General Discussion

From 2012:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2012/04/23/jonathan-alperts-mis-statements-and-possible-misconduct/

"Jonathan Alpert's Mis-Statements, And Possible Misconduct

An intentionally provocative opinion piece about psychotherapy was just published in the NY Times by Jonathan Alpert. Well, it worked. I’ve been provoked. Alpert is an apparently proud fellow who uses his web-site to trumpet being called “Manhattan’s most media-friendly psychotherapist.” In the article he lays claim to a style of psychotherapy that is a unique advance because unlike others he actually helps patients change. Other people, people like me, what we do is waste our patients lives so we can get paid. According to him relaxing “spa appointments” rather than anything useful are what people get from me and my kind.

How did this get past the Times editors? It is so clearly designed as an infomercial for selling the author’s go-for-the-gusto change-your-life in 28 days book. Plus the article is dangerous. It perpetuates the myth that psychotherapy is inefficient, ineffective snake oil, relaxing to be sure but snake oil nonetheless. In so doing it erects an unnecessary conceptual obstacle to getting help that someone might need. And it does this solely for the purpose of advertising Alpert’s brilliant advance that people need “an aggressive therapist” who’ll tell them what to do and kick their butts till they do it.
...

The fact is that some people benefit from short-term treatment, even I’m sure from Alpert, and others from long-term, even open-ended treatment. Some patients need one, some the other. And some therapists are good at doing one kind of treatment and not the other. Some both. But no one benefits from distorting research in the service of self-promotion, which is what Alpert apparently did. He disingenuously cherry-picked studies to make himself sound far more reasonable than he is, and also got some of the research fundamentally wrong trying to make his point that people need “an aggressive therapist.”

He just ignored as though it doesn’t exist important research that counters his “buy my book” message, research that has appeared, for example, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a follow-up in The British Journal of Psychiatry, and an instant classic from the American Psychologist. Worst of all given his topic, he ignored a famous 1995 Consumer Reports survey that was then discussed by Martin Seligman that “concluded that patients benefited very substantially from psychotherapy, that long-term treatment did considerably better than short-term treatment.”...(more)