An increased openness to diverse theoretical perspectives

Transcription

1 Special Article Psychotherapy Research New Findings and Implications for Training and Practice Per Høglend, M.D., Ph.D. The last decade has seen progress in psychotherapy research, despite the methodological complexity in this field. However, empirical research has influenced training and clinical practice to only a limited extent. This article is a brief evaluation of trends and some findings in modern psychotherapy research that may influence professional psychotherapy training and practice. (The Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research 1999; 8: ) An increased openness to diverse theoretical perspectives and a somewhat greater interest in empirical evaluation have characterized the field of professional psychotherapy during recent years. Several aspects of the macro-theories of personality and therapeutic change such as the behavioral, psychoanalytic, humanistic, and others have not held up to scrutiny by empirical research, nor have they been translatable into operations that will bear scrutiny. Renewed versions of hermeneutic, social constructionist, and qualitative approaches appear promising but so far have had limited value. More pragmatic clinical theories and mini-theories to guide questions of technique are derived from empirical research, and the trend toward mini-theories centered on specific problem domains and empirical evaluations will continue. Today there are fewer classical analysts, strict behaviorists, or biomedical reductionists than in the past. 1 The empirical analysis and merging of behavioral and cognitive psychotherapy is one salient trend. Behaviorists have not only accepted the importance of cognition, but are now including affect and altered versions of the idea of unconscious processes in their treatment. Psychodynamic therapy has become more short-term and focused, especially in North America. Research evidence has undermined the notion that transference interpretation in particular is the key to ef- Received December 11, 1998; revised March 30, 1999; accepted April 22, From the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 85, Vinderen, 0319 Oslo, Norway. Send correspondence to Dr. Høglend at the above address. Copyright 1999 American Psychiatric Association J Psychother Pract Res, 8:4, Fall

2 Psychotherapy Research: New Findings ficacy in the psychodynamic approach, at least within brief time limits. 2 4 The psychodynamic approach seems to move closer to the cognitive-behavioral orientation, but it retains an important focus on the depths of the therapeutic relationship and work on defenses as clinical tools. The nondirective approach of Carl Rogers and others can be enhanced with more directive and expressive techniques. 5 COMMON FACTORS VERSUS SPECIFIC TECHNIQUES Psychotherapy is generally effective beyond the effects of placebo controls. 6 8 On the average, 63 out of 100 patients achieve successful outcomes with systematic psychotherapy versus 38 out of 100 with placebo or minimal treatment. A good deal of change can be stimulated in a much shorter time than previously thought. McNeilly and Howard 6 indicate that about half the outpatients who undergo psychotherapy show significant improvement by the eighth session and that most cases of mild and moderate severity show good symptom change within about 26 weekly sessions. The demonstrated effect sizes are not due to effects of small sample sizes, nonrandomized designs, or bias in published versus unpublished studies. 8 However, it is difficult to conceptualize theoretically the overall equal outcomes of various techniques, schools, and formats. Mainstream theoretical approaches assume that common factors exist in all or almost all therapies and account for a considerable amount of observed change. The common factors may be the therapeutic relationship, faith in the wisdom of the sanctioned healer, and reconditioning via learning. Yet there is no good theory or precise description of such factors. The overall equal average outcomes of different therapies may also be due to insensitive outcome measures and/or small sample sizes (low power) in most studies. When neurotic symptoms are not too severe, common factors may be responsible for most of the outcome variance. However, recent empirical evidence demonstrates that, at least with more severe cases, important specific technique differences emerge in the treatment of depression, 9,10 phobias and panic, 11,12 substance abuse, 13 schizophrenia, 14 and health-related dysfunctions such as drinking, smoking, headache, compulsions, and insomnia. Active and specifically targeted interventions have on the average added something unique over and above the effect of common or unspecific factors. Furthermore, several patient characteristics seem to interact with variation in therapeutic techniques in producing differential outcomes. For example, less directive treatments appear to be superior to more directive treatments among patients with an internal locus of perceived control, whereas the opposite relationship seems to hold among patients with an external locus of perceived control. 15,16 More motivated and interpersonally better adjusted patients may do better with an exploratory dynamic technique, whereas more dependent patients do better (or equally well) with supportive technique. 17,18 Patients with a life history of high-quality interpersonal relationships tend to do better with a brief, focused dynamic treatment, whereas patients with a life history of low-quality interpersonal relationships tend to do better with a less focused psychodynamic therapy. 4,19,20 Perfectionistic patients may need long-term therapy, whereas less perfectionistic patients do relatively well with brief treatments. 21 Patients preoccupied with interpersonal relatedness may benefit mainly from the real relationship offered by a more active therapist, whereas patients preoccupied with self-definition, autonomy, and control may benefit mainly from interpretations and insight. 21 Depressed patients with an elevated level of avoidant traits may do better with cognitive therapy, whereas patients with an elevated level of obsessive traits do better with interpersonal therapy. 22 Patients low on a trait measure of antisocial personality disorder do better in self-directed verbal psychotherapies, whereas patients with more antisocial personality traits do better in more directive treatments. 23 Most of these findings are derived from post hoc exploratory analyses. Less robust findings from studies of patient-treatment matching have emerged so far. If replicated and extended, however, such findings could prove of great importance. THE PATIENT AND THE THERAPIST Psychotherapy research has demonstrated, as experienced clinicians have believed for a long time, that the patients personal characteristics are most important for the therapeutic alliance and for outcome. Suitable patients achieve successful outcome three times as often as less suitable patients. Suitable patients are generally characterized by less problematic personality traits, a good ability to establish stable mutual relationships, and a good ability to verbalize and cooperate J Psychother Pract Res, 8:4, Fall 1999

