Training in and Dissemination of Empirically-Validated Psychological Treatments: Report and Recommendations

TLDR: In this paper, a task force was constituted to consider methods for educating clinical psychologists, third party payors, and the public about effective psychotherapies, and to emphasize the strength of what we have to offer.

Abstract: At the request of David Barlow, President of Division 12, and under the aegis of Section I I I , this task force was constituted to consider methods for educating clinical psychologists, third party payors, and the public about effective psychotherapies. Lacking the enormous promotional budgets,arid sales staff of pharmaceutical companies, clinical psychologists labor at a disadvantage to disseminate irnportant findings about innovations in psychological procedures. Despite the great strides in the development and validation of effective treatments, it is not clear that the benefit of our approaches is widely appreciated, even by other clinical psychologists. We believe that, i f the public is to benefit from the availability of effective psychotherapies, and i f clinical psychology is to survive in this heyday of biological psychiatry, APA must act to emphasize the strength of what we have to offer — a variety of psychotherapies of proven efficacy. We suggest that psychologists hold an advantage in being the primary scientists in the