Psychology

Effectiveness of Therapy

The effectiveness of therapy refers to the degree to which a therapeutic intervention produces the desired outcomes for a client. It is typically measured by assessing changes in symptoms, functioning, and overall well-being. Evaluating the effectiveness of therapy involves considering factors such as the type of therapy used, the client's specific needs, and the quality of the therapeutic relationship.

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5 Key excerpts on "Effectiveness of Therapy"

Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
  • Clinical Psychology
    eBook - ePub

    Clinical Psychology

    An Introduction

    • Alan Carr(Author)
    • 2012(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)

    ...10 Effectiveness of psychological therapies Learning objectives After studying this chapter you will be able to: • define evidence-based practice in clinical psychology • explain the hierarchy of evidence that informs evidence-based practice • summarize the main findings from the evidence base for the effectiveness of psychotherapy • outline the medical cost offset associated with psychotherapy • describe the role of common and specific factors in the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Introduction One of the main ways in which clinical psychologists help clients is through psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a contractual process in which trained professionals with expert knowledge of their discipline interact with clients to help them resolve psychological problems and address mental health difficulties. Psychotherapy may be offered to children and adults on an individual, couple, family or group basis. Often clinical psychologists offer psychotherapy as one element of a multimodal programme provided by a multidisciplinary team. For example, a multidisciplinary adult mental health team may routinely offer a multimodal programme of cognitive behaviour therapy combined with antidepressants for depression, as described in Chapter 6. A multidisciplinary child and adolescent mental health team may routinely offer a multimodal programme for children with attention deficit hyper-activity disorder which includes behavioural parent training, school-based behavioural consultation, child-focused self-instructional and social training and methylphenidate, as outlined in Chapter 2...

  • Counseling and Psychotherapy
    eBook - ePub

    Counseling and Psychotherapy

    A Christian Perspective

    ...Appendix Is Psychotherapy Effective? Methods of Research Research methods are usually categorized as quantitative or qualitative. The quantitative approach has been more widely and traditionally used thus far. It focuses on measuring the outcomes of counseling and psychotherapy as well as the processes that occur in therapy interactions that may be related to such outcomes. Outcome research is used to evaluate the efficacy or Effectiveness of Therapy. The terms “efficacy” and “effectiveness” are usually used interchangeably. However, in recent years some authors have used the term “efficacy” to refer to the results of scientifically controlled outcome studies that show whether a particular therapeutic technique or intervention works better than no treatment or an “attention-placebo” condition. Such studies typically involve random assignment of patients or clients who meet the diagnostic criteria for specific psychological disorders and the use of detailed treatment manuals or manualized treatments in systematically and consistently carrying out the particular therapeutic intervention whose efficacy is being evaluated. These studies are also called randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by experimental or scientific design and are basically quantitative in nature. The term “effectiveness” has recently been used to refer more specifically to how successful a particular therapy or technique is in real-life, clinical situations in actual practice, and not in carefully controlled scientific experimental studies such as the RCTs often used in efficacy outcome research (see M. E. P. Seligman 1995). However, most authors and texts still use the terms “efficacy” and “effectiveness” synonymously and interchangeably, as I do in the book you are now reading. It is nevertheless important to evaluate how effective a particular therapy or technique is in both carefully controlled scientific outcome studies and in real-life clinical practice. J. Hunsley and C. M...

  • The Use of Psychological Testing for Treatment Planning and Outcomes Assessment
    • Mark E. Maruish, Mark E. Maruish(Authors)
    • 2004(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)