3 Høglend The evidence that therapist differences produce differences in outcome has increased substantially. 25 Skillful therapists use the techniques prescribed by the therapy method or manual, but in a flexible and competent way. They adjust their interventions according to the patient s maturity and responses. They sustain an optimistic but realistic attitude toward the patient, and they very seldom intervene in a critical, unfriendly, or unclear way. They do not avoid certain difficult issues in the therapeutic process, and they focus on important cognitive and affective material. However, it is much less clear what it is that creates a skillful therapist. The research in this area is limited and inconclusive. It is not consistently demonstrated that variables such as age, personality, profession, formal psychotherapy training, years of clinical experience, personal psychotherapy, or amount of supervision have any significant relationship to the therapist s skillfulness or the outcome of psychotherapy. Medical doctors and clinical psychologists with many years of training, personal therapy, and supervision tend to have lower attrition rates. But they do not consistently achieve better outcomes than, for example, relatively inexperienced social workers or psychiatric nurses. This area urgently needs more and better quality research documentation. PROCESS RESEARCH Significant progress is being made in studying more clearly defined process units and their relationships to outcome. More than 100 empirical findings support the position that the quality of the therapeutic alliance (i.e., the quality of the cooperation and mutual understanding between the patient and the therapist) is significantly associated with favorable outcome. The findings generally favor a cooperative attitude from the therapist versus a more directive attitude. 26 Thus, there is almost conclusive evidence that suitable patients who are open and have the ability to establish a good therapeutic alliance with a skillful therapist who conducts a clearly defined therapeutic method that is not too brief will achieve a favorable outcome. A long waiting period before treatment is clearly undesirable. OUTCOME MEASUREMENT Precise measurement of clinical phenomena continues to be relatively problematic in process and outcome research. Hundreds of measures are used once or only a few times, without adequately demonstrated reliability and validity. However, significant progress has been made in some areas for example, with the new alliance scales and measures of depression. Methodological problems have led to a bewildering array of suggestions about the design and statistical analysis of quantitative change. 27 Individual growth curve modeling, based on many repeated assessments of each patient s status over time, is currently recommended. 28 Outcome assessment to some degree must involve different perspectives (patient, therapist, independent evaluator), different dimensions (symptoms, personality, social functioning), and also mode-specific and general outcome measures. It is clear that different measures and measurement methods are consistently different in their tendencies to reflect change. Meta-analysis combining different measures cannot overcome the differences between measures. A possibly important innovation has been the renewed emphasis on clinical significance as opposed to statistical significance of results. Clinical significance can be determined by establishing a normative reference criterion based on the absence of symptoms or the status of a normal group of nonpatients. It is interesting that the more stringent categories of clinical significance are comparable to results identified earlier by simple rating scales that used categories such as cured, much improved, moderately improved, and unchanged. Under both these sets of criteria, about one-fourth to onethird of outpatient cases were considered cured at the end of psychotherapy. 1 There is a considerable interest in the long-term effects of therapy, but there is limited empirical knowledge. It had been concluded earlier that differences between treated groups and control groups are smaller at follow-up than at the end of therapy. Untreated control patients tended to catch up with treated subjects with the passage of time. 29 More recent reviews, however, tend to find that differences between treated and control patients are virtually the same at post-treatment and follow-ups. 30,31 Some studies even suggest a trend toward the continuing increase of differences during long-term follow-up periods For recurrent disorders, no brief psychological treatments have clearly demonstrated ability to protect against relapses after therapy. Cognitive therapy for depression may, however, have a small relapse-prevention effect. Some studies outside behavioral psychology have also begun to explore long-term J Psychother Pract Res, 8:4, Fall

