HENRY

Robert Epstein in Psychology Today:

The mental health fields have, now and then, spawned and nurtured some completely crazy ideas. Physicians in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, inflicted strange and extremely cruel treatments on their mentally ill patients based on equally bizarre theories of human nature. To try to shock schizophrenics into “regaining consciousness of the true self,” for example, doctors bled them until they fainted, or blindfolded them and allowed them to fall through a trapdoor into cold water — the so-called “Bath of Surprise.” It’s unlikely that such techniques had any therapeutic value.

Our own era has also produced theories and techniques of dubious worth. In the 1990s, for example, practitioners by the thousands began “facilitating communication” with nonverbal children by strategically guiding their clients’ hands over keyboards. Some of these children appeared to claim that they had been sexually abused, and one even wrote a novel this way. A barrage of research soon demonstrated that the technique was nonsense; all of the ideas came from the facilitators, not the children. Unfortunately, no matter how persuasive the evidence, people often cling to bad ideas, including facilitated communication.

Here are 10 faulty concepts from the mental health professions that have yet to disappear.

Posted on February 25th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill