Recalling the Uproar Over My Disputing Whether a Few Sessions of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Kept Psychotic Patients Out of the Hospital

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Patricia Bach's dissertation, supervised by ACT guru Steven C. Hayes, was considered one of the most distinctive contributions of ACT to the peer-reviewed literature. My two blog posts about it in Psychology Today in August 2011 immediately received over 1,000 reads. Steven Hayes offered to debate my claims publicly, but Kelly Wilson insisted that I pay conference fees, and so I declined.

In 2024, Hayes no longer lists this paper on his official lists, and Kelly Wilson is no longer listed as a founder of ACT, aka Contextual Therapy. I hope Steve will tell us how this bit of historical revisionism was carried out. It could be benign, but does it smell of Stalinist editing of memories of the past?

Seriously flawed research is seldom retracted but may fade away by no longer being mentioned by tis authors.

I have repeatedly been requested to make these old classics available. However, Substack writer Christine Sutherland's persistence carried the day. I recommend her Psychology Best Practice…