If you saw our last lesson on psychotherapy you might be wondering: What happened to Bernice?
Has she found a way to manage her depression?
Is she still wracked with anxiety?
Well it's really nice of you to ask.
And I'll tell her you said, "hi." But for our purposes as students of psychology, the bigger question arising from Bernice's case is "has psychotherapy helped?" and just as important, "how can we tell?" Well believe it or not, one of the main ways experts use is to simply ask the client, and see how they say they're doing.
Is Bernice out of bed, and living her life?
Did she make it through mid-terms without spiraling into a crisis?
And did she take that plane trip to Baja to party with her girls?
As a clinician, that would all be useful to know, right?
But the key is that we want to ask these questions in a scientifically rigorous manner, so that we really know a treatment works, rather than just extrapolating from individual cases.
