Published in:
01-09-2017 | POINT OF VIEW
Growing Better Therapists: A New Opportunity for Mental Health Administrators
Authors:
Scott D. Miller, Mark A. Hubble, Bruce E. Wampold
Published in:
Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research
|
Issue 5/2017
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Excerpt
Thirty years have passed since Sol Garfield pointed out that efforts to understand both how psychotherapy worked and could be improved consistently neglected a critical variable: the therapist. “The variability in the performance and skill of the individual psychotherapist has for the most part been minimized or overlooked,” he asserted. Instead, he continued, the profession has, “appeared to support the uniformity hypothesis—all therapists…perform equally well” (p. 41). Subsequent research, including data reported in this special issue of
Administration and Policy in Mental and Mental Health Services Research (Schiefele et al.
2016), documents therapists do differ in their effectiveness, consistently accounting for between 3 and 9% of the variability in clinical outcomes. The question of whether such differences matter for managers and administrators requires an answer. …