Farhad Dalal

Dr. Farhad Dalal is a British psychotherapist and group analyst, working with individuals, groups and organizations. He has been in independent practice for more than thirty years, initially in London and now in Devon.

Dr. Dalal is a critic of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) research. "Over the last decades, there has been a consistent trend toward deregulation for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry. This then is the research culture in which the science of CBT is cultivated. A culture of low standards and at times outright deceit. And as is bound to be the case, the science of CBT is contaminated by the culture in which it has grown and cultivated."

Talks and interviews
In this presentation I will subject elements of CBT research to a critique on its own terms - that is, from within the very 'Scientific' paradigm that CBT aspires to. I will begin arguing that as the 'third wave' of CBT (Mindfulness, CAT, ACT, DBT, etc) starts to give weight to ways of thinking that it previously disparaged, it comes to look more and more like the other psychotherapies that CBT seeks to distinguish itself from. I liken this process to that of colonisation and its way of appropriation.

Next, I take issue with manualisation itself, to say that the insistence that clinicians should stick closely to manualised protocols is driven by the needs of researchers (which is to keep control of the 'variables' in their experiments) rather than in the clinical interests of patients.

In the main part of the paper I will attend to the science behind the research and the ways that it gets written up. First up is the problem of 'publication bias', which when combined with the research requirements of NICE, constitutes a betrayal of the ideals of Science itself. Next, I will look closely at two interlinked well regarded research papers that demonstrate the efficacy of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, and are widely cited as examples of good research. A close reading of these papers will show that the picture is not as convincing as their abstracts would have us believe.