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The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Since in April, 2015 I review parts of The Great Psychotherapy Debate (Wampold & Imel, 2015) in the PPRNet Blog. This is the second edition of a landmark, and sometimes controversial, book that surveys the evidence for what makes psychotherapy work. You can view parts of the book in Google Books.

Wampold, B.E. & Imel, Z.E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2^nd edition). New York: Routledge.

Some therapists achieve better patient outcomes than others. This seems obvious on the surface and yet few people talk about it, and the research literature seems to downplay or ignore this fact. To illustrate the differing outcomes achieved by therapists, I reviewed a unique study in the September 2013 PPRNet Blog. In that study, 10 cases were randomly selected from 700 therapists (N = 7000 patients), and therapist outcomes were assessed by averaging their patient outcomes. Depending on the presenting problem, as many as 67% of therapists were reliably effective, but as many as 16% were reliably harmful. Clearly therapists differ. Yet psychotherapy research typically treats therapists as if they are uniformly effective. In their chapter, Wampold and Imel review some of the research that estimates the therapist’s effect on outcomes. In other words, what is the impact of the particular therapist on the patient outcomes? Even in studies in which: (a) therapists are selected as experts to provide a specific type of therapy (i.e., CBT, psychodynamic, interpersonal, etc.), (b) therapists are highly trained to be adherent to a manual with repeated supervision, and (c) patients are randomly assigned to treatments, there remains a significant amount of variability in therapist outcomes. Indeed in many studies the therapist effect is as large or larger than the effect of the intervention that is being delivered. In other words, which therapist a patient gets in a treatment study matters just as much or more than what type of therapy they receive. This is also true in medication trials. Better psychiatrists (i.e., those with overall better patient outcomes) who gave a placebo had better patient outcomes than poorer psychiatrists who gave the active medication. A recent large meta analysis found that about 5% of patient outcomes in controlled psychotherapy trials was attributable to the therapist, and the effect is as high as 7% in naturalistic settings. For treatment of PTSD, therapist effects are as high as 12%. On the surface these look like small effects, but in reality they can have a big cumulative impact. Therapists with the best and worst outcomes differ dramatically. For example in one large study, the best performing therapists had a patient response rate of 80% compared to the worst performing therapists who had only 20% of their patients improve. Which therapist would you want a loved one to see?

Practice Implications

Wampold and Imel reported that that therapist effects generally exceed the effects of the specific treatment that is being tested or provided. Some therapists consistently achieve better patient outcomes than others. What are the characteristics and actions of effective therapists? Factors like therapist allegiance to the therapy, empathy, and the ability to form and maintain an alliance with clients appear to differentiate therapists who consistently have good patient outcomes versus those whose patients tend to have poor outcomes.

Tracey, T.J.G., Wampold, B.E., Lichtenberg, J.W., & Goodyear, R.K. (2014). Expertise in psychotherapy: An elusive goal? American Psychologist, 69, 218-229.

As I have reported many times in this blog, there is substantial evidence for the efficacy of psychotherapy. However, the quality of psychotherapy differs across therapists – that is, some therapists achieve better client outcomes than others. Tracey and colleagues (2014) ask: is it possible to demonstrate expertise in psychotherapy? They define expertise as “increased quality of performance that is gained with additional experience”. Professions that can demonstrate expertise include: astronomers, test pilots, chess masters, mathematicians, and accountants. But several professions may not demonstrate expertise, including: psychiatrists, college admissions officers, court judges, personnel selectors, and psychotherapists. The difference is that the former group has predictable outcomes and has access to quality feedback. In addition, Tracey and colleagues argue that psychotherapy lacks adequate models for how interventions produce benefits. As a result, adherence to treatment protocols (i.e., manuals) is not reliably associated with better patient outcomes. Further, more experienced therapists are not more effective than less experienced therapists. Experienced therapists might have more complete conceptualizations of client problems, but these conceptualizations may not be accurate. Finally, although therapists affect outcomes, client variables (e.g., motivation, severity of symptoms, expectations) likely explain the largest proportion of outcome variance. Tracey and colleagues argue that part of the problem is that psychotherapists do not engage in “deliberate practice”; that is, practice of a specific task (e.g., identifying a rupture in the alliance), receiving specific feedback (e.g., that a rupture was not identified), opportunity for repetition (e.g., to identify a subsequent rupture in the alliance), and opportunity for improvement afforded by error (e.g., better able to identify a future rupture and repairing that rupture). Generally the practice of psychotherapy provides little feedback about the accuracy of past clinical decisions. In other words there is a lack of quality information to help therapists develop into experts. Further, for a whole host of reasons, psychotherapists are notoriously poor at assessing client progress (i.e., like other humans, therapists engage in a number of biased evaluations of their performance). Quality information might be available from progress monitoring (i.e., continuous feedback to therapists about client outcomes), which has been shown to improve client outcomes. However, this may not aid therapists in developing expertise, since progress monitoring provides little information about what therapist behaviors are necessary to improve performance and client outcomes.

