Dateline: 11:20 am, April 18th, 2010

Today I was supposed to fly from Stockholm, Sweden to the far northern town of Skelleftea–a flight that takes a little over an hour.  Instead, I’m sitting on a train headed for Sundsvall, the first leg of a 12 hour trip that will include a 6 hour bus ride and then a short stint in a taxi.

If you’ve been following the news coming out of Europe, you know that all flights into, out of, and around Europe have been stopped. Eyjafjallajokull–an Icelandic volcano–erupted the day after I landed in Goteborg spewing an ash cloud that now covers most of Europe disrupting millions of travellers.  People are making due, sleeping on cots in airline, train, and bus terminals and using Facebook and Twitter to connect and arrange travel alternative.

In the meantime, another eruption has taken place with the publication of the latest issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology that threatens to be equally disruptive to the field of psychotherapy–and to proponents of the narrow, specific-treatments-for-specific-disorders or “evidence-based treatments” movement.   Researchers Webb, DeRubeis, and Barber conducted a meta-analysis of studies examining the relationship between adherence to and competence in delivering a particular approach and outcome.  The authors report finding that, “neither adherence nor competence was…related to patient (sic) outcome and indeed that the aggregate estimates of their effects were very close to zero.”

Zero!  I’m not sure what zero means to everyone else, but where I come from it’s pretty close to nothing.  And yet, the romance with the EBT movement continues among politicians, policy makers, and proponents of specific treatment models.  Each year, millions and millions of dollars of scarce resources are poured into an approach to behavioral health that accounts for exactly 0% of the results.

Although it was not a planned part of their investigation, the must-read study by Webb, DeRubeis, and Barber also points to the “magma” at the heart of effective psychotherapy: the alliance, or quality of the relationship between consumer and provider.  The authors report, for example, finding “larger competence-outcome effect size estimates [in studies that]…did not control for the influence of the alliance.”

The alliance will take center stage at the upcoming, “Achieving Clinical Excellence” and “Training of Trainers” events.  Whatever you thought you knew about effective therapeutic relationships will be challenged by the latest research from our study of top performing clinicians worldwide.  I hope you’ll join our international group of trainers, researchers, and presenters by clicking on either of the links above.  And, if you’ve not already done so, be sure and visit the International Center for Clinical Excellence home page and request an invitation to join the community of practitioners and researchers who are learning and sharing their expertise.