Big Data & Psychology?

What Your Therapist Doesn’t Know

"Big Data has transformed everything from sports to politics to education. It could transform mental-health treatment, too—if only psychologists would stop ignoring it."

If promoting one model over others doesn’t improve client outcomes, what does? As the APA put it, “Patient and therapist characteristics, which are not usually captured by a patient’s diagnosis or by the therapist’s use of a specific psychotherapy, affect the results.” In other words, more important than the model being used is the skill of the therapist: Can therapists engender trust and openness? Can they encourage patients to face their deepest fears? Can they treat clients with warmth and compassion while, when necessary, challenging them?

Doctors rely on a wide range of instruments—stethoscopes, lab tests, scalpels. Therapists, by contrast, are the main instruments of psychotherapy. But this merely brings us back to the central question I faced after Grace died: How can those instruments—the therapists themselves—be improved?

I think monitoring clients with questionnaires every few sessions, and using big data to predict how the client is actually progressing is really great!

But I'm just not sure you can learn to be a great therapist... I think you've either got that necessary awareness for feelings etc, or you haven't, and the learning therapists go through puts those natural skills into some type of powerful formal structure. The guy who wrote that article... sounded like he was really struggling with the feelings side.

Paying for private Psychotherapy was some of the best money I've ever spent... 50 minutes a week for 7 years... an amazing journey of personal development.

Broadly agree, especially with the last bit (though in my case it was a little less than two years before my employer changed insurance plans and I lost coverage - ah, the wonders of American health care), though I would contend that you can "have it" for some people and not for others, or for some circumstances and not others, which I suppose is an argument for specialization.