ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the overall evidence for the effectiveness of psychological therapies, discusses the delivery of therapy in primary care settings and provides a number of case-studies to position psychological therapies in an international context. A key theme in psychological therapy provision relates to the prevalence of disorder, the number of potential patients who could be helped and the costs involved, given the relative intensity of “talking therapy” compared to a prescription for drugs. Service-user and provider satisfaction with these programmes was high, and clinical data showed an improvement in patient outcomes. A wide range of psychological therapies potentially fall within the term “psychological interventions”. In psychodynamic psychotherapy, a focus is placed on the patient freely expressing and exploring with the therapist feelings related to both current conflicts and those from their past.
