Evidenced Based is Evidenced Biased: The Problematic Privileging of Cognitive Behaviorism in Psychotherapy Research and Practice.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has established itself as the privileged psychotherapy treatment modality among academics in clinical training programs in the United States, based on the assumption that the empirical evidence simply favors this modality. However, there is a scarcity of critical reflection on the limited generalizability of the findings of CBT-type studies to typical clients in the real world who often defy narrow diagnostic classification and desire improved emotional wellbeing, not mere symptom reduction, from their psychotherapy experience. Moreover, there is burgeoning evidence to suggest that improved outcome in psychotherapy is more contingent on the "interventionist" more so than the "intervention;" in other words, embodied listening skills, empathy, rapport building, and the like, are more predictive of client change than specifiable techniques. This is notwithstanding the respectable literature underscoring the effectiveness of psychodynamic and humanistic psychotherapy which is currently undervalued in academia. This presentation will address these topics and discuss the implications of the increased monoculture of CBT in academia on the quality of clinical training graduate students receive, as well as the types and lengths of psychotherapy treatments health insurers and government regulators approve of.