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Bisanz, Erik

University of British Columbia

As demand for mental health services rises precipitously, long-held beliefs and understandings about how psychotherapeutic interventions work and how they might be improved are being challenged. Meeting growing demand for mental health care may be possible with better ways of understanding what makes therapeutic interventions work, so as to develop more effective, scalable, and/or cost-effective approaches. This research investigated how principles of common factors theory could be used to better understand and potentially optimize the delivery of mental health interventions using a novel study design. A panel of theoretical and practical experts in common factors were shown a video of a brief intervention with easily measured outcomes that could be delivered by a practitioner or self-applied in either a practice or research setting. The experts were then each interviewed about how they would improve the delivery of the method without changing the core technique, so as to focus their feedback on improving outcomes by enhancing the positive effect of the common factors. Next, the expert interviews were transcribed and coded using qualitative methodology, and the themes that emerged were used to create a second video of the intervention that was optimized based on the feedback. Finally, the experts were shown both videos side-by-side and asked whether they believed that the optimized version had leveraged their feedback and whether they would expect it to outperform the baseline version when used by a client/patient. The experts uniformly agreed that the optimized version of the intervention was improved over the original version, and they expected it would have greater positive effects when applied. These results indicate that the approach used in this study is a viable way of mobilizing insights from common factors theory in both research and practice settings. This research may help to narrow the gap between theory and practice, and it could open new avenues for studying and improving optimization and scalability of both psychotherapy and other mental health interventions.

Text

2024-04-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87926

Counselling Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/