Effectiveness Of Psychology
Overall Effectivenss vs. Individual Effectiveness
Research evidence about the effectiveness of counselling and psychotherapy overall is relatively unambiguous: counselling does work. For a wide range of types of psychological distress, both subjective client reports and more objective measurements indicate that counselling and psychotherapy are effective, both in the short term and over longer time periods. For certain kinds of psychological distress, such as depression, some evidence also suggests that the benefits of counselling can interact positively with medications such as anti-depressants: in other words, counselling and medication together sometimes offer better results than either counselling or medication on their own.
What is more ambiguous, however, is the research evidence on the effectiveness of specific types of counselling or psychotherapy. Overall, no one therapeutic approach stands out as offering better results than any other. (However, evidence from efficacy studies is gradually accumulating to indicate that some kinds of distress are particularly well addressed by certain approaches; clients with panic disorders, for instance, often respond particularly well to cognitive behavioural therapy.) At first glance, it might seem that this failure to discriminate between therapeutic approaches in terms of overall effectiveness could be attributed simply to the fact that different people will respond in their own ways to different types of counselling: if clients choose the 'right' or 'wrong' types of therapy only by accident, this might result in particular types offering good results in some areas and bad results in others, with the overall result that no one type of counselling would stand out. But because studies are typically designed to detect and isolate these types of regularities, we know that random choice about therapy type does not, by itself, provide a sufficient explanation of the evidence.
While no one type...
Please login to view the full essay...