I guess not strictly related then, but I’d be interested to know if anyone is aware of cost-effectiveness analyses using WELLBYs for one-on-one traditional psychotherapy/counselling, as this is a relevant baseline for a project I’m drafting.
Our updated operationalization of psychotherapy we use in our new report (page 12) is
“For the purposes of this review, we defined psychotherapy as an intervention with a structured, face-to-face talk format, grounded in an accepted and plausible psychological theory, and delivered by someone with some level of training. We excluded interventions where psychotherapy was one of several components in a programme.”
So basically this is “psychotherapy delivered to groups or individuals by anyone with some amount of training”.
Does that clarify things?
Also, you should be able to use our new model to calculate the WELLBYs of 1 to 1 more traditional psychotherapy since we include studies with 1 to 1 in our model. Friendship Bench, for instance, uses that model (albeit with lay mental health workers with relatively brief training). Note that in this update our findings about group versus individual therapy has reversed and we now find 1 to 1 is more effective than group delivery (page 33). This is a bit of a puzzle since it disagrees somewhat with the broader literature, but we haven’t had time to look into this further.
I’m very excited by the work HLI is doing.
I’m a little confused by what psychotherapy refers to in this post, is this going by HLI’s contextual definition “any form of face-to-face psychotherapy delivered to groups or by non-specialists deployed in LMICs”?
I guess not strictly related then, but I’d be interested to know if anyone is aware of cost-effectiveness analyses using WELLBYs for one-on-one traditional psychotherapy/counselling, as this is a relevant baseline for a project I’m drafting.
Hi Victor,
Our updated operationalization of psychotherapy we use in our new report (page 12) is
“For the purposes of this review, we defined psychotherapy as an intervention with a structured, face-to-face talk format, grounded in an accepted and plausible psychological theory, and delivered by someone with some level of training. We excluded interventions where psychotherapy was one of several components in a programme.”
So basically this is “psychotherapy delivered to groups or individuals by anyone with some amount of training”.
Does that clarify things?
Also, you should be able to use our new model to calculate the WELLBYs of 1 to 1 more traditional psychotherapy since we include studies with 1 to 1 in our model. Friendship Bench, for instance, uses that model (albeit with lay mental health workers with relatively brief training). Note that in this update our findings about group versus individual therapy has reversed and we now find 1 to 1 is more effective than group delivery (page 33). This is a bit of a puzzle since it disagrees somewhat with the broader literature, but we haven’t had time to look into this further.
That’s clear to me now and thank you also for the pointer on 1 to 1 effectiveness!