4 Psychotherapy Research: New Findings strategies to enhance the maintenance of treatment effects. 36 MEDICATION AND PSYCHOTHERAPY Discussions of the relative efficacy of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, in comparison and in combination with one another, tend to be less influenced by ideology in recent years. More clinicians in psychiatry and psychology believe that combined treatment provides improvement over the individual treatments. It generally has been difficult to demonstrate significant benefits for combined treatments in comparison with single modalities. However, exceptions exist. Supportive or educational psychotherapeutic interventions for both patient and family, when added to long-term neuroleptic treatment, significantly reduce the relapse rate over and above either treatment alone for schizophrenic patients. 37 Furthermore, exposure plus antidepressive medication does better in agoraphobia than either treatment alone. 38 Three earlier controlled studies, which evaluated the effect of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy in long-term treatment of depression, supported the hypothesis that symptom relief, most readily produced by pharmacotherapy, rendered the patient more accessible to psychotherapy, which produced the strongest effects in social functioning and interpersonal relationships. 37 A recent mega-analysis demonstrated that combined therapy for severe depressions (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression score 20 during 4 weeks) is superior to psychotherapy alone. 39 A large-scale maintenance study, 36 however, reported no trend toward value of combined treatment over expert pharmacotherapy alone. In the treatment of several anxiety disorders, both psychological and pharmacological interventions are on the average equally effective. However, exposure has more lasting benefits with obsessive-compulsive patients than medication alone, 11 and cognitive therapy seems superior for bulimia, compared with medication. The usefulness of combined treatments remains to be more adequately tested empirically, on larger patient samples and on inpatients. It is interesting to note that no psychotherapy treatment manual that is designed to facilitate the effects of medication or increase compliance with medication is yet published. Benzodiazepines may inhibit long-term effects of exposure therapy for agoraphobia, 40 but there are no other empirical studies to indicate that pharmacotherapy inhibits effects of psychotherapy or vice versa. As to whether nonresponders to medication do better with psychotherapy or with a combination of the two treatments, there is no systematic empirical evidence available to guide clinical decision making on this question. THERAPIES FOR SPECIFIC DISORDERS Although the American Psychological Association Task Force produced a list of empirically validated therapies (efficacious treatments) for mental disorders in 1995, such an attempt carries severe limitations. 41 There are promising psychological treatments for most mild to moderately severe adult disorders. Most of the treatments are brief cognitive or behavioral interventions. The only exceptions are supportive-expressive psychodynamic therapy for opiate dependence and interpersonal therapy (IPT) for depression. 42 However, psychotherapy interventions that are not included on the list are missing, by and large, because they have not been subjected to controlled clinical trials with such patient populations. In particular, the psychodynamic practice community has tended to place less value on clinical trial methodology. EFFECTIVENESS IN GENERAL SETTINGS The so-called effectiveness or clinical utility of the treatments that is, what happens when the treatments are exported from controlled conditions (mostly university settings) into the field is not extensively studied. IPT for depression effectively treats major depression among primary care patients when provided by mental health professionals. Approximately 70% of patients participating in full psychotherapy or pharmacotherapy protocols, but only 20% of primary physicians usualcare patients, were judged as recovered at 8-month follow-up. 43 The effects of multisystemic therapy (MST) for violent and chronic juvenile offenders have been very impressive in controlled settings, but the effectiveness of MST could not be maintained in community mental health settings. 44 The Consumer Reports study of about 3,000 patients treated by mental health professionals and family doctors may give some indications about the effectiveness of psychotherapy as it is practiced in the community. 45 Mental health professionals did significantly better than family doctors, but only when the treatment duration was more than 6 months. Long-term treatments 260 J Psychother Pract Res, 8:4, Fall 1999

