What Works for Whom?
The evidence reviewed without partisanship. Shaped UK commissioning for two decades.
The Roth and Fonagy volume, now in its updated second edition, provides a clinically sophisticated guide to utilizing the existing research with judicious sensitivity to the client who does not fit neatly into oversimplified categories of diagnosis and treatment brands.
Roth and Fonagy work through the outcome literature disorder by disorder, asking which treatments have evidence behind them for which patients and under what conditions. They set out the research designs, weigh the strength of each finding, and mark the difference between a therapy that has been tested and found wanting and one that has simply never been trialled. The second edition, published in 2005, extended the first across new populations and updated the trials throughout.
For a psychodynamic clinician the value lies in how even-handedly the survey is conducted. Psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapies are assessed on the same terms as cognitive and behavioural ones, with the gaps in their evidence base named plainly rather than excused. The authors are careful about the limits of the method: they distinguish efficacy in controlled trials from effectiveness in ordinary practice, and they note where the absence of data reflects the difficulty of studying long-term work rather than its failure.
About the authors
Anthony Roth
Anthony Roth (1953 to 2023) was a clinical psychologist who worked at University College London, where he helped lead clinical psychology doctoral training. With Peter Fonagy he wrote What Works for Whom?, a critical review of the evidence on psychotherapy outcomes. He also led the development of competence frameworks that set out the skills required to deliver effective psychological therapies, and these frameworks shaped training and service standards across the field.
Peter Fonagy
Peter Fonagy is a Hungarian-British psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist at University College London and the Anna Freud Centre. Working across attachment research and psychoanalysis, he developed the theory of mentalization and the concept of reflective function, arguing that the capacity to hold minds in mind grows within secure early relationships. With Anthony Bateman he built mentalization-based treatment, extending it to conditions long held to resist analytic work. He remains a defining figure in contemporary psychodynamic thinking.
Details
- 1996
- English
- Guilford Press
- Guilford Press, 2nd edition, 2005
- 661
- 9781593852726