    ...(1996). Evaluation of psychotherapy: Efficacy, effectiveness, and patient progress. American Psychologist, 51, 1059–1064. Jacobson, N.S., & Christensen, A. (1996). Studying the effectiveness of psychotherapy: How well can clinical trials do the job. American Psychologist, 51, 1031–1039. Jacobson, N.S., Follette, W.C., & Revenstorf, D. (1984). Psychotherapy outcome research: Methods for reporting variability and evaluating clinical significance. Behavior Therapy, 15, 336–352. Jacobson, N.S., Roberts, L.J., Berns, S.B., & McGlinchey, J.B. (1999). Methods for defining and determining the clinical significance of treatment effects: Description, application, and alternatives. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 300–307. Jacobson, N.S., & Truax, P. (1991). Clinical significance: A statistical approach to defining meaningful change in psychotherapy research. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 59, 12–19. Kazdin, A.E. (1977). Assessing the clinical or applied importance of behavior change through social validation. Behavior Modification, 1, 427–452. Kazdin, A.E. (1998). Research design in clinical psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Kendall, P.C. (1999). Clinical significance. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 383–384. Kendall, P.C., & Grove, W.M. (1988). Normative comparisons in therapy outcome. Behavioral Assessment, 10, 147– 158. Kendall P.C., Marrs-Garcia, A., Nath, S.R., & Sheldrick, R.C. (1999). Normative comparisons for the evaluation of clinical significance. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 285–299. Kendall, P.G., & Norton-Ford, J.D. (1982). Clinical psychology: Scientific and professional dimensions. New York: Wiley. Kopta, S.M., Howard, K.I., Lowry, J.L., & Beutler, L.E. (1994). Patterns of symptomatic recovery in time-unlimited psychotherapy. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62, 1009–1016. Kordy, H., Hannover, W., & Richard, M. (2001)...

  • Contemporary Theory and Practice in Counseling and Psychotherapy
    • Howard E. A. Tinsley, Suzanne H. Lease, Noelle S. Giffin Wiersma(Authors)
    • 2015(Publication Date)

    ...There thus appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy; the more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate. (p. 322) With that salvo, research on psychotherapy outcomes accelerated with a vengeance. By 1967, efficacy research had moved beyond simple questions of “does it work?” Gordon Paul (1967) concluded a conceptual article with the enduring question: “What treatment, by whom, is most effective for this individual with that specific problem, and under which circumstances?” (p. 111). One of the turning points in psychotherapy research was the application of the meta-analysis statistical procedure to psychotherapy outcome studies (Smith & Glass, 1977). That provided a way to make numerical comparisons across different treatments and different outcome measures and determine whether various moderating variables (e.g., mode of treatment, number of sessions) affected outcomes. Those statistical findings provided a good way to supply evidence for psychotherapy in the managed mental health care push of the 1980s. The next big turning point came with the establishment of the Division of Clinical Psychology’s (APA Division 12’s) Task Force on Promotion and Dissemination of Psychological Procedures (1995). The Task Force (which has now become the Committee on Science and Practice) was established to inform consumers, managed care and insurance companies, and psychotherapists about which treatments were the strongest at dealing with which diagnostic disorders. Although the level of sophistication was still far short of Paul’s specific question, the movement was clearly in a responsible, self-policing direction. The result of that task force was the publication of a controversial compendium of treatments that had research evidence to meet different criteria for levels of empirical support (Chambless & Hollon, 1998; Chambless et al., 1996)...

  • Developmental Science and Psychoanalysis
    eBook - ePub
    • Peter Fonagy, Linda Mayes, Mary Target, Peter Fonagy, Linda Mayes, Mary Target(Authors)
    • 2018(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)

    ...It is our hope that the brief overview provided in this chapter has proved convincing, not in its specific findings, but in the overall message that research to understand the Effectiveness of Therapy in practice is a worthy goal to pursue in our next 50 years of child therapy research. Note Preparation of this manuscript was facilitated by support from the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health (MH064503–01A1 and MH066371–01). Commentary Mary Target Robin Weersing, in an elegant and deceptively straightforward presentation of the currently most challenging issue in psychotherapy research, offers a worrying portrayal of psychological therapy services. Can therapies, shown to be efficacious in research studies, remain effective in the real world? She shows that, notwithstanding the strong evidence base of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) in comparison with those of other approaches, when offered in the context of a community mental health service, CBT does not show comparable effectiveness. As one of the most original and open-minded researchers currently at work, attempting to address the so-called efficacy versus effectiveness issue (the difference between research treatment outcomes and those seen in routine clinical practice), any data presented by Weersing will command attention. These data are at once intriguing and challenging...