Science and Psychotherapy

Abstract

Psychotherapy can sometimes look more like a business than a scientific procedure. Too often, hype trumps research data and is used to support marketing of a product. Yet even if the world of psychotherapy is a marketplace, empirical evidence should be the final arbiter. When a new treatment is a drug, governments do not allow it to go in the market without strong evidence. These systematic evaluations are applied to the licensing of every form of pharmacological treatment. Talking therapies should be subject to the same kind of regulation.