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CBT and meds are insurance friendly. Even if therapists don't like it, they're basically forced into it by the system, otherwise payments are more likely to get clawed back in an audit by the insurance company. And why does insurance like CBT and meds? CBT is time boxed in many ways and 'evidence based'. Psychoanalysis and other therapy types are effectively not, and insurance already doesn't like paying for mental health as it is. Meds are relatively cheap compared to therapy also.

It's also related to why it's pretty hard to find therapists that take insurance in some places.



Evidence based but yet wholly ineffectual for so many. The medical model of mental health treatment is designed to treat symptoms not heal causes very often. That the causes are varied and treatments don’t scale as easy as a pharmaceutical manufacturing line doesn’t mean it’s not one of the more important pursuits medicine is trying to tackle. Hoping the current medical generation will continue to move away from the “chemical imbalance” theory of the past, of which there are far far too many practitioners out there holding onto ineffective treatments.

CBT still costs a LOT of money and time, so there is an incentive towards finding more effective treatments, but managing symptoms is in some ways more preferable because the medical system needs people to be “sick” or else a treatment might be seen by puritanical society as somehow indulgent or hedonistic. What if a “cure” involves taking significant time away from work to work through trauma? They might be better and more productive in the end than a stopgap treatment, but society can’t necessarily tolerate the idea.


"Where Is the Evidence for “Evidence-Based” Therapy?" is a pretty interesting paper on "evidence based" therapy.




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