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Psychotherapists & counsellors who don't monitor their outcomes are at risk of being both incompetent & potentially dangerous

I find the recent paper by Kraus & colleagues a bit scary - "Therapist effectiveness: Implications for accountability and patient care" - with its abstract reading "Significant therapist variability has been demonstrated in both psychotherapy outcomes and process (e.g., the working alliance). In an attempt to provide prevalence estimates of "effective" and "harmful" therapists, the outcomes of 6960 patients seen by 696 therapists in the context of naturalistic treatment were analyzed across multiple symptom and functioning domains. Therapists were defined based on whether their average client reliably improved, worsened, or neither improved nor worsened. Results varied by domain with the widespread pervasiveness of unclassifiable/ineffective and harmful therapists ranging from 33 to 65%.

The Norway feedback project: a clear and sensible way to make psychotherapy more helpful

I wrote a few days ago about Barry Duncan's interesting book "On becoming a better therapist".  Duncan cited three major influences that had helped to form the book.  The first was his involvement as an editor of the recently published, multi-authored "The heart and soul of change: delivering what works in therapy" - for further details about this more academic publication, see my blog post "The heart and soul of change."   The second major influence has been findings from the fascinating Norway Feedback Project.  As I've already written, the main research paper here is

  • Guildford BABCP conference: the four main areas I want to use clinically after this conference (eighth post)

    I've already written a series of seven blog posts on this year's BABCP conference.  What are the key points I want to take away? I think they centre around four areas. Most important for me is what's been triggered by Michael Lambert's presentation on "Supershrinks and pseudoshrinks" . Secondly, a major theme (more so than at any other conference I've been to) was couple therapy. I spent a lot of time listening to a whole series of couples experts - what do I want to do with this information now? Thirdly there are the implications from the Dodo bird panel on depression treatments. Lastly there's a bits and bobs category.

    Taking these in reverse order:

    Proposal for a BABCP special interest group on compassion

    The British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) encourages the formation of Special Interest Groups (SIG's) in areas that members want to particularly focus on.  There has been discussion recently about a possible SIG on Compassion.  If you're a member of the BABCP and you would like to be involved, do please let me know (if you haven't done so already).  I've made some suggestions about the kind of territory a Compassion SIG might cover (see below), but I very much understand that people who are interested in the SIG, may well not be interested in all the areas I've suggested ... and they may have additional suggestions to add.  The aim would be discuss all this further once we see if there at least 15 of us who would like to support the SIG's establishment.

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