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3. Discuss how one might assess different psychotherapies. Which psychotherapies appear to be the most effective?

Key Points:

  • The relevant considerations when evaluating psychotropic drugs apply equally well to the appropriate evaluation of psychotherapy.
  • There has been sustained attention to evaluating the effectiveness of psychotherapy since the 1950s; the continued need to clarify how best to do this attests to the difficulty of the task.
  • Difficulties related to the magnitude of studies.
  • What constitutes an appropriate control group in evaluating psychotherapy?
  • Self-selection as a problem in therapy: different types of people are likely to select and remain in different types of therapies, resulting in biased samples.
  • The difficulty of obtaining a stable group sample.
  • What have we learned about the effectiveness of psychotherapy over the last 50 years?
  • Hans Eysenck’s landmark work on the topic in the early 1950s.
  • Evaluation of psychotherapy using meta-analysis, a quantitative method for combining results across a number of studies.
  • Can we conclude that psychotherapy is effective?
  • Clearly much remains to be learned if we are to answer the ‘ultimate question’ about psychotherapy: ‘What treatment, by whom, is most effective for this individual with that specific problem, under what set of circumstances?’
  • These points should be referred to in addition to synthesizing other elements of chapter 16.

Copyright 2005 BPS Blackwell