Study Examines Psychotherapy: Who Should Get It and Who Shouldn't
A team of researchers led by Mark Kopta of the University of Evansville has developed a method to predict patients' recovery in psychotherapy. According to the team's study, which appears in an article in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (October 1999), it is now possible to know, in advance, which patients can benefit from psychotherapy and which ones can't.
This ideal situation for managed mental health care is to know whether a patient will respond to psychotherapy before it's administered. A successful method for predicting treatment outcomes saves resources by immediately directing patients to the best treatments rather than wasting time and money in trial-and-error approaches. The team of researchers, lead by Kopta of the University of Evansville and Scott Leon, Northwestern University, present a methodology that predicts course of recovery across sessions for individual patients in psychotherapy. Furthermore, the method indicates the likelihood, for each patient, that the prediction will be correct.
The article describes the use of patient profiling to predict mental health levels across psychotherapy sessions for 890 patients treated by managed care programs. By inspecting statistically derived mental health curves, the researchers report being 75 percent accurate in their predictions. Interestingly, they found that certain patients are more predictable than others. For one group of patients, accuracy levels reached over 93 percent; for another group, they were only in the 25 percent range.
A major consideration for predictability was the level of satisfaction between the patients and the patients' romantic partner: the less satisfying the relationship, the more predictable the patient's response to treatment. What factors influence whether or not a patient can be helped with psychotherapy? The researchers note that patients with the following characteristics are more likely to benefit from treatment: less symptomatic; more optimistic with greater peace of mind; functioning better in life areas such as work, family, and self management; more confident that psychotherapy will help; have experienced their psychological difficulties for a shorter period of time; and have had less psychotherapy before the current episode.
Kopta says this research represents a giant step in helping patients. "This is the first major breakthrough in controlling the cost of psychotherapy without sacrificing some of its benefits," he says. "With patient profiling, patients can now be treated more effectively in briefer amounts of time." The journal can be viewed online at: http://www.apa.org/journals/ccp/1099tc.html
For more information, or to obtain a copy of the study, contact Dr. Mark Kopta [email protected] at the University of Evansville, in Evansville, Indiana, 812-479-2520, or at home, 812-867-7701. Or call Marsha Jackson, university relations, 812-479-2562.
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