Academic Discussion on Therapy Periods in the Intervention Process Aiming to Produce Psychological Change

Gordon Paul wali one of the most often quoted questions that has guided psychological interventions for decades when the era of evidence-based therapy first began. His question was: "What treatment, by whom, under what conditions, is most effective for this individual with this particular problem, and how does it occur?" This question has been quoted countless times over the past few decades. (Paul, 1969, p. 44). The aim of Paul's research was to bring the field study closer to theories supported by empirical research and tailored to meet the needs of unique individuals based on already well-established processes of change. Empirical clinical psychology has been unable to supply a solution to Paul's query, decades after Paul made this statement. During this time, we have learned a great deal about how to achieve satisfactory results using certain procedures. This failure should not come as a surprise, as interest in this field has rapidly shifted to another field. As an alliance developed between a syndromal approach in academic psychiatry and the intervention science of empirical clinical psychology, research increasingly focused on the impact of treatment protocols on the signs and symptoms of diagnostic entities, as explored in randomized controlled trials. (“A process-based approach to psychological diagnosis and treatment:The ...”) This era is ending and innovative approaches to progress that focus more on the individual are now being considered (Ng & Weisz, 2016). In a series of recent articles on what we call Process-Based Therapy (PBT; Hayes & Hofmann, 2018), we have sought to set up a progressive foundation of evidence-based change processes that lead to evidence-based procedures. In doing so, we tried to lay the foundations for what we call Process-Based Therapy (PBT). We propose to propose that, as opposed to the method of using protocols for syndromes, a "functional first" approach will help us build a bottom-up diagnostic system with a focus on the clinical value of the system. The intervention process, which aims to produce psychological change, is a dynamic process that includes many factors. These variables are often studied as mediators and moderators. The connections that mediators make are often complex, two-way, and unique to each person they serve (Hofmann, Curtiss, & Hayes, 2020). These mediators, by definition, respond to specific treatments (called "one way" of mediation) and are concerned with outcomes (called "way b" of mediation, they must be statistically correlated to achieve results beyond any treatment). The terms "treatment procedures" and "mediators" are not entirely interchangeable (Hofmann et al., 2020). However, we can start a diagnostic system with known important agents. This is possible because, unlike the situation four decades ago, when syndromal diagnosis was first introduced to the profession, there are now hundreds of studies on the mediators of clinical outcomes. Taken as a whole, these mediation studies supply a strategic place to ask a new question at the heart of process-based diagnosis. The question is: "Given this goal then, what key biopsychosocial processes should be targeted with this client, and how can they be changed most efficiently and effectively?" (Hofmann & Hayes, 2019a, page 38).