| Empirically Supported Treatments
This information was written by the members of the Dissemination Subcommittee of the Committee on Science and Practice. What approaches to psychotherapy are beneficial? Is my psychotherapy helping me with my problems? Is the psychotherapy I am considering likely to be beneficial for me? These questions are direct and straightforward ones, and psychotherapy patients, and those considering becoming patients, deserve direct and straightforward answers. Unfortunately, these answers are not always easy to obtain.
To address consumers' needs for information about benefits of psychotherapy, this website has been developed by the Committee on Science and Practice of the Society of Clinical Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association, to provide brief descriptions of various psychotherapies that have met basic scientific standards for effectiveness.
Scientific Standards For Testing Psychotherapies Therapies described here have been shown to be beneficial in scientific studies meeting several stringent criteria. Patients who participated in studies of the therapies described here had better results than patients who received no treatment, or they had outcomes that were at least equal to those of other patients who received an alternative therapy that has been shown in other studies to be beneficial. The therapies described here have been shown to be beneficial in more than one study conducted by more than one team of scientists. The psychotherapies are described in written treatment manuals so that other therapists can apply the same treatment in roughly the same way with clients who have similar problems. Most therapies described here were studied in a particular type of scientific study: a randomized controlled trial. Randomized controlled trials are used routinely in medical research to determine which therapies for a given disorder are beneficial. In a randomized controlled trial, patients with the disorder being studied (e.g., clinical depression) are randomly assigned to one of the therapies being studied (for example, interpersonal therapy, cognitive therapy, or antidepressant medication). The delivery of the various therapies is controlled as much as possible (for example, the treatments are of equal duration, are provided by therapists of equal experience, and so on) in an attempt to assure that the only difference between the experimental groups is the treatment type. Some therapies were studied in series of carefully controlled single case studies. We set stringent scientific criteria for evaluating the therapies presented here, relying on the results of data from carefully controlled studies. We did not rely on the opinions of patients, the opinions of professionals, information obtained from uncontrolled research studies, or other uncontrolled sources of information. Data collected by scientists in controlled studies provide the most objective information available about the benefits of psychotherapy. Some well-known psychotherapies do not appear here. Usually, this is because they have not been subjected to the types of controlled studies described above, rather than because these psychotherapies have been found to be ineffective or harmful. The field of psychotherapy research is a relatively new one, and therefore many therapies, which may prove to be beneficial, have simply not yet been studied. We recommend that consumers first seek out therapies that have been studied and shown to be beneficial in controlled studies. However, even the psychotherapies shown effective in controlled scientific studies do not help all patients. Therefore, if one of these treatments fails to help, it makes sense to try other therapeutic approaches, even when they have not been evaluated in controlled studies. Will a Therapy That Has Been Shown to be Beneficial in Scientific Studies Help Me? No scientific study can show that a psychotherapy shown to be beneficial for the average patient in a research setting will in fact be helpful to any particular patient treated by a particular therapist in the real world. To determine whether a particular therapy is helpful for you, in your unique circumstances, we recommend that you and your therapist work collaboratively to: * Set clear treatment goals How to Use this Website To obtain information about treatment of a particular clinical problem, look for that problem in the list along the left of the screen. If you don't find what you're looking for there, then scroll through the screens. We provide information about the most common disorders (anxiety, depression, substance abuse), but not all clinical problems. |
