The flat earth as a metaphor for the evidence for uniform efficacy of bona fide psychotherapies: Reply to Crits-Christoph (1997) and Howard et al. (1997).

The central metaphor used to illustrate the finding that psychotherapies produce generally equivalent outcomes has been that of the Dodo bird, who in Alice in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865/ 1962) exclaimed, everybody has won, and all must have prizes. In spite of the empirical evidence for the conclusion that there are no differences in relative efficacy among bona fide psychotherapies, the Dodo bird verdict cannot achieve much respect, as witnessed by the commentaries (Crits-Christoph, 1997; Howard, Krause, Saunders, & Kopta, 1997) of the most recent meta-analysis of studies that have compared various psychotherapies (Wampold et al., 1997). It is now time to replace the Dodo bird metaphor with one involving the fiat Earth, a notion that persists in spite of evidence to the contrary.