Improving psychotherapeutic services via randomized clinical trials, treatment manuals, and component analysis designs.

In order to advance the practice of psychotherapy and to discover how to improve on the benefits of psychotherapy, we propose that practitioners and researchers should rely more on the results of randomized clinical trials research. On the practice side, the routine use by practitioners of manuals for empirically supported treatments holds the promise of providing scientifically based clinical services to clients. On the research side, there is much to be gained in using component analysis designs to determine the effective elements of a treatment that has been established as empirically supported in randomized clinical trials. Once these elements are identified, the next version of the treatment manual then could highlight the crucial aspects of treatment to be included in clinical practice. thus further refining scientifically based psychotherapeutic services.