You’re gonna love my cure for hysteria.
I like where this is going, and I can supply my own equipment.
Is there a barber in the house?
Never has there been a more fitting username.
I prefer Shot From Guns unshaven.
Gee, Dr. Kellogg, you’re such a genius!
I dunno, I think **may_be_ignorant **nailed it pretty fucking well, too.
Let me try to remove this from the context of AA to see if you can better understand what we’re trying to say here.
I used to be very depressed. Criipplingly depressed. I had severe PTSD. Despite these problems I was, if I do say so myself, one of the single most motivated people on the planet in terms of improving my mental health. When I realized I needed help, I went out and got a therapist, one with years of experience treating trauma. I adhered faithfully to the advice she gave me and I absolutely busted my ass to get better.
About a year into the treatment, I got worse. Hospitalization, suicidal ideation, self-injury, I was a fucking wreck. I was fired from the fucking school cafeteria for too many absences, I had to withdraw from school despite the fact that I was a straight-A high school student on scholarship… PTSD was ruining my life.
What I didn’t know at the time is that my therapist was using a therapeutic framework called psychodynamic therapy. There is currently very little, if any, evidence that psychodynamic therapy works. If the claims being made about AA are true (and I haven’t evaluated the evidence myself yet, so I’m holding out on that), then AA can be compared to psychodynamic therapy. A fraction of the people get better, we don’t know why, but it seems like a fraction of people get better anyway, so it doesn’t seem particularly useful.
So here I was, busting my ass, literally, hours a day, trying to get better, doing everything the therapist said to do, and just getting worse. And it stayed that way for years. Years in which I believed I was never, ever going to be happy. Ever. I can’t tell you what it is like to be that severely depressed, I really can’t. It was an absolute nightmare.
One day, in a fit of frustration, my husband (then fiancé) said to me, ‘‘THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THIS TREATMENT WORKS. There are so many better things out there for you to try. If you commit to using an evidence-based treatment, I will pay for it.’’
So, I did what he asked. I told my therapist I wanted to try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is the current most robust, well-evidenced treatment for depression.
Do you know how I feel about psychodynamic therapy? Let me tell you how I feel about it. I spent EIGHT FUCKING YEARS in psychodynamic therapy and it didn’t do a damn thing for me other than make me feel like more of a victim. I trusted the so-called ‘‘experts’’ in trauma and let them hold my hand and talked about my past ad-nauseum and nothing changed.
I spent TWO MONTHS on CBT and made immediate progress in depression, returned to school and aced the rest of my courses and am now a highly functional Master’s student. Last year I spent 3 months on prolonged exposure for PTSD and my symptoms have decreased dramatically. (That’s not an anecdotal claim, it’s a measured one… I was treated at the Center for Study and Treatment of Anxiety at Penn which is a world-renowned research institution for PTSD.)
How many years of my life were robbed because of bad science? Don’t you think I deserve to have treatments that have been proven to work? Don’t you think I deserved to enjoy college and make friends and be in class and get an education? Don’t you think alcoholics deserve that too?
Yes, some people in AA get better. But maybe they get better because they are extra-motivated to change, or maybe they get better because they have such a strong social bond with other alcoholics, or they love their program director and that motivates them to change, or whatever. The point is, for every alcoholic that gets better, there are 19, like me, who are robbed of precious time, years of their life. If we are going to help as many people as possible, we have an obligation to make sure that what we are doing is based on sound evidence. It’s not enough to say, ‘‘It sure works for some people I know.’’ Because we are not ALL some people. I was the one who suffered because of this ignorance. Do you get it? This isn’t about trying to take away power from alcoholics, it’s trying to GIVE IT BACK TO THEM.
As a victim of ignorance for too long, I am really just so fucking tired of the excuses.
There is NO FUCKING EXCUSE that an 18 year old college freshman suffering PTSD should be given shitty, unproven advice by people who are supposed to be experts in the field. There is NO FUCKING EXCUSE that we proliferate programs and interventions for serious problems that have no or little evidence of working. It’s absolutely fucking disgusting and I’m tired of this bullshit game we play. If someone has the courage and motivation to deal with a problem, they deserve the best possible treatment. Period. If AA is so fucking wonderful, then let’s get on track to proving it. If it’s not, then it deserves no special protection in the discourse on alcoholism.
olives, why are you such an ignorant fucking asshole? WHY DO YOU HATE OUR FREEDOM?
You are, however, comparing apples to oranges. According to you, there is treatment A for depression, which has no scientific evidence to support it, and treatment B, with lots of scientific evidence to support it (“well-evidenced”). Presumably, an unbiased person reviewing the research and evaluating the evidence would reasonably conclude that treatment B is better than, more robustly supported by the science than, treatment A. You are quite correct that a healthcare professional ought to know that, and prefer B over A.
This is not the same as AA and alcoholism; as painstakingly demonstrated upthread, there is currently no such weight of scientific evidence demonstrating that treatment B or C is better than AA. An unbiased person reviewing the research and evaluating the evidence would have no evidence-based scientific basis for choosing another treatment over AA, other than their own intuitions and beliefs.
The anger is quite understandable; but anger is no replacement for evidence.
olololololo irony
The “irony” here is that those who dislike AA for being the embodyment of woo are, apparently, quite willing to totally ignore the science on the matter.
We’re not ignoring the science. We’re simply pointing out that the science shows that AA is pointless (or has at least completely failed to demonstrate that it has a point), while AA’s own “methods” are demonstrably grounded in discredited theories. You just find these facts inconvenient and point out that nobody has yet *proven *that you don’t have a floating, invisible, intangible, and silent unicorn living in your garage.
It has? I’d love to see a meta-study that demostrates that science shows AA is “pointless”. Oddly enough, none have been produced so far in this thread.
That would be the one you keep bringing up, which shows that AA can’t be demonstrated to be effective.
Except that’s not what the study concludes. It concludes that there is insufficient evidence, because the existing studies are flawed in various ways, that AA is better than other available treatments. The authors then call for better studies.
Can you see the difference between that, and stating positively that AA is “pointless”?
Except that’s not what the study concludes. It concludes that there is insufficient evidence, because the existing studies are flawed in various ways, that that there is actually a floating, invisible, intangible, and silent unicorn living in my garage. The authors then call for better studies.
Can you see the difference between that, and stating positively that my garage does not contain such a creature?
If flawed studies conclude that AA is superior, then any conclusion(including yours) that AA is superior is flawed.
Period.
End of story.
I’ve got it.
Shot From Guns, your magic rock only works on some coins. The ones that came up the way you predicted. It works sometimes.
That’s fine, since I have no-where made any such conclusion.