Just came across a provocative article about the iatrogenic effects of self-help cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) books:
Self-help books based on the traditional principles of CBT, including popular titles like ‘CBT for Dummies’, can do more harm than good, according to a new study. The risks were highest for readers described as ‘high ruminators’ – those who spend time mulling over the likely causes and consequence of their negative moods.
The gist of the research (by Gerald Haeffel and colleagues) is that in some people’s hands — specifically, people prone to engage in rumination — self-guided CBT techniques can exacerbate depressive symptoms. In CBT, clients are often taught to pay attention to their negative thoughts so they can recognize and change them. But ruminators are already excessively focused on negative thoughts, which is why they are at higher risk for depression. Just following a book without the help of a dedicated therapist, ruminators may be encouraged to ruminate even more, without acquiring the skills to take the next step of challenging and altering those thought patterns.
What’s interesting from a research-design perspective is that this finding comes from a study that crossed a randomized manipulation (giving people traditional CBT self-help books vs. 2 control conditions) with a person variable (individual differences in a proneness to rumination) and found a meaningful statistical interaction. As such, it is able to identify a causal process that is stronger within a subset of the population.
What this design doesn’t tell us, though, is about the real-world effects. Experimental randomization means that high and low ruminators were equally likely to get the CBT books. In the real world we cannot assume this would be the case. If ruminators are more likely than non-ruminators to seek out these kinds of books — maybe they seek out books that are compatible with their existing cognitive tendencies — then the problem would be even worse than the experiment suggests. On the other hand, if ruminators are less likely to seek out CBT-based self-help books (maybe recognizing that the advice inside isn’t going to help them), then self-selection would mitigate the real-world effects.
So a useful followup study to complement this work would be an observational design, in which high- and low-ruminators were allowed to select among books with and without the harmful CBT components, and you could model whether such self-selection mediates effects on depressive symptoms.
The Hardest Science 