CBT doesn't really work much and science in mental health

Lynch, D, 2010, Cognitive behavioural therapy for major psychiatricdisorder: does it really work? A meta-analytical review of well-controlled trials, Psychological Medicine
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=/PSM/PSM40_01/S003329170900590Xa.pdf&code=b62ffa4b898268608a9e7b504bdd5319

Cognitive behavioural therapy - changing the way people think and behave by using talking techniques from therapists - doesn't really work according to this high quality review.The review uses a different inclusion criteria to the 'mega-analysis' which is often used to show that CBT really does work.
Butler, A. et al. 2006, The empirical status of cognitive-behavioral therapy: A review of meta-analyses, Clinical Psychology Review
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735805001005

So which one is true? The massive review (the 2006 one) which includes loads of papers but has a weaker inclusion criteria and, if I remember right, doesn't include a funnel plot or the smaller review of higher quality trials (the 2009 one at the top of the page)?

I'm afraid it's the one of controlled trials. At least based on the current paradigm of evidence based medicine. Blindness is so important.

The double blind randomised controlled trial gained success when it showed insulin shock or insulin coma therapy to be as effective as other treatments at the toime for...think it was schizophrenia. At the time
the insulin treatment was considered best practice around the world but the introduction of random assignment to the control or active treatment group showed that, in fact, it wasn't the best treatment.

Time and again it's the reviews that select the highest quality trials which show treatments thought to work suddenly don't. The recent noteable example is electro-convulsive therapy or ECT. This barbaric
treatment is what I hope is the last in the line of psychiatric treatments which induce seizures. The history of inducing seizures to treat mental disorder can be traced back to the work of Hippocrates who
notices paitents who had malaria seizures also had behavioural changes. The recent Bentall and Read review on ECT picked high quality trials with long term follow. This treatment of last resort was shown to be as
effective on follow up as sham ECT (where no electricity is used to shock a person into a seizure) and slightly more effective during treatment.
http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/mental-health-abuse/electroshock/ect-review-2010-read-bentall.pdf/view
(Link to paper at the bottom of the page.)

Many, many people have died because of this treatment. Some people who've had it done are major advocates of the treatment. This presentation on TED is an example.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_on_electroshock_therapy.html

The speaker may have gotten the same benefit from sham ECT and less damage to his brain.

And so back to CBT. The controls in the trials are as effective as this new dogma of treatment for all but depression where the evidence for it's effect is small. The effect size is far below what got the Improve
Access to Psychological Therapies scheme approved.then factoring in publication bias...that demon of good
research....which is the effect of trials with negative results being hidden...well it knows off about a third of the effect size of CBT studies.
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/196/3/173.full

In a sense it's saddening that there's few effective cures for mental disorder. Perhaps it's all the hedonic treadmill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Or perhaps it's the operational cluster of symptoms approach doesn't provide a good way to assign treatment to diagnosis?

A URL research trick

In the previous post I came across two articles by the same author. Here's one of the URLs.

http://www.bgmi.us/web/bdavey/Psychosis.htm

I came across the article while searching for something else and as usual took a little time out to read something that was interesting. It was well worth it as well. These branches out into other information can be lead to new ideas and concepts.

I like what the authors written so I could Google his name however a simple technique using the web address could lead to a gold mine of the authors work. By deleting the file name I can get to the directory of files (this only works on some web pages). In this case it becomes

http://www.bgmi.us/web/bdavey/

And there I uncover

A STRATEGY FOR LOSERS

HELPING THE LAST TO COME FIRST IN THE ECOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETY

This only works on older sites with static pages however there are many such URL tricks that can be used to find information beyond the power of a search engine. There's nothing illegal about this and hackers would use far more sophisticated techniques if they wanted to get hold of information. This is purely something that's an advantage for researchers who have a small knowledge of IT.

It works because many websites are really just like looking at text files in directories on a computer hard drive. All that has happened is by deleting the file name the web server has returned the index.html page and if that's not there then most web servers either give a directory listing of the files or don't allow access to any of the files within the directory.

We can go to another directory by deleting another bit of the web address so it becomes

http://www.bgmi.us/web/

And there's a standard page listing the files and directories because no one has written an index.html file. It's possible to click into directories where the user has set read access. In this case there seems to be some sort of encyclopedia.

http://www.bgmi.us/web/cyclopedia/

There's a very long list of the web files there. There's no index.html (or index.htm) but there's a few files that look like index files.

There are lots more tricks like this that experienced online researchers can use to find nuggets of information that wouldn't be found using standard search engine-only techniques.