Today’s blog was written by one of our in-house clinicians: Ricky Giesbrecht, MA, RP, CCC.
How do therapists decide which intervention best suits your needs?
There are many factors to consider, such as:
- The presenting issue
- History of the issue
- The severity of the issue
- Safety factors
- Background information
- Social environment
With so many contributing factors to consider, it`s important for therapists to create a kind of “road map” to ensure you are getting the best treatment possible. This is where we rely on several decades of research and practice to help us identify the treatments that work.
According to the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, evidence-based therapy is defined by “[a]dherence to psychological approaches and techniques that are based on scientific evidence.
It’s important to select interventions based on their proven effectiveness in research, rather than going on a hunch. The main reason for this is that things don’t always work the way we think they do. A treatment might work well for one person but be of little help to someone else. We find this out by comparing tens of thousands of people who have gone through various treatments and examining which ones prove to be most effective overall. With these results, we can identify which groups of people respond best to a particular treatment.
That isn’t to say there’s a “one size fits all” treatment for your issue. Every person’s situation is different and it’s important that those differences are accounted for. It’s more accurate to think of an intervention as a road map: it doesn’t decide how fast you go, what you drive, or how you get there. Those are all activities you and your therapist can decide collaboratively. A road map gives you some direction, checkpoints, signs, and important feedback that you’re on the right track. Without it, you can spend a lot of unnecessary time and frustration on bumpy roads.
CFSSC has a clinically diverse team and each clinician works from many different evidence-based frameworks. To learn more about different types of evidence-based therapy interventions, check out our blog. In addition, you can visit us at any of our walk-in counselling clinics for support.