5 Høglend ( 6 months) were associated with better outcomes. The overall average effects for treatment by mental health professionals converged roughly with meta-analyses of efficacy. 7,8 The Consumer Reports study was retrospective, the patient sample mostly self-selected, with no control groups, and outcome measures were global. It cannot answer questions about efficacy, but it strongly indicates that psychotherapy helps those who actually seek it. Cost-benefit analyses of psychotherapies have so far been too sparse and primitive to guide clinical decisions. METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM Methodological pluralism seems to be supported by more and more people studying clinical phenomena. Journal editors and granting agencies still seem to focus on experimental and multivariate quantitative methodologies, mainly because methodological procedures and quality criteria have been difficult to establish in phenomenological and qualitative research. Designs using no-treatment control groups, placebo control treatments, or comparison with an alternative therapy cannot identify the efficiency of a specific technique or component of the treatment package. Therefore, so-called dismantling and constructive design strategies, in which single components are added, subtracted, or varied, tend to be used more often in psychotherapy research. Use of treatment manuals tends to reduce the effects of therapist differences and facilitates replication and comparison of findings across studies. However, although therapists can be trained to manual adherence, there seems to be no straightforward way of improving alliance and outcome by manual training. 4,46,47 Treatment manuals may underemphasize clinical judgment and flexibility. RESEARCH-INFORMED PSYCHOTHERAPY The question of how psychotherapy works that is, what are the specific mechanisms of change is still subject to much speculation. For example, four mechanisms of change have been described: mastery/coping, clarification of meaning/motives, problem actuation/experience of problem, and personal resource activation. 48 All four mechanisms can be activated by concrete therapeutic procedures, depending on the needs of the individual patient and his or her situation. Therapists allegiance to therapy schools and theoretical models may be blinders to integration of the many different therapeutic procedures for activation of basic change procedures (interpretation, exposure, Socratic dialogue, gestalt, support, education, family). Integration may be a challenge for the next decade of psychotherapy research. Clinical trials (for example, dismantling designs), large-scale observational studies in the field, detailed process research, and intensive studies with good qualitative methodology may all contribute. IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING AND CLINICAL PRACTICE Research findings are not readily absorbed into therapist communities. Practitioners may reject psychotherapy research as oversimplistic. Or they may limit their interest to only those studies that apply directly to their current practice. There is also an inherent tension between clinical judgment, creativity, and innovation on the one hand, and firm clinical guidelines based on efficacy research on the other hand. Clinical judgment can never be fully manualized. Expert practitioners may be those who are able to use manuals and technical recommendations flexibly in accordance with patient characteristics and the clinical situation. The aim of clinical guidelines should be to achieve practice that is firmly rooted in research findings but at the same time to nurture development of clinical judgment. There is no incompatibility between jazz improvisation and extensive scale practice. There should be no incompatibility between learning to use manualized techniques and development of clinical flexibility and creativity. Current research and clinical experience both suggest that training in more than one treatment modality enhances therapist expertise. Training should therefore include both exploratory psychotherapy and a more structured psychotherapy modality. Psychotherapy curricula should also include some knowledge about specifically targeted techniques for different disorders. Nonspecific (or poorly structured) psychotherapy is less effective for many psychiatric disorders. 49 Preliminary evidence indicates that manualized training in specific treatment modalities should use audiotaped or videotaped sessions and structure the learning experiences to provide specific directive feedback, with a focus on therapists thought processes. 50 J Psychother Pract Res, 8:4, Fall

6 Psychotherapy Research: New Findings Knowledge based on current research is important in training psychotherapists for clinical practice. Trainees need a good deal of research-based knowledge in order to be able to educate and inform patients about psychiatric disorders and alternative available treatments; at the same time, some knowledge about patients orientation, abilities, and willingness to accept the recommended treatment techniques may be an important aspect of therapist expertise. Trainees should achieve competence in recognizing when more specialized care or long-term treatment is required. Some knowledge of long-term maintenance treatments and procedures for relapse prevention may be central in the treatment of patients with recurrent disorders, high comorbidity, or poor social functioning. Despite the limited evidence for the superiority of combined psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy treatment, combined treatment is reasonable to try with nonresponders. Therapists also need to learn how to monitor treatment delivery and patient progress. Use of a brief measure of symptoms and a measure of the therapeutic alliance may give important feedback about treatment progress. Evidence-based psychotherapy practice implies continuous exchange of information among researchers, clinicians, service providers, and third-party payers. Furthermore, consumers of psychotherapy are exposed to unbalanced and potentially misleading information about mental health treatment through the media. Providing users with research-based information about effective treatments for various disorders may influence clinical practice in favorable directions. REFERENCES 1. Bergin AE, Garfield SL: Overview, trends and future issues, in Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, 4th edition, edited by Bergin AE, Garfield SL. 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