As good as it gets? Therapy outcomes of trainees over time.

Abstract

There is a paucity of empirical studies that demonstrate psychotherapy trainees improve at assisting their clients' therapy outcomes over time. We examined whether trainees (i.e., practicum, predoctoral interns, and postdoctoral fellows) improved in their clients' therapy outcomes over time. We examined 114 trainees (i.e., who were trainees for the first client in the database) and had over 12 months of client outcome data (M = 45.31 months). At the start of their time in our database, about half of the participants (48.2%) were predoctoral interns, 42.1% were practicum students, and 9.6% were postdoctoral fellows. Collectively, they treated 2,991 clients (M = 26 clients per trainee). Clients completed the Behavioral Health Measure, which assesses general psychological functioning (i.e., well-being, symptom distress, and life functioning), as a measure of therapy outcomes. Trainees demonstrated small-sized growth in their clients' outcomes over time (d = 0.04 per year); however, this growth was moderated by client severity. That is, trainees demonstrated growth over time in working with clients who were less distressed (d = -0.13 to 0.10 over time), but there was no change over time for trainees when working with more distressed clients (d = 0.67 to .65 over time). The results were consistent across trainee level (i.e., practicum, predoctoral intern, postdoctoral fellow), yet trainees varied in their patterns of growth. Psychotherapy training has a small, but positive, effect on trainees' ability to foster positive outcomes with their clients over time. (PsycINFO Database Record

Counseling and Psychology Student Experiences of Personal Therapy: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis

“…Of the 89 interviewees across the studies, 18% were male reflecting statistics reported about the gender balance in some fields of psychotherapy (for example, Robinson et al, 2017 ). This gender ratio also reflects the male-female make up of respondents in surveys of therapy trainees (for example, Owen et al, 2016 ). However, there is no way to find out the gender balance in therapy training courses for the review period.…”

Interpersonal Counseling in the Treatment of Adolescent Depression: A Randomized Controlled Effectiveness and Feasibility Study in School Health and Welfare Services

“…Hence, our results represent the effect of this treatment in the "practice phase." Although the SWs were given systematic and regular method-specific supervision, it is likely that their competence in providing IPC would have increased after a greater number of supervised, completed cases (Owen, Wampold, Kopta, Rousmaniere, & Miller, 2016). Although the IPC counselors adherence to clinical principles of IPC were relatively good, except for the use of communication analysis, role-playing, and decision analysis, further experience might have had a more positive effect on the results.…”

Therapist effects in yearlong psychodynamic therapy: An exploratory study

“…A large body of research concerns the influence of experience on therapist effectiveness, with the majority of studies finding no correlation between experience, therapy training, and treatment outcomes (Beutler et al, ; Erekson, Janis, Bailey, Cattani, & Pedersen, ). However, it has recently been found that therapists actually become less effective with experience (Goldberg, Rousmaniere et al, ), although some recent findings indicate that novice therapists actually improve with every year of experience, but with the improvement occurring mainly when treating clients whose symptoms are mild (Owen, Wampold, Kopta, Rousmaniere, & Miller, ). This finding is in line with the results of the present study, according to which therapist effectiveness is more relevant to clients with mild symptoms.…”