New and Emerging Research

In their paper “Psychodynamic psychotherapy for children and adolescents: a critical review of the evidence base”, Midgley & Kennedy (2011) provide a useful summary of the growth of research into child psychotherapy in recent years, and some of the excellent work that is currently being undertaken to demonstrate further not only that child and adolescent psychotherapy works, but also why and how it works, for whom, and what works best in what circumstances. The following is an extract from their paper:

One positive message taken from this review is that the amount of research investigating the efficacy and/or the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy with children and adolescents has increased decade by decade from the 1970s through to the present day, so that we are beginning to gain some understanding of ‘what works for whom’ in regard to psychodynamic treatments for children and young people.

Clearly, there is a pressing need for further, high-quality research in this field. In the UK, an example of such research currently under way is the IMPACT Study (Goodyer et al., 2011), funded by the NIHR Health Technology Assessment. This study, investigating the effectiveness of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for relapse prevention among adolescents with moderate to severe depression, builds on early studies by Target and Fonagy (1994a) and Trowell et al. (2007), but aims to take the next step in establishing the evidence-base for this type of treatment. With a large sample (n=540), careful randomisation, manualised treatment, systematic checks on treatment fidelity and a range of outcome measures at both the end of treatment and at follow-up, this study looks set to be the most comprehensive investigation of the effectiveness of psychodynamic child and adolescent psychotherapy to date.

In addition, a number of other on-going studies targeting specific diagnostic groups, such as children suffering from severe anxiety (Weitkamp et al., 2011), bulimia nervosa (Kronmu¨ ller et al., 2011), personality pathology in adolescence (Odom and Foelsch, 2011) and social phobia in children (Milrod, personal communication 7 August 2010), suggest that the evidence-base for psychodynamic work with young people is likely to grow over the coming years.