ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2020
What Research Evidence Is Valid for Psychotherapy Research?
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effectiveness of psychotherapy for Hwa-Byung: A systematic review of interventional studies.Medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Cognitive behavioural therapy for the treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome in adults - a meta-analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Mentalization-based treatment for adolescents with conduct disorder (MBT-CD): a feasibility study.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2023Trial
- Do Sleep Disturbances Improve Following Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Adolescent Depression?International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Trial
- Does Depression and Relationship Distress Predict Longer Couple Therapy Treatment in Naturalistic Settings?Journal of marital and family therapy · 2026Article
- How Many Anxious Kids in Community Mental Health Would Be Eligible for an RCT? And Does It Matter? Insights from a Naturalistic Sample and a Non-Systematic Review.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- A critical appraisal of integrating family constellation therapy with pharmacological treatment for depression.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Review
- Evidence Synthesis in Youth Mental Health for Low- and Middle-Income Countries.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2025Article
- Adaptive mentalization-based integrative therapy for severe personality disorder and mental illness: study protocol for a controlled longitudinal cohort study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depressive Disorders: Enhancing Access and Tailoring Interventions in Diverse Settings.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2024Review
- Process and outcome of outpatient psychotherapies under clinically representative conditions in Austria: protocol and feasibility of an ongoing study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Two people making sense of a story: narrative exposure therapy as a trauma intervention in early intervention in psychosis.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2024Article
- Randomized Trials of Psychotherapeutic Treatment for Psychogenic Seizures: Scoping Review.Indian journal of psychological medicine · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) have contributed to improved clinical practice with increased use of effective and life-saving treatments for severe diseases. However, the EBM model is less suitable for psychotherapy research than for pharmacological research and somatic medicine. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) design is an example of experimental methodology, which inevitably has more imperfections in psychotherapy research because psychotherapy RCTs cannot use double-blinding and the treatments tested are composite treatment packages. Long-term psychotherapy for severe and complex mental disorders is especially difficult to study with an RCT design. During the last decades, advanced analytic methods have been developed in psychotherapy process research, which enables investigation of causal connections regarding change mechanisms in psychotherapy. Therefore, we propose that the top of the research evidence hierarchy for psychotherapy should encompass: (1) RCT for circumscribed disorders, (2) cohort studies for complex disorders, and (3) advanced process studies for change mechanisms.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.