A review of this book by psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, and Jeffrey Lohr, which attempts to alert potential consumers to the distinctions to be found among mental health treatments with respect to their scientific validation. This is an important issue, since nonvalidated therapeutic techniques can be not only useless but dangerous or lethal — e.g. the death of a Colorado girl in 2000 at the hands of “rebirthing” therapists. I am not sure if this is the fault of the book, which I have not read, or of this review in the Skeptical Inquirer, but this approach risks confusion and invalidation of potentially useful approaches by lumping three sorts of controversial therapeutic techniques together — those whose claims are based on scientifically valid reasoning but whose empirical validation is less than robust; those which have empirically proven efficacy which we do not understand in scientific terms (yet?); and those which are most like absurd quackery, preying on the credulity of the desperate and untutored. From among the therapies they touch on, for example, I would place critical incident stress debriefing (for which the lack of efficacy in some careful research studies has hit the media and the profession like a bombshell in the last few years since Sept. 11) in the first category; EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) in the second category; and Thought Field Therapy in the third. Although it is not likely such a book, which is densely written and technically argued, will reach those at the mercy of the third sort of therapies in order to inform and protect them, that is its supposed raison d’etre.

As evidence accumulates that one should not scoff at the placebo effect, which may represent a considerable part of the healing power (or, shall we say, the mobilization of the patient’s intrinsic healing power?) of techniques scientifically understood or not, I am surprised that “unscientific” is essentially used as an epithet and a sole criterion in evaluating these therapies. Psychoanalysis itself is an artful belief system, scientifically unverifiable, which exerts its power by the skill with which the practitioner enlists the patient into sharing the belief system. One might describe psychopharmacological healing in the same way, and not just if one is trying to be a wag. Perhaps what the authors ought to be driving at is a distinction between techniques which appeal to and utilize our intelligence (by which I mean our intuitive and ’emotional intelligence’ as well as our reasoning faculties) rather than insulting it…