The outpatient psychotherapy project PAP-S investigates patients treated in outpatient psychotherapies. 10 different therapy concepts (humanistic, psychodynamic, body therapies) with approx. 100 therapists and about 350 patients are included in the study and will be investigated in several regards: time-dosage-outcome relationships in the treatment concepts under study, therapeutic relationship and outcome, treatment adherence and outcome. All therapy sessions are audiotaped and therapists do not know which sessions will be drawn by chance for objective ratings by raters who are blind towards school affiliation of therapists.
Raters are trained using an intervention manual which covers school specific and nonspecific interventions. This presentation reports about first preliminary results regarding treatment fidelity and outcome across concepts involving 107 therapy sessions from 37 patients, treated by 22 therapists from 7 out of the 10 concepts under study. In sharp contrast to therapists’ own subjective ratings measured after each session, the objective ratings reveal that the school true interventions add up to a maximum of 10 – 20 percent or less while unspecific and interventions from other concepts range between 30 and 50 percent each.
Nevertheless treatment outcomes reflect in most cases that therapies ended successful. If these preliminary results should be confirmed by including remaining concepts and therapists, an answer would be found for the question as to why different therapy schools achieve comparable results (so-called outcome equivalence or dodo bird verdict): therapists would do rather similar things and would intervene less school specific than they themselves assume.
