Advancement in Psychological Treatment
While there hasn’t been an intense focus on improving standard to treating mental illnesses, there has been improvements on figuring out which types of psychological treatments are best suited for each mental illnesses bringing about improvement.
The article “Psychological Treatments” by The Society of Clinical Psychology discusses current psychological treatments that are currently established and have been effective at treating specific psychological diseases, so medical professionals can easily distinguish which treatment the client needs. The research article should be used as a base, and with the therapist’s knowledge can be utilized to to find the best treatment for each patient.
The treatments are given a brief discussion, with evidence backing them on how they are able to effectively thwart the problem. To categorize the effectiveness of the psychological treatments there were two sets of guidelines in place: the first set was created in 1998 by Chambless & Hollon, which ranks treatments as strong, modest, or controversial while the newer set from 2015, by Tolin et al., ranks treatments as very strong, strong, weak, or lacking enough evidence. This updated system uses studies that combine the results of many RCTs (called meta-analyses). The newer set of guidelines is able to keep up with the advancement in treatments there are, not all treatments have been evaluated by the newer guideline and are still regulated by the Chambless & Hollon guidelines.
The research article shows how crucial research is for any aspect in the medical field especially psychology, while psychology has been around for while the mind is ever evolving so there will be new knowledge to be found. Psychologists have to be knowledgeable on the recent research and experiments, especially pertaining to treatments that are being used on their clients.
The main reason there needs to be accurate guidelines is to know what exactly counts as psychological treatment, since that’s what the patients require. This raised concerns that non-psychological or even pseudoscientific treatments could sneak into the system and get evaluated unfairly. So each psychological treatment was accurately evaluated using studies that combine the results of many RCTs (called meta-analyses). They then compared the evaluation standard of each treatment by listing it the way it was previously viewed using the Chambless & Hollon (1998) guidelines versus the Tolin et al., 2015 guidelines. The newer guidelines for the treatments go more in depth in the research on how it has shown effectiveness across the board.
This is important since psychologist need to understand the particular therapies that exist and what efficiency they work in regards to the particular illness/ ailment the patient may have. The article also emphasized that while not all treatments on the SCP list have been updated with the newest research, some may still be very effective. There’s just not enough manpower or resources to constantly re-evaluate everything. Through the article you can learn more about how The Society of Clinical Psychology (SCP) has been working to identify and share psychological treatments that are backed by solid research to help professionals.
Link to article – Psychological Treatments