(the full 48 slide Powerpoint lecture can be downloaded by clicking here)

I wrote a blog post yesterday entitled "Melbourne lecture: 'How can we help our clients more effectively?' - the current worrying situation".  Although effect sizes produced by psychotherapy are good and subsequent benefits typically outlast gains produced by medication, there is a worrying lack of progress over time in improving the overall outcomes that psychotherapy achieves.  I said that effectiveness data suggests that we are "barking up the wrong tree" in putting so much of our time & research effort fairly exclusively into developing yet further members of the rapidly growing crowd of evidence-based (and non evidence-based) psychotherapies.  The Dodo bird suggestion that "everyone has won, and all must have prizes" certainly has strong arguments on its side:

Yes, there are encouraging developments with a few evolving Rolls Royce interventions for example involving CBT treatments of social anxiety and PTSD.  However in the search for improvements in how effectively we can help our clients, it is eminently sensible to widen our exploration to look at why therapists themselves vary considerably in the benefits they achieve and at the very interesting possibilities involved in more methodical session-by-session feedback of client progress. 

Fascinating and rich possibilities here.  And in the last section of the lecture I talked as well about our developing understanding of how humans develop increasing expertise and effectiveness in any field.  Rapid feedback on how successful we're been is certainly a necessary component of this expertise development, but there are other important components as well ... see the workshop slides for more on this.