Fee assessment and outpatient psychotherapy.

To test the widely held belief that fee assessment policy affects the psychotherapeutic process, data were gathered from the records of 434 clients who had received individual outpatient psychotherapy at a mental health center in 1972. The 3 predictor variables were fee (no payment, welfare, insurance, scaled payment, and full payment), diagnosis (psychosis, neurosis, personality disorder, transient situational disturbance, and other), and socioeconomic status (5 levels). A least-squares multivariate analysis of variance found only diagnosis to be significantly related to the outcome, number of appointments, and attendance of individual outpatient psychotherapy. Failure to find significant effects of fee assessment categories on therapeutic process suggests the invalidity of therapeutic purposes as a rationale to charge fees for psychotherapy. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)