The Therapist Widget Effect
Bruce Wampold's Research about Therapist Quality: Who matters more than What
From our new article in the Harvard journal Education Next:
Wampold is direct. “There is no other profession where your performance is so ignored as psychotherapy,” he noted in a recent interview.
On the research literature itself: “There have been 10,000 to 15,000 clinical trials of different psychotherapies. There have been maybe 20 studies of therapists. Amazing, isn’t it, when you think about the money spent?”
Indeed, when Wampold sought funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to study individual therapists, he was denied.
The medical system relies on therapists’ credentials as proxies for quality. Are they predictive of results?
No. Advanced degrees and additional certifications are weak predictors of patient outcomes—a result that will not surprise Education Next readers who have lived through analogous discussions about teachers.
Read the whole thing here.
So do we start evaluating therapist outcomes and make them transparent, perhaps link to licensing? Should there be a policy push on therapist quality?
No!
The politics here don’t work.
Leave them alone.
HOWEVER…
We could make that bargain for a cadre of new unlicensed providers waiting in the wings: non licensed coaches, near peers, and bots. There are plenty of RCTs showing these providers benefit patients.
For teens in particular, that’s a great policy deal. They really like choosing things, and this would not only increase “total access” - it would increase teen agency (choose among these 3 people, with different backgrounds, vibes, and approaches).
