About this Research Topic
Over the last decade, psychotherapy was considered a complex form of interaction, which in many ways is different to relationships in ordinary life. Regardless of the specific therapeutic method, the therapist’s role is to facilitate patients’ change and to improve functioning. From the researcher’s perspective, treatment failures have been related to negative interpersonal processes in psychotherapy. There is significant evidence of a substantial variance in treatment outcome between different therapists. Therapists may be more important for therapeutic success than the type of intervention they deliver. Furthermore, while therapists differ in their average outcomes, most therapists have at least some successful outcome cases. On the other hand, even the most effective therapists have experience of unsuccessful treatments where patients did not improve. Thus, most therapists have experiences of both successful and unsuccessful treatments. What makes the difference? How come psychoanalytic psychotherapy sometimes does not work and how can we prevent it? Finally, is it possible to identify the reasons of underlying unsuccessful therapeutic processes regardless of the psychotherapeutic model?
In our opinion, understanding when and how treatments are unhelpful or have negative effects is a key question. This Research Topic welcomes all psychotherapeutic models and orientations, as well as all different treatment settings. Research on unhelpful aspects of psychotherapy could be of immense help to clinical approaches as well as to theoretical developments. Such research is also a necessity if we do not wish patients to be harmed by psychotherapy. We would like to encourage the potential authors to present their research strategies, relevant results, and clinical implications from their studies. We welcome studies with different methodologies, both RCT and naturalistic, both quantitative and qualitative, conducted in different settings and focusing on different therapeutic orientations. Our ambition is to gather papers presenting different points of view and substantially contributing to the issue of what we, as researchers and clinicians, can learn from unsuccessful treatments.
Keywords: Unsuccessful Treatments, Nonresponse, Deterioration, Side Effects, Negative Processes
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