice, sounds to me more like a romantic than a scientific pursuit. "Yes lots of other therapies also have that approach but many owe rather a lot to Freudian pioneer." Certainly: say Aaron Beck, father of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and practising psychoanalyst. He quite famously designed CBT as descendant of psychoanalytic ego psychology, and defended psychoanalysis on grounds of cognitive psychology (at best loosely linked to the cognitivist discipline). Psychoanalysis runs around various competing and intermingling theoretical frameworks which Maté really doesn't touch on. He's more aligned with Dr. K than psychoanalysts. I'd say CBT's ego psychology roots make it comparably psychoanalytic to Maté, yet obviously this genealogy makes little sense to most. You could take my word for how calls towards Freudianism are the same mistake, but, fine. "And I also dispute that Maté is better representing research" I didn't talk about how he represents research: I said he's better informed on his specialties around clinical work and trauma, where your critiques of him were often shallow, vibe-based and poorly informed. On bad days, both he and the podcast end up around some performative contradiction of pseudoscience, but Maté's epistemic claims are generally more modest than you give them credit for. Conversely, you're hardcore scientists working in the hard sciences of psychology and anthropology. I rarely find pseudoscience talked about productively, but in DtG's case, I'd put you under closer scrutiny in finding the things I've tried to line out lacking in intellectual and scientific rigor. Appreciate the candor, either way. I concede you mostly responded to my satisfaction in the beginning of the episode.
Exai
2024-08-29 14:36:39 +0000 UTCWe readily admit our level of of familiarity with the most recent literature but I’m sorry I just fundamentally disagree that therapy is some mystical discipline where we shouldn’t be concerned about replicable and measurable results. Plenty of bad quality studies with unsuitable metrics, but that doesn’t mean the solution is to reject attempts to build high quality evidence. Ultimately the logic you are invoking is the same as Doctor K. Therapy is so unique that we cannot hold it to the same standards as other areas of medicine. And we describe Gabor Maté as psychoanalytic because he focused on repressed childhood trauma as the decoder key for adult psychology. He may not be a paid up disciple of Freud but there is certainly an inherited emphasis there. Yes lots of other therapies also have that approach but many owe rather a lot to Freudian pioneer. And I also dispute that Maté is better representing research, I’ve went down the rabbit hole with various citations he’s used and they are almost invariably over interpretations of low quality evidence. None of the above means therapy is useless, CBT is the only effective treatment, or that people will not benefit from non-evidence based therapies.
Christopher Kavanagh
2024-08-29 11:53:15 +0000 UTCIn the myth of normal he quotes a film he made called the wisdom of trauma, which, to be fair you can get for free as it's a donate what you can system. In the film he quotes capatilism as part of the problem perpetuating trauma. Since I signed up for that I received multiple promotional emails of Maté's courses on something called sand (science and non duality) which is some new age vibe subscription service. All this to say I think he definitely does a fair amount of profiteering.
Dave the Rave
2024-08-29 10:39:51 +0000 UTCShedler's "Where Is the Evidence for 'Evidence-Based' Therapy?" is a standard response against cognitivist framings of therapy being a solved (now, even worthless!) practice, where the task of the ideal clinician is to reproduce manualized treatments for RCTs, with patients & patient outcomes mostly valued as data points. But even if that were the mission statement (of course, this isn't a fair assessment of even most CBT), it's exactly the frankly miserable evidentiary record of "evidence-based" approaches, even when the tests are basically designed for the chosen winner, which should raise alarms that we're doing something wrong! Maté (who's not Freudian or psychoanalytic, by the way, so it's strange you keep saying he is!) may be annoying and New Agey and overplay his hand. He's still more of a scientist in his specialty than podcasters vibing on vague science feelings. Citation practices are more lacking here, even when something is looked up; usually annoying-sounding studies are dismissed offhand without reading anything. Such expressions of science-belief disguised as scientific critical thinking are pseudoscientific exactly as we might recognize in some of our gurus! Who, here, is speaking for science? This isn't meant as some ringing endorsement of Maté, but perhaps this falsity could tell us a little bit about why when a CBT practitioner, master of evidence-based therapy, goes to a therapist, they usually seek out a psychodynamic one. Yeah, there's my soapbox! The McCarthyist side of cognitive psychology is to me what philosophy is to the pod, so these clinic-adjacent episodes are when it gets a bit painful.
Exai
2024-08-29 10:38:41 +0000 UTCThanks that was fast. Might remember you next time I have concerns about IT trouble, low bank balance, or world peace.
Sean Atkinson
2024-08-29 09:38:36 +0000 UTCFixed!
Christopher Kavanagh
2024-08-29 09:26:14 +0000 UTCFixed.
Christopher Kavanagh
2024-08-29 09:26:10 +0000 UTCFixed!
Christopher Kavanagh
2024-08-29 09:26:05 +0000 UTCFixing...
Christopher Kavanagh
2024-08-29 09:19:56 +0000 UTCCheck out the first couple minutes guys. Something wrong in the editing
Julie
2024-08-29 09:11:28 +0000 UTCIntroduction repeats at very start! Looking forward to listening to the rest of the episode...
Sean Atkinson
2024-08-29 09:11:19 +0000 UTC
