Empirically Support Treatments

Empirically Support Treatments

Empirically Support Treatments

Advocates of Empirically Supported Treatment contend that (1) clinical psychologists are researchers, (2) psychotherapy is founded on technical idea, (3) research demands empirical validation of idea, and (4) thus no pattern of psychotherapy that is not supported by empirical “proof” of its effectiveness should be countenanced. (Alvarez 2003)

We would be alarmed to discover, they contend, that physicians were carrying out untested treatments without the permission of their patients, or that the Food and Drug Administration was allowing medicines without verification of their effectiveness or information of their probably undesirable edge effects. Just so, we should be alarmed that the public has had no way of working out what is and is not productive psychotherapy and that the APA and other expert associations manage not anything to double-check that the public is defended from practitioners of what are, at best, untested treatments of mental disorder.

The strongest supports of EST inside the American Psychological Association (APA) arrive from the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology (or SSCP—Section III of Division 12—Clinical Psychology), which was formed in 1966 with the aim of encouraging the tightest likely attachment between research and perform in clinical psychology.

In the 35 years since its creation, this full of power and pledged assembly has become an progressively mighty voice inside Division 12, whose website prominently characteristics the outcome of the Task Force on Empirically Supported Treatments and suggests that persons inquire, when searching psychotherapy, what diagnosis best aligns them and what types of treatment have been scientifically verified to be productive in treating individuals with that diagnosis; it has contended that government allocations and third-party payer monies should to proceed only to practitioners of “empirically supported treatments,” and it has attempted the task of holding pathway of study that, as ...