Integrating self-help into psychotherapy: 16 practical suggestions.

Psychologists routinely recommend self-help to their patients but desire guidance on the optimal methods and resources for doing so. This article provides 16 suggestions, culled from both the research literature and clinical experience, for integrating self-help into psychotherapy. Among the clinical recommendations are broadening the definition of self-help, assessing clients' self-help histories, offering tangible support in linking clients with self-help, tailoring the self-help resource to the person (not only the disorder), assisting clients with the administration of difficult self-help programs, using self-help during waiting and maintenance stages, and addressing clients' reservations about its use. Psychologists' top-rated self-help books, autobiographies, and films are presented. By their behavior, psychologists can enhance the effectiveness of self-help within the context of psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Popular self-help books for anxiety, depression, and trauma: How scientifically grounded and useful are they?

Self-help books for psychological disorders have become increasingly popular, yet there is surprisingly little research on their scientific status or overall utility. The authors identified 50 top-selling self-help books for anxiety, depressive, and trauma-related disorders. Using a scale derived from the literature on bibliotherapy, expert psychologists rated each book on overall usefulness, grounding in psychological science, the extent to which it offers reasonable expectations, the extent to which it offers specific guidance for implementing the self-help techniques and for monitoring treatment progress, and whether it offers potentially harmful advice. The results revealed strong intercorrelations among the scales, such that books scoring high along one dimension tended to score high along others. There was wide variability in the overall quality of the books, but several factors emerged as predictors of book quality. The most highly rated books tended to be those having a cognitive behavioral perspective, those written by mental health professionals, those written by authors holding a doctoral degree, and those focusing on specific problems. Implications of the findings, including specific recommendations for authors and consumers of self-help books, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive-behavioral therapy for women with lifelong vaginismus: A randomized waiting-list controlled trial of efficacy.

Women with lifelong vaginismus (N = 117) were randomly assigned to cognitive-behavioral group therapy, cognitive-behavioral bibliotherapy, or a waiting list. Manualized treatment comprised sexual education, relaxation exercises, gradual exposure, cognitive therapy, and sensate focus therapy. Group therapy consisted of ten 2-hr sessions with 6 to 9 participants per group. Assistance with minimal-contact bibliotherapy consisted of 6 biweekly, 15-min telephone contacts. Twenty-one percent of the participants left the study before posttreatment assessment. Intent-to-treat analysis revealed that successful intercourse at posttreatment was reported by 14% of the treated participants compared with none of the participants in the control condition. At the 12-month follow-up 21% of the group therapy participants and 15% of the bibliotherapy participants, respectively, reported successful intercourse. Cognitive-behavioral treatment of lifelong vaginismus was thus found to be efficacious, but the small effect size of the treatment warrants future efforts to improve the treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exploring digital fiction as a tool for teenage body image bibliotherapy*

This article reflects on the findings of the interdisciplinary ‘TransForm’ project, which ran between 2012 and 2014 and aimed to explore how reading and writing digital fictions (DFs) might support young women in developing frameworks for more positive thinking regarding their body image. The project comprised the following stages: (1) a review and compilation of DFs thematising and/or problematising female corporeality; (2) a series of cooperative inquiries with 3 groups of young women (aged 16–19 years) over a period of 5 weeks, examining participants’ responses to a selection of the previously compiled DFs, as well as the challenges these young women face in relation to body image and (3) an interventionist summer school in which participants aged 16–19 explored body image issues via writing DFs. This article reports on the main observations and findings of each stage, and draws conclusions for future research needs in this area.     

Use of feature film as part of psychological assessment.

Similar to the psychotherapeutic use of metaphor, feature film is increasingly used as a clinical technique for eliciting and building upon patients’ symbolic language. The clinical use of film has been presented as valuable in advancing the patient–clinician therapeutic alliance. Feature film is thought to help difficult-to-reach patients engage in therapeutic exploration of problematic cognitive, behavioral, and emotional elements of their existence. Research on the clinical use of film has primarily focused on outpatients. There have been no investigations exploring the use of film as part of psychological assessment in inpatient settings. Current literature has also continued to focus on techniques drawn from cinematherapy. In cinematherapy, clinicians choose and assign specific films to patients on the basis of their interpretations of films having specific therapeutic value. There are no studies or expositions to date that highlight the merits of patients, not clinicians, choosing films that relate to their psychological difficulties. The following article describes the possible benefits of a clinical assessment technique that uses patients’ choices of feature film during the initial inpatient psychological mental status exam. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive Bibliotherapy for Depression: A Meta-Analysis.

Do you want to use bibliotherapy with clients but wonder about the size and mechanism of effectiveness? The authors report a meta-analysis of 29 outcome studies of cognitive forms of bibliotherapy for depression. Seventeen studies with stronger research designs (pretest-posttest waiting list control group) yielded a respectable effect size of 0.77, considered the best estimate of effect size from this study. This result compares favorably with outcomes from individual psychotherapy. In light of the substantial positive effects associated with bibliotherapy for depression, the authors discuss clinically relevant questions related to the use of cognitive bibliotherapy. These include why practitioners might consider the use of this technique, which individuals can benefit from this approach, and how professionals can structure care. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bibliotherapy for children with anxiety disorders using written materials for parents: A randomized controlled trial.

The current trial examined the value of modifying empirically validated treatment for childhood anxiety for application via written materials for parents of anxious children. Two hundred sixty-seven clinically anxious children ages 6-12 years and their parents were randomly allocated to standard group treatment, waitlist, or a bibliotherapy version of treatment for childhood anxiety. In general, parent bibliotherapy demonstrated benefit for children relative to waitlist but was not as efficacious as standard group treatment. Relative to waitlist, use of written materials for parents with no therapist contact resulted in around 15% more children being free of an anxiety disorder diagnosis after 12 and 24 weeks. These results have implications for the dissemination and efficient delivery of empirically validated treatment for childhood anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)