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Eleven Blunders that Cripple Psychotherapy in America: A Remedial Unblundering

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This book was written by Nicholas Cummings daughter and it was slanted in that frame of reference. No dirty laundry, all good stuff daddy did, which is true, but I would have preferred a more journalistic approach. Too self serving.

Why has psychotherapy faltered so much in the past four decades? "Eleven Blunders that Cripple Psychotherapy in America: A Remedial Unblundering" seeks to answer that question and turn the profession's fate as a whole around for the future. With plans to restore the faith in modern psychotherapy and condemnation for those who have brought it down, "Eleven Blunders that Cripple Psychotherapy in America" is a complete and comprehensive examination of the issue. Deftly composed, "Eleven Blunders that Cripple Psychotherapy in America" is highly recommended for college library psychology collections.

In the preface, comparing Australian with American health systems, arguing Australia's is far behind the US, the authors are incredibly wrong and poorly researched. With Australia's national health scheme, access to psychology services for all has vastly improved since 2006, before this book was written.

The authors state: "The Sunday, September 16, 2007, edition of the daily newspaper The Australian carried a story by its medical reporter Clara Pirani, "Medicare for Mental Health Displaces Counsellors." In Australia there are only about 1,200 psychologists, while there are 17,000 counselors. She writes, "People are waiting up to 16 to 20 weeks for an appointment with a psychologist." Australia has universal government-sponsored healthcare. A recent rule termed Better Access to Mental Health, designed to increase access, has worsened the situation because it so often restricts referral to psychologists only, not counselors. The intention was to improve care because counselors are not equipped to treat the more serious conditions, such as bipolar disorder. This is just an example of how far behind us Australia is." (p.xxxvii)

Utter nonsense. Australia at the time had in excess of 20,000 psychologists, and a state by state (now national) registration scheme to ensure some measure of quality control. Counsellors has self-regulating organisations but no approved and consistent training standards. Moreover, the Better Access scheme was not designed to offer long-term psychotherapy, but brief, evidence-based treatments for the following disorders of prevalence:
Psychotic disorders
Schizophrenia
Bipolar disorder
Phobic disorders
Anxiety disorder
Adjustment disorder
Depression
Sexual disorders
Conduct disorder
Bereavement disorders
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Eating disorders
Panic disorder
Alcohol use disorders
Drug use disorders
Sleep problems
Attention deficit disorder
Obsessive compulsive disorder
Co-occurring anxiety and depression

Perhaps the group of 1200 being referred to was clinical psychologists, and the counsellors being 17,000 generalist psychologists who are also part of the Better Access scheme, albeit rebated at a lower rate.

I'm happy for books such as this to challenge the status quo and see improvement to care occur, but not at the expense of factual information.

i read this book for a class. it has some good information for those in the field. one blunder says that the field of psychology is producing too many psychologists for the amount of jobs available. the goverment listing of upcoming job openings says otherwise. i do however agree with the correctness of the blunders asserting psychologists do not have enough business saavy, and it is a mistake to try to separate our field from the rest of the healthcare model.

Cummings is clearly the inspiration behind this unnecessarily paranoid and grandiose attack on all those who have wronged him in his "50 years of psychotherapy". While an account of some of the failures of psychotherapy to acclimatize to the changing economic and cultural norms is probably more than warranted, this volume lacks even a modicum of respect for all those psychologists who have endeavored to understand the human condition. The book is riddled with self-contradictions and does more harm than good. For example, Cummings lauds Fromm-Reichman's position that "the schizophrenic mind will not connect with the therapist until the therapists enters his distorted and delusional world..." (p. 94), only to rebuke the seemingly parallel approach of Laing a few pages later "Laing confronts the patient's questioning of her own conspiracy delusion and sets out to prove to her that a conspiracy does indeed exist. Soon the patient is acting less crazy than the therapist in response to a technique I have witnessed many times in my career." (pp. 100-101). He further characterizes the empirically-driven work of such psychologists as Marsha Linehan, in her case as "psychological romanticism" (p. 102). He also laments the increasing number of professionally trained psychologists, curiously, an issue he directly contributed to in his creation of the California School of Professional Psychology - a school that is stated to have trained approximately half of all the licensed psychologists in California. The book is replete with other confusing and self-contradictory anecdotes, tirades, and unhelpful discussions of the faults and failures of psychology and psychotherapy with little attention paid to potential solutions. Although it may contain a few useful gems of history, these gems are vastly outweighed by the many inconsistencies and unwarranted attacks on accomplished and dedicated scientists, practitioners, and all those in between.