Not everyone is so enthused about IFS. It has its skeptics and critics, too, some emerging from a scandal at a St. Louis eating disorder clinic called Castlewood. In 2011 and 2012, former Castlewood patients filed suit alleging that they had been pressured into recovering memories of childhood abuse that had not in fact occurred. Richard Schwartz had spent a year and a half at Castlewood training its staff in IFS therapy at the invitation of the clinic’s directors, Lori Galperin and Mark Schwartz (no relation). Though Schwartz did not himself treat patients at Castlewood, IFS played a role in patients’ negative experiences there.
Schwartz is dismayed by what happened at Castlewood, which he calls a misuse of IFS. He says he has no present relationship with Mark Schwartz and Lori Galperin.
“In what I teach and what I do myself,” Schwartz says, “when [a patient] comes up with memories that they didn’t have before, I take the position that we can’t know whether they’re true or not without corroboration.”
The other issue that IFS skeptics tend to point to is a dearth of empirical support. Despite growing anecdotal evidence about IFS’s effectiveness for OCD, DID, depression, and a host of other disorders, few clinical studies have yet been done. Less easily reduced to repeatable techniques than competing modalities like cognitive behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, IFS has attracted little academic attention.
That may be starting to change. Frank Anderson, a former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, was working as a staff psychiatrist at Bessel van der Kolk’s renowned Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, when he first encountered Schwartz and IFS. It flipped his world upside down.
“I had been working with severe trauma for a long time at the Trauma Center, and I was one of the many people who go, ‘Oh wow,’” Anderson recalls. “Within the mental health world, it’s a huge paradigm shift. IFS is very non-pathologizing. Every part, every symptom has a positive intention. That kind of blows therapists away. ‘What do you mean, shooting heroin has a positive intention? What do you mean, cutting yourself or bingeing has a positive intention?’”
In 2013, Anderson became chair and later executive director of the Foundation for Self Leadership, IFS’s research arm, with the aim of finding academic partners willing to try IFS in clinical tests. The first opportunity was with rheumatoid arthritis patients. IFS proved not just to significantly lower their depressive symptoms but to diminish pain and improve physical function as well. The study earned IFS official designation as an evidence-based treatment in 2015. More recently, a complex PTSD trial (currently under submission to journals) confirmed, Anderson says, the longstanding belief and clinical experience of IFS therapists that IFS is a very effective trauma treatment. After 16 sessions of IFS therapy, 12 of 13 trial subjects no longer qualified for the diagnosis.
Though promising, these results are preliminary. Even some of Schwartz’s biggest fans worry that he may be overselling what IFS can accomplish.
Deany Laliotis, the EMDR therapist and trainer, is among them. She is a big proponent of IFS, viewing it as complementary to EMDR and including IFS concepts in her own EMDR trainings, but she has reservations about the scope of the paradigm shift Schwartz is hoping to achieve.
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