Clin Psy

PSYCHOTHERAPY OUTCOME

A MODERN HEALTH PROFESSION

by

Wolfgang Linden and Paul L. Hewitt

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Narrative Review

• In a narrative review, a researcher provides detailed descriptions of the existing studies and sums up the results in a conclusion section that reflects the author’s judgment of that literature.
• It should be written in a way that allows other researchers to replicate the results.

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What Questions Are Meta-Analytic Reviews Trying to Answer?

• The obvious overall questions asked in meta-analysis are whether a given treatment XX alleviates a particular disorder and whether or not treatment XX is superior to other available treatments.
• This requires controlled clinical trials that have comparison groups built-in.

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What Questions Are Meta-Analytic Reviews Trying to Answer?

• A meta-analysis should consider the fact that psychological therapy outcomes are affected by factors including
• ethnicity
• age of the patient
• length of therapy
• gender of the client

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What Questions Are Meta-Analytic Reviews Trying to Answer? (cont'd)

• A meta-analysis should consider the fact that psychological therapy outcomes are affected by factors including
• level of distress before treatment
• delivery form

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What Questions Are Meta-Analytic Reviews Trying to Answer? (cont'd)

• Many researchers who have published meta-analyses cluster the outcomes into variables like
• mortality rates
• reduced use of medications
• fewer physician visits
• biological markers of a disease
• self-report measures of distress

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What Has Been Learned From Existing Meta-Analyses?

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What Has Been Learned From Existing Meta-Analyses? (cont'd)

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What Has Been Learned From Existing Meta-Analyses? (cont'd)

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Cost-Effectiveness of Psychological Therapies

• Patients and insurance companies want to know how cost-effective psychological services are if they are to pay for them.
• Given the explosions in healthcare worldwide, clinical psychology has no choice but to document how effective services are and show what the cost implications are.

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Cost-Effectiveness of Psychological Therapies (cont’d)

• The research on this topic has given the clinical psychology field the opportunity to market itself.
• In order to be effective, these studies should describe how much money treatment has to cost relative to other health expenses and how it benefits the economy.

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Cost-Effectiveness of Psychological Therapies (cont'd)