Evidence-based practice in Cognitive-behavioural Therapy for Essay

Evidence-based practice in Cognitive-behavioural Therapy for Schizophrenia - Essay Example Thus far, there is no legitimate group assigned to give definition to formal EBP for mental disorder. Therefore, a broader understanding of EBP necessitates up to date and unbroken knowledge of clinical evidence associated with the treatment of mental illnesses. This essay discusses evidence-based practice for cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) in schizophrenia. This is an important issue to discuss in the field of EBP because there are still a lot of unsettled problems that need a certain extent of care in the implementation of CBT methods. Empirical support for CBT has been fairly substantial to justify application for the treatment of schizophrenia in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, the empirical support concerning CBT has critical weaknesses. There are still problems in understanding CBT’s specificity and the stability of any positive outcome beyond the duration of the treatment itself (Gaudiano 2006, 3). The explanation for the conflicting results is not identified and thus is uncertain. Such unsettled issues suggest the importance of further controlled, randomised studies placing emphasis on the stability and specificity of any supposed positive effects of CBT. Empirical Support for EBP in Schizophrenia A primary motivator for studies on psychological treatments for individuals with schizophrenia is the reality that a large number of people still develop signs of psychosis—possibly 40 percent—in spite of intervention with antipsychotics (Roth & Fonagy 2005, 281). CBT administered to clients individually has been examined for community-based samples of individuals with mental illness, for severe current-onset mental disorder, and for relapse avoidance. More currently, research has also started to consider administering CBT to individuals who are highly susceptible to mental illness (Whitfield & Davidson 2007, 47). Even though there are proofs that CBT can have numerous positive outcomes, these proofs are not definite. A major questi on is which benefits should be considered vital. The study of Rector and Beck (2001) focusing on CBT for delusions discovered positive outcomes for CBT combined with less detailed psychosocial treatments. Likewise, several individual investigations have discovered evident benefits of controlled CBT-based models such as with regard to relapse rates. But on the contrary, other studies that have focused on rates of relapse, such as the study of Pilling and associates (2002), have discovered that CBT does not improve them. CBT for schizophrenia is intended to be a supplementary therapy to pharmacotherapy; hence, controlled, randomised studies before usually used supplement research paradigms, evaluating usual treatment against usual treatment in addition to CBT. After a number of trials discovered definite gains for CBT outside usual treatment, accurately designed trials started to surface evaluation CBT against nonspecific treatments (Gaudiano 2006, 2). As expected, findings evaluating CBT against another treatment were less notable. A number of metal-analyses have been made public in the past summing up the results of treatment demonstrated in investigations of CBT for mental illness. Tarrier and Wykes (2004), derived from a current review of 19 clinical studies, discovered an â€Å"effect-size difference between CBT and comparison conditions of .37 at post-treatment on