ABSTRACT
Any exploration of the questions, ‘Has therapy helped this person with intellectual disabilities?’ and ‘How can we tell?’ has to engage with a number of related issues. Firstly, what is known about the efficacy of psychotherapy with this client group in general? What research is there and what does it tell us? What are the challenges to conducting research with this client group? Also, what does our particular experience at Respond tell us about how it helps? How can our clients, who in the main receive long-term, psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic treatment, be seen to have benefited from that treatment? How do we, as an organization, respond to the pressure to demonstrate its effectiveness to our stakeholders?
