Browsing by Author "Korhonen, Emma"

Goals: Social relationships and social support are considered to have significant impact on people’s mental health. Significance of social support is highlighted in psychotherapy, as confidential therapeutic relationship between a client and a therapist is seen as one of the most important factors predicting effectiveness of the therapy. Accordingly, opportunity for the patient to get social support outside of the therapy may be beneficial for the success of the therapy. The aim of this study was to examine if self-reported social support predicts changes of work ability in psychotherapy and whether the prediction varies in different therapies. Methods: This study is part of the Helsinki Psychotherapy Study and is based on it’s study population, where 326 patients suffering either mood or anxiety disorder were randomly assigned to short-term solution-focused therapy (SFT), short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (SPP) or long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (LPP). Participants were divided to groups of strong and weak social support by the mediation of the total score of the Brief Inventory of Social Support and Integration (BISSI). Effectiveness of therapies in different groups was evaluated by changes in work ability assessed with five different methods in five-year follow-up. Results and conclusions: Self-reported social support had different impact on work ability in different therapy groups. The most significant and completely new finding was that patients with weak social support benefited from SFT more than LPP in the beginning of the follow-up and more than SPP at the end of the follow-up. Also in the group of weaker social support short therapies had a faster response than long therapy and LPP better results than SPP in long-term follow-up. In the group of better social support similar differences occurred only when both length and type of therapy were different. This study suggests that prediction varies in different therapies, but differences inside therapy groups are lesser than expected. Amount of researches of the subject is very limited and more research is needed.