Practice Implications

Tracey and colleagues conclude that currently psychotherapy does not provide evidence that it is a profession with expertise. To achieve expertise, therapists need quality information not only about their patients’ outcomes but also about their own average outcomes (i.e. performance) relative to other therapists working with similar clients. And therapists need information on how to manage specific events in psychotherapy. Tracey and colleagues suggest therapists set aside time to generate hypotheses about one’s practice that can be disconfirmed, and then test these hypotheses. For example, if a therapist is experiencing a higher than average number of premature client terminations (which may follow a misunderstanding with the client), the therapist may hypothesize that he or she is not identifying key alliance ruptures. To test this hypothesis, the therapist could repeatedly assess the alliance (with a validated instrument) with some clients, use this information and not clinical judgement alone to identify alliance ruptures (i.e., a week to week severe downward trend in alliance scores), and implement an intervention to repair the alliance with these clients. Do clients with whom a therapist has implemented this procedure drop out at a lower rate? Does this process of deliberately identifying alliance ruptures and repairing them lead to enhanced therapist performance regarding alliance ruptures? This form of deliberate practice (testing disconfirmable hypotheses based on quality information) might lead to greater expertise in identifying alliance ruptures.

Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change: Starting in March 2013 I will review one chapter a month from the Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change in addition to reviewing psychotherapy research articles. Book chapters have more restrictive copy right rules than journal articles, so I will not provide author email addresses for these chapters. If you are interested, the Handbook table of content and sections of the book can be read on Google Books.

Crits-Christoph, P., Connolly Gibbons, M.B., & Mukherjee, D. (2013). Psychotherapy process-outcome research. In M.E. Lambert (Ed.), Bergin and Garfield’s Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, 6^th Edition (pp. 298-340). New York: Wiley.

This month I consider the section in Crits-Christoph and colleagues’ chapter on the process of psychodynamic therapy (PDT). There are a number of PDT models, but they each share some fundamental aspects of treatment or purported mechanisms. One is insight or self understanding, in which patients learn about themselves and their relationships through interventions like interpretations. Self understanding is expected to help patients reduce symptoms by increasing adaptive responses in their important relationships. Transference interpretations may help patients understand their patterns within the therapy relationship, address or change these patterns, and generalize the changes to relationships outside of therapy. Another mechanism might be changes in defensive functioning. Defense mechanisms may be expressions and means of coping with unconscious conflict, needs, and motivations. Change in defensive functioning from less adaptive (e.g. acting out, passive aggression) to more adaptive (e.g., altruism, self observation) may be necessary to achieve improvement in symptoms. Crits-Christoph and colleagues addressed four questions in their review of research on the process of PDT. (1) Are the uses of PDT techniques like transference interpretations related to treatment outcomes?  A number of studies have associated the use of PDT interventions and outcomes, and the average effect size is moderate. In general, transference interpretations were associated with better treatment outcomes. However the findings for transference interpretations are complicated. For example, the use of too many transference interpretations may not be therapeutic and may result in poorer outcomes. A small number of studies looked at the quality or accuracy of transference interpretations and found a moderate relationship between accurate interpretations and good outcomes. Most of these studies did not control for previous improvement in outcomes, so an alternate explanation might be that patients whose symptoms improve facilitate therapists to provide more effective transference interpretations. (2) Is patient self-understanding or insight associated with positive outcomes in PDT? Crits-Christoph and colleagues concluded from their review that changes in self-understanding is an important part of the therapeutic process of PDT. The relationship between insight and outcomes were not evident in CBT or medication interventions, thus suggesting that self-understanding is a specific mechanism of PDT. (3) Is change in defensive functioning related to outcomes in PDT? Only four studies have looked at this question. The studies suggest that improved defensive functioning is related to good outcomes especially for those with more severe problems. However, it remains unclear whether change in defensive functioning causes change in symptoms or the other way around. (4) Is therapist competence in PDT related to treatment outcomes? There is some evidence that competence and adherence in delivering PDT were related to good patient outcomes. Some research also showed that competence and adherence to PDT protocols preceded or caused good outcomes.

