A naturalistic psychodynamic psychotherapy study: Evaluating outcome with a patient perspective

Abstract

The difficulties in conducting psychodynamic psychotherapy research are well documented. More recent meta-analyses have demonstrated clear benefits; however, it has been argued that naturalistic studies are of more direct relevance to clinical services. UK National Health Services (NHS) provide psychodynamic psychotherapy within psychiatric settings for heterogeneous and generally complex patient populations. Much of the psychodynamic psychotherapy is provided by trainee psychiatrists who rarely have prior experience of delivering such therapy, but who are supervised by senior staff. Our naturalistic outcome study uses both quantitative and qualitative methodology, and describes a symptomatically and functionally impaired patient group (n = 384) deriving significant and clinically meaningful benefit from their therapy. Patient satisfaction and perceived change were positively correlated with each other and with symptomatic improvement. Patients' descriptive comments provided additional rich information, most commonly describing a positive outcome for therapy and the belief that therapy was too short. This study complements more formal research showing that psychodynamic psychotherapy is efficacious in outpatient settings. © 2013 BPF and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.