This article by Peter Simons has been published by Mad in the UK. It begins:
“In a viewpoint piece published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers write that there is no evidence that psychiatric interventions lead to ‘successful’ outcomes. Successful outcomes, they write, include ‘the prevention of undesirable events, such as death and disability, and the achievement of desirable ones, such as remission.’
Psychiatry, unlike other medical specialities, has not developed efforts to investigate this question. They write:
‘Despite advances in measurement-based psychiatric care, clinical [success rate] reporting systems do not exist for most psychiatric services. This applies to all psychiatric treatments, including pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, and neuromodulation.‘
The viewpoint was written by Kenneth Freedland and Charles Zorumski at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.
One way to measure ‘successful outcomes’ is to assess whether current treatments are more effective ‘for a variety of clinically important outcomes’ than previous treatments. Other medical specialities can point to such progress …”
You can read more from here.
