The common theme I am seeing with all mental health research is that we are doing short term studies and then making large claims referencing those studies. Claims that these studies can not back up.

And we are studying based on symptom reduction. Not underlying functional psychological repair.

This truly means that we are doing the equivalent of bringing a person into the doctor, asking them their symptoms, diagnosing them without any blood tests, giving them opiates for the symptoms and then never doing long term research on the outcomes of that intervention on quality of life, long term adverse effects of the intervention, or sustainable remission of symptoms when the intervention is removed.

Without that data, it is like giving an opiate to a cancer patient without any tests and measuring outcomes only based on short term symptom reduction. We aren’t testing for what is underneath and how that is best treated. We are just happy when people say they feel better. In the short term. We know the opiate didn’t cure the cancer, but if we measure its impact based on short term symptom relief and call that research that opiates treat cancer we are misleading the public. Opiates treat pain. Not cancer.

We must do longer term studies not only on medication, but on therapeutic techniques. There are significant methodological challenges in doing so. I understand that. But to decide to pretend we have research on these interventions when we don’t study long term remission and quality of life indicators is to decide to willfully mislead the public into saying we know things we don’t actually know. We are relieving symptoms, making ourselves feel better and the client feel better. But only temporarily. And we throw up our hands when those interventions stop working or impede the potential for other things to work for the person and say “oh well, we did the best we could”.

No. No we did not.