Psychotherapy... Expanding the shrinks

THE unexamined life may not be worth living,
but the overexamined life can be difficult, too....
Many people are turning to a relatively young branch of “talking therapy”, 
called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to get them through 
the (day and) night. CBT, which teaches people to bypass unhelpful thoughts, 
has been elbowing aside the talk-about-your-childhood psychoanalysis favoured 
by believers in Freud and Jung. Up to 43% of all therapy courses 
in Britain are now CBT, and the practice is increasing: around 6,000 
new therapists have been trained since 2007 and CBT absorbs 
much public funding. In 2012, £213m went on a National Health Service 
programme delivering CBT, while £172m was spent on all other 
forms of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

The growing popularity of CBT was consolidated in 2007,
when the government adopted the treatment as standard.
Three things had swayed it. The newish practice had accumulated a body
of evidence proving it worked (students of Freud and Jung have been
slower to move from couch to lab).
It was very good at getting patients back to the office: a 1997 study
found people with psychological problems had significantly higher
employment rates after CBT than after traditional psychoanalysis.
It was also speedy, getting results after just ten one-hour sessions
(psychoanalysis can, expensively, take a lifetime).
So CBT therapists were trained up and given all the plum NHS jobs,
consigning other therapies largely to private practice....
[...]economist.com