The Scientist Practitioner Delusion?

‘Surviving this week as a therapist, trumps being a scientist practitioner’, there were gasps of surprise and murmurs of agreement, as I said this at a recent IAPT Workshop I was giving. I mused out loud about who had the space to collect data on a client, write it up and present it for publication. No contrary voices were raised despite the scientist practitioner model being an article of faith on CBT training courses.  Students should be invited to write an essay on ‘The Scientist Practitioner Delusion?’

The engineering narrative is a better descriptor for the overwhelming majority of CBT practitoners, rather than being invited to ape academic clinicians, for whom the scientist practitioner model is probably the best descriptor. But the concerns of the true ‘scientist practitioners’ are very different to the engineers, yet they dominate service provision, conferences etc. I remember Paul Salkovskis, Current President of BABCP, once saying to me that the membership speaks with a small voice, but this isn’t surprising, if most are powerless, stressed engineers. I debated with Paul at an Annual Conference a few years ago but he didn’t see a problem with scientist practitioner as a universal descriptor and was dismissive of the idea of engineers.

But whilst it was scientists who developed the first computers, vis a vis Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in the war years (The Imitation Game is a brilliant watch!), it was engineers who developed the personal computer that we all know. Dissemination needs a creative dialogue between scientists (scientist practitioners) and engineers.

Dr Mike Scott