In support of ESTs.

In general sense, I do admit that psychotherapeutic equivalence exist at a clinical settings. There are cases that people with problems show alleviated symptoms by just being wait-listed for psychotherapy. Furthermore, people with depression often bounce back without a treatment in real world. If treatments conducted on those cases, most types of interventions cannot but work at the end. On the other hand, complex symptoms such as severe
schizophrenia accompanying with personality disorders are hard to deal with by any kind of psychotherapy. And therefore there could be no differences in the effects, according to types of treatments. Even if the effects by different kinds of therapies do exist, the effect size caused by specific therapy techniques is only 0.2, according to meta analyses by Luborsky(2002). All of those lend a support that “dodo bird do exist”.

However, I agree with EST approaches that specific therapies are helpful to "specific people in specific situations with specific problems” with two reasons. First, the goal of evaluation research is to be applied to practice to better, if not the best at all times, serve people with problems as mental professionals. In light of practical utility of research, EST is in a stronger position to promote practices based on rather validated techniques. Second, accumulative evidences, such as Hunsley & Giulio(2002), shows that substantial differences among psychological treatments do exist. In practice, clinicians adopting EST report the effective results of treatments with a wide variety of problems, phobias, eating disorders, anxiety orders, etc. Why not implementing EST if I come to treat specificity-driven disorders or patients where evidences are provided. I think patients will benefit from this approach likewise it is safer to depend on clinically-tested drugs, even though there is no 100% guarantee that the treatment or drugs will also effective on themselves.

In addition, I also think it is more constructive, as Hunsley & Giulio(2002) suggested, that future directions of research should focus on expanding the list of ESTs that work for specific conditions and 2) improving upon the therapeutic impact of currently available ESTs, rather than being involved in a contention of “psychotherapy equivalence vs. specificity”. In line with this, research to explore the interplay between clients’ personal characteristics and treatment, as briefed mentioned in Chabless and hollon(1998), will be quite interesting in a sense that it could identify exceptional cases which are like an outlier in statistics. Because those outliers bear significant implications in clinical settings, it is also worthwhile making an endeavor to pursuit it.