ABSTRACT

In the past two decades, mental health disciplines have moved toward approaches with empirically demonstrated capacity to solve specific mental health problems ( Craighead, Craighead, & Miklowitz, 2008 ). This is not to say that other interventions are not effective, but that they have not been demonstrated so in a systematic way, involving randomized, rigorously constructed clinical trials using treatment manuals ( Wampold, Ollendick, & King, 2006 ; see Sexton, Gordon, Gurman, Lebow, Holtzworth-Munroe, & Johnson, 2011 for a discussion of guidelines for classifying evidence-based treatments in CFT) and employing adequate control groups and attention to method biases ( Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003 ). Family therapy researchers have attempted to meet some of these challenges and their work has been reviewed in special issues of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (October, 1995 and January, 2012). These treatments historically have been grouped under several names: “empirically validated treatments/therapies,” “empirically supported treatments/therapies,” “evidence-based treatments,” and “manual-based treatment/therapies.” In this chapter, all of these will be considered “manualized interventions” in that all of them presuppose a detailed manual that states how the intervention must be done.