Post by Admin on Nov 6, 2023 12:26:32 GMT
Patients Laud Focus on Therapy Relationship in Psychodynamic Treatment
Patients challenge conventional wisdom in public healthcare settings by emphasizing the power of the therapy relationship in their treatment.
By Javier Rizo -November 1, 2023
www.madinamerica.com/2023/11/patients-laud-focus-on-therapy-relationship-in-psychodynamic-treatment/
New research finds that patients in public healthcare settings find relationally oriented treatments, such as psychodynamic psychotherapy, helpful to them in a variety of ways. Clinician-researchers led by Dr. Hannah Richardson from the Cambridge Health Alliance, a public medical system associated with Harvard Medical School, recently published results from their study in The Journal of Mental Health Training, Education, and Practice to understand what patients receiving psychodynamic psychotherapy found helpful in their treatment.
While they found that most patients thought their treatment was helpful, they often mentioned their therapist as an essential element of helpful treatment. Such findings highlight the value of interpersonal connections as a part of treatment and that patients outside the traditional psychotherapy practice setting value treatments that focus on this connection (i.e., psychodynamic therapy). The authors reviewed some of the current research on patients’ perspectives of good therapy, noting that they are not very common and that:
“Although interventions such as single-session therapy may rely less on the therapeutic relationship, it is unclear whether they can be helpful to patients with complex problems… The therapeutic relationship emerges repeatedly in the literature as helpful regardless of the study design or population. Other factors perceived as helpful by patients across modalities include personal contact, awareness/ insight/understanding, behavioral change/problem solution, empowerment, exploring feelings/emotional experiencing, relief, feeling understood, patient involvement, reassurance/support/safety, and ‘voicing.’”
The authors wanted to understand what patients found helpful in psychodynamic psychotherapy, which hasn’t received much attention in patient-centered research. They also wanted to understand whether patients’ reporting of what they found helpful in psychodynamic psychotherapy changed with 100 patients three months into treatment and 88 patients after ending therapy.
Patients who agreed to receive follow-up questionnaires from the researchers were asked one open-ended question about what they found most helpful about the treatment they received at the clinic, along with the patients’ numerical rating of how beneficial the therapy had been. Patients in the study had an average length of therapy of 10.5 months or approximately 44 mostly weekly sessions. In addition to receiving psychodynamic psychotherapy, about half of the patients also reported receiving psychiatric medication as part of their treatment.
The authors analyzed patients’ feedback on their treatment experiences by categorizing and organizing their responses into themes based on perceived patterns while prioritizing code development that emphasized inter-rater agreement and consistency among researchers. From these initial analyses of responses from patients three months into treatment, the authors created a codebook of 16 categories to deductively code patients’ responses after completing treatment. This led to the analysis of the themes that connected the codes.
From this analysis, the authors found that the most common codes found in patients’ responses of what they found therapeutic in treatment were having someone to talk to, having structure in treatment (a consistent and frequent therapeutic ‘frame’), and symptom relief/improved functioning.
rest in link.
Patients challenge conventional wisdom in public healthcare settings by emphasizing the power of the therapy relationship in their treatment.
By Javier Rizo -November 1, 2023
www.madinamerica.com/2023/11/patients-laud-focus-on-therapy-relationship-in-psychodynamic-treatment/
New research finds that patients in public healthcare settings find relationally oriented treatments, such as psychodynamic psychotherapy, helpful to them in a variety of ways. Clinician-researchers led by Dr. Hannah Richardson from the Cambridge Health Alliance, a public medical system associated with Harvard Medical School, recently published results from their study in The Journal of Mental Health Training, Education, and Practice to understand what patients receiving psychodynamic psychotherapy found helpful in their treatment.
While they found that most patients thought their treatment was helpful, they often mentioned their therapist as an essential element of helpful treatment. Such findings highlight the value of interpersonal connections as a part of treatment and that patients outside the traditional psychotherapy practice setting value treatments that focus on this connection (i.e., psychodynamic therapy). The authors reviewed some of the current research on patients’ perspectives of good therapy, noting that they are not very common and that:
“Although interventions such as single-session therapy may rely less on the therapeutic relationship, it is unclear whether they can be helpful to patients with complex problems… The therapeutic relationship emerges repeatedly in the literature as helpful regardless of the study design or population. Other factors perceived as helpful by patients across modalities include personal contact, awareness/ insight/understanding, behavioral change/problem solution, empowerment, exploring feelings/emotional experiencing, relief, feeling understood, patient involvement, reassurance/support/safety, and ‘voicing.’”
The authors wanted to understand what patients found helpful in psychodynamic psychotherapy, which hasn’t received much attention in patient-centered research. They also wanted to understand whether patients’ reporting of what they found helpful in psychodynamic psychotherapy changed with 100 patients three months into treatment and 88 patients after ending therapy.
Patients who agreed to receive follow-up questionnaires from the researchers were asked one open-ended question about what they found most helpful about the treatment they received at the clinic, along with the patients’ numerical rating of how beneficial the therapy had been. Patients in the study had an average length of therapy of 10.5 months or approximately 44 mostly weekly sessions. In addition to receiving psychodynamic psychotherapy, about half of the patients also reported receiving psychiatric medication as part of their treatment.
The authors analyzed patients’ feedback on their treatment experiences by categorizing and organizing their responses into themes based on perceived patterns while prioritizing code development that emphasized inter-rater agreement and consistency among researchers. From these initial analyses of responses from patients three months into treatment, the authors created a codebook of 16 categories to deductively code patients’ responses after completing treatment. This led to the analysis of the themes that connected the codes.
From this analysis, the authors found that the most common codes found in patients’ responses of what they found therapeutic in treatment were having someone to talk to, having structure in treatment (a consistent and frequent therapeutic ‘frame’), and symptom relief/improved functioning.
rest in link.