This is just my own pedantry and here to encourage others to think about it not to change the established naming which in the fields of psychosocial interventions and therapies is always “outcome”. I wish we used “change” instead. Why …
Details #
The position that Jo-anne and I hold is that, taken strictly, “outcome” is a post-mortem judgement: that a lot of therapies and psychosocial interventions aim to help people help themselves for the rest of the their lives, to help them be able to change psychologically and relationally as needed across changes in circumstances and across the inexorable, if unpredictable changes imposed by the life cycles and ageing. To that extent we prefer to see most of the measures deemed “outcome” measures as change measures. To my amusement I see that the wording about “post-mortem” dropped out of the published version of the the OMbook. I don’t remember but I suspect that came from the publishers’ reviewers not us!
Does it matter? Well not a lot and certainly the “outcome” word is so entrenched I don’t see it going this century, however perhaps it reflects important themes. The early 20th Century ideas of therapy probably had a thread of omnipotence: that a good therapy was a once only and life changing impact. Through the 20th and particularly the early 21st Centuries in the global north the “medical model” (again, I prefer “illness model”) took over with the idea that therapies were to fix deviations from a desirable state. In the late 20th Century this was also about states that were desirable not just to the client but to the economy perhaps most obviously in the emphasis on returning people to employment that was at heart of the UK IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, now “NHS Talking Therapies, for anxiety and depression”).
That would seem to fit with talking about “change” more than “outcomes” but I suspect that it has satisfied a political need, as public funding reduced durations of therapies and focused increasingly on short term “fixing” to keep talking about “outcomes” and not to fund any serious look at long term changes.
Try also #
- Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT)
Chapters #
This theme is introduced from Chapter 1 but runs through the entire OMbook.
Online resources #
None feasible!
Dates #
First created 15.i.25.
