It Can Be A Good Thing For A Therapist And Client To Disagree About The Client's Problems

Posted on June 14, 2016

Rolf Holmqvist and his colleagues recruited 846 therapy clients as they started a course of therapy at a Swedish primary care centre, most of them after having been referred by their family doctor.

Separately, the clients and therapists rated the nature of clients’ mental health problems at the start of therapy and again at the end. After each session, therapists and clients also completed measures of their “working alliance” – essentially their rapport and how well they felt that they collaborated.

Focusing on depression and anxiety, the researchers found that there was only moderate agreement between therapists and clients about whether these problems were present or not – for example, for just under half the clients, the therapists reported that the clients were depressed or anxious when the client themselves did not.

What’s more, amount of agreement on the presence or not of depression was not related to the success of therapy in reducing the clients’ self-rated symptoms, nor to ratings of working alliance. And regarding anxiety, some of the most successful outcomes were actually seen in those instances where the therapists rated the client as anxious, but the client did not seem themselves as having anxiety.

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Source material from BPS Research Digest