CORE--PSYCHOTHERAPY

DESCRIPTION: The Psychotherapy Research and Training Core is a new addition to the proposed CPIRC. It is an outgrowth of our previous research on risk factors for psychiatric and behavioral problems in children and adolescents as well as our experience in treatment research. While psychotherapy has had great success in the marketplace and is widely used, it has lacked credibility in academic research. The last two decades have yielded considerable improvement in the specification of certain psychotherapies and their testing in controlled clinical trials for adults. Only recently have these technologies been applied to testing psychotherapy in children and adolescents with some psychiatric disorders. The Psychotherapy Core plans to accelerate this process by providing consultation to investigators on the technology of psychotherapy research and its testing; by facilitating training in empirically based treatments; and by identifying opportunities to test out psychotherapies, including adaptations of widely used psychotherapies to different settings, modalities, or disorders, as well as previously untested ones. The term psychotherapy is used to cover the wide range of psychosocial treatments currently used.