Talk:Psychotherapy

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Psychotherapy was a good article, but it was removed from the list as it no longer met the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.
Review: August 26, 2006. (Reviewed version).

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Wiki Education assignment: Psychology Capstone

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 9 January 2024 and 26 April 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Peytonmk (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Peytonmk (talk) 22:32, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Regarding adding parentheses to the name Reuterskiöld

@Biogeographist I noticed you reverted my edit saying it wasn't needed. I think there may be some confusion here. Adding double parentheses to a name in a citation doesn't change the way it looks it just bypasses the cs1 error "cite uses generic name" []. Because the name Reuterskiöld has the word Reuters in it it gets tagged for this error despite it being his actual name. CursedWithTheAbilityToDoTheMath (talk) 18:18, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

@CursedWithTheAbilityToDoTheMath: OK, I didn't know that. Please use edit summaries to explain your edits: WP:ES. Biogeographist (talk)

What is "a psychotherapy" vs. "psychotherapy"

The article switches from talking about and defining "psychotherapy" generally, to discussing different specific "psychotherapies" (e.g., CBT, DBT, and ACT). What, specifically, is "a psychotherapy" ? Is it something like "a collection of clinical practices, typically guided by some psychological models and empirical evidence" ? 4Aleph4Omega4 (talk) 16:33, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

@4Aleph4Omega4: Yes, "a psychotherapy" is a type of psychotherapy, as in List of psychotherapies. Relatedly, Category:Psychotherapies was moved (renamed) to Category:Psychotherapy by type. Biogeographist (talk) 21:29, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

Effect sizes

Meta-analyses across a range of psychological difficulties consistently report moderate to large effect sizes for evidence-based psychotherapies. Given this, I find it problematic to highlight a single study suggesting low effect sizes and the need for a “paradigm shift” as the central framing of the introduction—and then reiterate this claim, unchanged and unchallenged, twice more in the text. This approach risks presenting a distorted view of the broader evidence base.

For example, Munder et al. (2019) conducted a rigorous meta-analysis of treatments for depression and reported an overall effect size of d = 0.7, which is typically considered large.

Similarly, the phrasing “no reliable changes due to psychotherapy can be found in up to 33% of patients” strikes me as unnecessarily negative and oddly constructed. A more balanced and empirically grounded formulation would be: “Approximately 66% of patients experience reliable changes following a course of psychotherapy”, a statement that better reflects the field’s established findings without minimising its limitations.

In sum, I believe these formulations understate the considerable empirical support for psychotherapy’s efficacy and do not accurately represent the current state of the evidence.

Reference Munder, T., Flückiger, C., Leichsenring, F., Abbass, A. A., Hilsenroth, M. J., Luyten, P., … & Wampold, B. E. (2019). Is psychotherapy effective? A re-analysis of treatments for depression. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 28(3), 268–274. P.S.S. (talk) 20:47, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

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