Browsing by Author "Grandell, Leena"

Objectives. Psychotherapy research has traditionally concentrated on the positive outcome of therapy whereas negative outcome has not been an object of interest. A comparison to psychopharmacological treatment, for which reporting of side-effects is mandatory, reveals a difference. The area of psychotherapy outcome has lacked consensus on theoretical, methodological and practical issues. This bachelor thesis is a literature review on the subject. The review is limited to cover research projects dealing with adult individual psychotherapy for mood and anxiety disorders concentrating on cognitive and psychodynamic therapy orientations. Method. The Bachelor thesis consisted of a literature review covering international scientific papers on negative outcome of psychotherapy concentrating on following research questions: operationalisation of psychotherapy outcome, measures for monitoring outcome, categorisation of psychotherapy outcome and methods for distinction between the categories. Additionally the work covered a review on quantitative results. Results and conclusions. No consensus on measuring psychotherapy outcome and the categorisation of outcome was evident. A typical approach was using the categories “recovered”, “improved”, “non-response” and “deteriorated”. Two alternative means of operationalising the psychotherapy outcome could be found. Measures for estimating symptomatic level, interpsychological functioning and social functioning were combined with the reliable change index (RCI) to assess observed changes. Another alternative formed measures to assess directly adverse effects of psychotherapy. Quantitative estimates of negative outcome were consistent: prevalence of deteriorated patients varied between 1 – 7% and share of non-responders was 39-67%