The American Psychological Association just issued guidelines for treating trauma. Conveniently for health insurers, these guidelines support the briefest and cheapest therapies, and ignore all the evidence that shows that longer therapies are much more effective.
There are some valid criticisms here. And I’m trying to respect the concern that everyone is showing.
But are you seriously expecting me to go to 20-40 therapy sessions before starting to see an improvement? Who has the time or money to do that? If you want treatment to be accessible, ‘the briefest and cheapest’ therapies are what you should be aiming for.
And, if not CBT, what do you recommend? Cause I’m not seeing any evidence for a good alternative.
The point isn’t that you, based on your situation, can not choose a short, CBT based treatment if you think that will help you. The point is that it’s not going to help everyone. And if you try it and it turns out it doesn’t help you, you’ll need access to different or longer treatment. That different and longer treatment is not going to be available and it definitely isn’t going to be covered by insurance if it isn’t included in treatment guidelines.
It took me 5 minutes of googling to learn that other common threatments for trauma and PTSD are Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Psychodynamic Therapy, Group Therapy, Hypnotherapy, Logo Therapy, Somatic Trauma Therapy and combinations of therapy and medication. I don’t know shit about these treatments, and that’s really besides the point here.
What these guidelines are doing is treating the briefest and cheapest treatment as the only option because it is the only thing that can be studied by following patients for a very short period. And insurance companies will use these guidelines as an excuse to only pay for the briefest, cheapest option.
If you don’t see how this is wrong, imagine applying it to, say, cancer. Imagine if we only gave the cheapest, shortest, chemo session to every single cancer patient no matter how bad their situation was? And if they needed longer treatment, their insurance would stop paying because the effects of longer treatment were not proven by short term studies?
QueerAnarchism 