Promoting student centred emotional well-being
What does research indicate?
As indicated previously, research by necessity, is usually done on standardized models with standardized patient populations. THese
studeis tend to exclude two-thirds of people who are intially intervewed. It is much harder to do research on "expert"
models with usual clinical populations.
Psychotherapy research done with these constraints on fairly simplistic structured models tend
to indicate that:
- Therapy works.
- There is little indication that any specific technique is what makes a therapy useful
- The relationship
between the therapist and the patient is an important aspect of therapy.
- The results of research models of therapy are far poorer
than an experienced therapist or a client would hope to expect. Generally research in therapy indicates that less than 70%
of clients will experience a 50% reduction in symptoms. Results for the treatment of depressed moods tends to show even poorer results.
Of people initially interviewed for studies in depression, using Cognitive-Behavioural or Interpersonal Psychotherapy, only
about 8% of people show sustained improvement.
- In meta-analyses of research, therapies that focus on relationships tend to show
slighlty better change in relationships while therapies that focus on symptoms tend to show slightly better response in symptom change.
As discussed previously, this is what one would expect due to the issue of the client's wish to get better and to please the therapist.
These results therefore cannot be deemed to show that any of these therapies are actually better for improvement in relationships
or symptoms.
