Can counselling and psychotherapy also do harm?
On the significance of undesirable side effects and dangers of psychotherapy and psychosocial counselling in the context of their sustainability.
No effect without a side effect, is a well-known aphorism. This is all the more true for highly effective effects, such as those that come to light in the context of psychotherapy. It is all the more astonishing that for a long time an almost naïve attitude was widespread in this context with regard to possible "collateral damage" - according to the motto: we are "only" talking, what is there to harm? For some years now, however, possible side effects, dangers and damages of psychotherapy and psychosocial counselling have been increasingly taken into account - both in terms of theoretical conceptualisation and empirical assessment. The colloquium will take up some aspects of the discussion and outline the development of theory and research on the topic.
Impulse
Prof. Dr. Matthias Ochs, University of Applied Sciences Fulda
The fact that psychotherapy and psychosocial counselling can also have negative effects or even cause harm was not considered for a long time. There are many reasons for this, including the myth that no one can be harmed if people "just talk to each other" with the best of intentions and within a professional framework. But every pharmacist knows that what works also has a side effect. And psychotherapy achieves medium to high effect levels on average. For this reason, there have been increasing calls in recent years to record side effects and risks more systematically, validly and reliably in the context of benefit-harm assessments.
Lecture
Prof. Dr. Zbyněk Vybíral, Masaryk University Brno
Negative/adverse effects in psychotherapy and counselling (overview of past and current studies)
Recently, Barney Vaughan et al. (2014) concluded in their comparative efficacy study, that "at present the monitoring of adverse events in psychotherapy research falls behind that of psychopharmacology research." We all know relatively enough about side effects of pills, but only a few about side effects or negative effects of psychotherapy. The talk is aiming to sketch some efforts in the field and to bring more knowledge about what we call as potentially deterioration or harm or negative effects. Historically taken, the debates of faults and errors in psychotherapy have been a substantial part of critical thinking in psychotherapy development since its very beginning. In contemporary psychotherapy research we face the new challenges to foster and to study more in details what our clients expect and why they are unsatisfied so often. However, does a temporally dissatisfaction with process in psychotherapy automatically mean negative side effect? Discussion focused on substantial questions like "How do we know whether this one is or isn't adverse event?"
