Who Needs a Case Formulation and Why: Clinicians Use the Case Formulation to Guide Decision-Making

Abstract

Protocols for empirically-supported treatments (ESTs) typically do not require the therapist to develop an individualized formulation of the patient, nor do they describe procedures for doing this. I offer some hypotheses about why the idiographic case formulation receives short shrift in most EST protocols, I describe an exception to this general rule, and I conclude with a discussion of implications of these ideas for psychotherapy research.