There is an episode of Spongebob (one of those few cartoons accessible to both young children and adults) where Patrick, upset that his friend Spongebob has won so many awards and he has won none, decides to copy everything Spongebob does. Patrick is a lazy, dumb, pathetic, (but charming) do-nothing, and he is no less so by simply mimicking Spongebob\u2019s every move \u2013 hence the comic irony my four-year-old can appreciate. Neurolinguistic programming (NLP), at its core, takes the Patrick approach to success and counseling.<\/p>\n
The wikipedia entry on NLP<\/a> is fairly factually thorough, and I won\u2019t waste time here reproducing it, so for background I suggest reading the entry. Also, this recent blog post<\/a> by Donald Clark is a good summary of the scientific reviews of NLP \u2013 all damning. Briefly, NLP was developed in the 1970\u2019s and is based upon the notion that success can be achieved by simply modeling the language, behavior, and thought patterns of successful people. Various versions of this have been applied to counseling by simply modeling the language and behavior of supposedly successful counselors.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When first proposed there was nothing overtly pseudoscientific about NLP. It was a bit simplistic and na\u00efve, but may have had some merit. But it turns out that the assumptions of NLP, namely that our cognition, behavior and emotions can be \u201cprogrammed\u201d by mimicking the more superficial aspects of those with desirable attributes (for example posture and mannerism) are wrong. The last thirty years of research have simply shown that NLP is bunk.<\/p>\n New ideas in applied science (like health care or counseling) are evaluated in two ways \u2013 are the basic science premises of the idea valid, and does it work. Although the latter trumps the former, both are important to consider because evidence of efficacy is often less than definitive, and the threshold of evidence necessary to accept a new therapy should be modified by it\u2019s plausibility (in contrast to the precepts of evidence-based medicine, but that\u2019s another blog entry).<\/p>\n In the case of NLP it has failed every test of both its underlying theories and empirical tests of its efficacy. So, in short, NLP does not make sense and it doesn\u2019t work. In science you don\u2019t get three strikes, those two and you\u2019re out. It turns out that improving one\u2019s cognitive ability and emotional stability is hard work \u2013 there\u2019s no quick short cut. The brain is not infinitely reprogrammable \u2013 it can learn and change, but there is an underlying structure and function that is pretty resistant to change, and this resistance increases as we age. Change is possible, but it\u2019s hard work. You can\u2019t just download a new personality.<\/p>\n So why, then, has NLP persisted for 30 years despite all the evidence against it? I think this reflects an endemic problem within the mental health field. Part of the problem is that the field is very broad, with multiple parallel professions, including psychiatry, clinical psychology, social work, and counseling. Also, within each profession there are multiple theories and traditions, many mutually exclusive. The degree of dedication to science and evidence-based practice is also highly variable. The bottom line is that, although there is a great deal of legitimate science within the mental health field, in practice it is rife with pseudoscience and nonsense.<\/p>\n This results from the fact that new ideas and practices may go from inception to application without taking a detour through the trials of experiment and review. It is not uncommon for a practitioner to get a new idea about how to approach counseling, they then start doing it in their practice, then write a book, teach classes and seminars, if successful they create an institute, and before you know it there is a thriving infrastructure dedicated to this new method within the mental health field. At some point after this process is already under way someone may bother to do some scientific studies, but by then it\u2019s too late. There is already too much invested in the technique, and too many practitioners who \u201cknow\u201d that it works because they have seen in work with their clients. This is the story of NLP, and many other methods \u2013 like repressed memory therapy, eye movement desensitization therapy, and countless others.<\/p>\n The introduction of new pseudoscientific counseling techniques is driven by market forces, which demands easy answers to complex questions. Everyone would like the quick and magical fix for their complex psychological issues. NLP fits this mold perfectly \u2013 just program the brain to model after a successful person, and you will magically become successful.<\/p>\n There are also numerous reasons why any psychotherapy method may seem to work. There is generic benefit from just sitting and talking with another person. The introduction of a novel method into therapy creates the expectation that something should happen. Both the counselor and the client want the sessions to be successful, so there is a motivation to perceive success. So any counseling method will have both non-specific benefits and a large false perception of benefit \u2013 even if the technique itself is worthless and the underlying principles absurd.<\/p>\n There doesn\u2019t appear to be an easy fix for these problems either. Ideally, an academic and scientifically grounded group with grab the reigns of the therapy professions and instill quality control by setting practice standards based upon scientific plausibility and evidence for efficacy. New ideas will be tested before they are widely disseminated. It\u2019s hard to imagine this happening, however, because the field is comprised of so many independent and often competing professions. There is no one set of reigns to grab. Infatuation with alternative medicine ideology has also made this more difficult, as efforts to impose scientific standards are dismissed by some as male western demagoguery.<\/p>\n Those who advocate for more science and reason within the mental health field will keep plugging away, and I will cheer them on. But we will likely need either a cultural revolution or a massive overhaul of the system before we will see significant progress. Until then NLP and other counseling nonsense will endure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is an episode of Spongebob (one of those few cartoons accessible to both young children and adults) where Patrick, upset that his friend Spongebob has won so many awards and he has won none, decides to copy everything Spongebob does. Patrick is a lazy, dumb, pathetic, (but charming) do-nothing, and he is no less […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[654],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience","category-skepticism","tag-agency"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}