ABSTRACT
Faith in it has three allied sources. The first is the idea that the absence of mental well-being is a kind of illness or disorder. The second source of faith, dating approximately to the 1980s, is the belief that diagnostic classification schemes can give an adequate definition of disorder, thereby allowing the amount of suffering to be quantified. Epidemiologists and researchers could then go about their business more efficiently, to some extent hiding the fact that the definitions were conventional and pseudo-medical. The third source of faith comes from an acceptance of the idea that methods of research from medicine that are used to compare one treatment with another can be transferred with equal plausibility to psychological therapy. The strategy of decomposing a phenomenon into its basic components and testing how they interact has a proven track record in many areas of science. Client characteristics that may be of some importance in ensuring success are persistence, openness, and optimism.
