BYU psychology professor Gary Burlingame, alongside an international team of psychology professors, developed a website meant to address a long-standing controversy within the mental health profession: the declining research, support and resources for group therapy.
While traditionally, people may prefer a one-on-one consultant with a therapist, immense research has proven group therapy to be just as effective. Despite that data, more and more institutions are providing less resources for group therapy education and awareness, Burlingame said.
The idea to make this website came when Burlingame noticed gradual depleted support for group therapy as a viable source for patients throughout his career.
The new website, Burlingame explained, has three primary purposes:
- To spread awareness of the effectiveness of group therapy.
- To act as a resource for group therapy research to be published.
- To urge educational institutions and healthcare facilities to train students or providers in group therapy.
This evidence-based group treatment website is “not to provide specific training or make money,” but rather to act as a dissemination tool, Burlingame added
“I hope once somebody is aware that there is evidence-based group treatments (available to them) that they might say, let's go out and get trained,” he said.
Burlingame shared that he and his team hope the website can reduce stigma and disinformation about group therapy, as well as act as a catalyst for needed reformation in the mental health profession.
The data Burlingame studied showed that if 10% of current unmet needs for U.S. psychotherapy was remedied with group therapy:
- An additional 3.3 million people could be served.
- The need for new therapists would decline, since more people could be served to one therapist.
- The U.S. would save over $5.6 billion in mental health costs.
When users open the website, there are three tabs they can click on. The first tab, labeled as ‘Treatments,’ lists different conditions users can learn more about. After clicking on one of the conditions, several group treatment options are listed, along with links to the supporting research.
The second tab, labeled as Therapeutic Relationships as EBT’ shows the impact of the bonds created through group therapy.
The third tab, labeled as ‘Alternative to RCT,’ is yet to be established, as the website is still under construction while they continue to gather information.
Professor Bernard Strauss PhD's lab at the Institute of Psychosocial Medicine, Psychotherapy, and Psycho-oncology at Jena University Hospital in Germany, is an associate of Burlingame’s who helped establish the website. They knew they had to do some deep research, and to expand their team.
“With [Strauss’s] network in Europe, and my network in North America, we developed these international teams [that created] this common code book,” which was used to compare findings from one analysis to another, Burlingame said.
After extensive research, 40–50 studies showed that when they removed previous allegiance to individual or group therapy, “there was zero difference in improvement and in attrition and in acceptance and in recovery, any metric that you wanted to look at,” Burlingame said.
This finding proved that group therapy is just a effective as individual therapy.
These studies can be seen on the website, alongside other data found in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, a textbook used by mental health professionals.
Once the website was published by the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA), it received a positive national response, which Burlingame was happy to see.
Burlingame, who’s recently stepped down from being President of the AGPA, added that the website was like “an end of career kind of thing.”
“It’s the culmination of a lot of work that we’ve done,” he said. “It was one of my goals as President to get it done. It’s been a good run.”
To visit the website, click here.