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Assessing Progress
Most people who seek psychotherapy benefit from it. In a national survey by Consumer Reports, nine out of ten people who had received psychotherapy reported that it had been helpful to them. In national studies, about 50 percent of clients are significantly less distressed after 7 sessions, and 75 percent have improved significantly after 14 sessions. After 21 sessions, about half of patients are not only substantially improved but are not experiencing any more emotional distress than a typical person. Given the fact that the symptoms that bring people into psychotherapy can be related to a poorer quality of life, affecting our jobs, our personal goals, and our relationships, these levels of improvement make evident just how useful psychotherapy can be.
However, psychotherapy is not always effective. Some patients may remain in therapy for extended periods of time without seeing improvement. Sometimes people continue because they like the therapist or because they want to believe that therapy is helping in some way that will eventually result in change. The therapist, also, probably wants to believe that what s/he is doing is helpful. The problem in this case is that neither the therapist nor the client is learning from experience.
Interventions are not always going to work; but, when they work, the patient generally feels some boost right away. There is very little evidence that any interventions that work in the long run leave clients feeling worse or no different in the short run. The few cases that do exist involve feeling worse for brief periods of time, and your therapist should be able to explain why this may happen for a week or two before the intervention begins. In general, if therapy is working, the client is feeling better.
There is a second reason for monitoring progress in an objective way. Doing this allows the client to assess whether they are in an intervention that is not helping them, and it allows the therapist to assess his/ her own effectiveness. The fact is that therapists vary widely in how effective they are - so feedback is helpful for clients and therapists alike.