Resources

There are many therapies and medications out there for psychological problems. Some have been tested and science suggests they work, others have been tested and science suggests they don't work, others haven't been tested at all, so we don't know either way.

If you were diagnosed with cancer, and your doctor offered you two treatments- one that your doctor created and thinks is the best treatment but has no scientific evidence for, and one that has been tested in many scientific studies and shown to work- you would want and expect to receive the treatment that has the most scientific evidence. You should expect the same from your mental healthcare providers.

For a psychological treatment to be considered “research-based”, it has to go through a series of phases of rigorous scientific testing:

• First, the therapy is developed and tested in a small group of people.
• Then, the therapy is tested in a larger group of people to see if it leads to meaningful symptom improvements.
• After the therapy has been shown to work in a larger group, the therapy is compared to treatments that have already been established as helpful in a study called a randomized controlled trial. Or, it is compared to treatments that work a little, but aren't the most effective, to see if it works better.
• Once the treatment has been tested and shown to work similarly to existing treatments that work for a given problem, the treatment then gets tested in different contexts, including community settings and with different groups of patients and providers, to make sure it works in “the real world”.

Research based treatments have been through all of these phases of testing, so they've been studied many times and their results consistently show they work.

When a treatment is considered “first line”, it means that there is a lot of evidence of this type to suggest that it improves symptoms enough to make an impact on a person's functioning, and that improvements are lasting for months to years after the treatment ends.

When a treatment is considered second, or third line, it means that there is not as much evidence to support that treatment, the evidence is not as positive, or that the quality of the studies that have tested it are lower. It doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't work, it could mean that it just hasn't yet been thoroughly tested enough.

Ask your healthcare providers for the scientific evidence for the approach they're using. You have a right to know and to receive frontline interventions!