Practice Implications

There is good evidence that transference interpretations are related to outcomes, but therapists need to use these judiciously. The research suggests that too many transference interpretations in those with lower levels of functioning, or inaccurate interpretations in general, can reduce outcomes or be related to poorer outcomes. There is also good evidence that patient self understanding of relationship patterns will result in positive outcomes. Self understanding or insight may be a specific mechanism by which PDT works that sets it apart from CBT and the effects of medications. The research also indicates some evidence for the positive effects of changes in defensive functioning, but it is not clear whether change in defenses is a cause of or caused by positive symptom outcomes. Therapist competence and adherence in delivering PDT is also related to good patient outcomes. This highlights the need for training and supervision in evidence based PDT interventions.

Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change: Starting in March 2013 I will review one chapter a month from the Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change in addition to reviewing psychotherapy research articles. Book chapters have more restrictive copy right rules than journal articles, so I will not provide author email addresses for these chapters. If you are interested, the Handbook table of content and sections of the book can be read on Google Books.

Bohart, A.C. & Wade, A.G. (2013). The client in psychotherapy. In M. Lambert (Ed.) Bergin and Garfield’s handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change (6^th ed.), pp. 219-257. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Last month I blogged about the section in Bohart and Wade’s (2013) chapter that focused on client symptom severity and motivation. This month I focus on differences between clients and therapists on their perceptions of therapy processes and outcomes. In a previous blog (see June 2013), I reviewed a meta analysis that showed that given two equally effective treatments, clients should be given their preference in order to improve outcomes. Clearly, client perceptions and preferences are important, and perhaps more important than the therapist’s perceptions. Bohart and Wade (2013) reviewed a number of studies that demonstrated this. For example, studies show that client ratings of the therapeutic alliance predicted which therapists had better than average outcomes, whereas therapist ratings of the alliance did not predict outcomes.  In three other meta-analyses, client perceptions of therapist genuineness, empathy, and therapeutic presence were each more predictive of outcomes than the respective therapists’ assessments of their own genuineness, empathy, and therapeutic presence. Clients also value different outcomes compared to therapists and researchers. Most research on outcomes tends to focus on symptom reduction, but clients appear to have a broader view of good outcomes. In a qualitative study, clients focused on healthier relationship patterns, an increase in self-understanding that led to freedom from and avoidance of self-destructive behaviour, and stronger valuing of the self, in addition to symptom reduction. Others report that clients define good outcomes as reengaging in meaningful work and social roles, and restoring their self respect.

Practice Implications

Clients are more finely attuned to the therapeutic alliance than therapists, and perhaps are better at detecting relevant and helpful therapist stances. If you are interested in assessing therapeutic alliance or a therapist’s empathy, don’t ask the therapist, ask the client. This has implications for training therapists in helpful therapeutic relationship stances. Helping trainees find areas for continued development as a therapist (i.e., in terms of improving their empathy, genuineness, and therapeutic presence) may require asking their clients’ opinions. Client perceptions of therapist qualities are more relevant than therapist perceptions when assessing effective therapist relationship stances. Therapists should monitor client preferences, particularly if the client is having difficulty engaging in the therapy. If possible and reasonable, therapists should alter their relationship approach to a client based on client feedback. Regarding outcomes, therapists, researchers, and agencies should consider broader definitions of outcomes that are more aligned with what clients want and value. Improved self concept, improved relationships, and better social and work functioning may be just as important as symptom reduction for most clients.