Empirically supported psychotherapies: Comment on Westen, Novotny, and Thompson-Brenner (2004)

D. Westen, C. M. Novotny, and H. Thompson-Brenner (2004) suggested that efforts to identify empirically supported treatments are misguided because they are based on assumptions that are not appropriate for some types of treatment and patients. The authors of this comment argue that Westen and colleagues are simply incorrect when they assert that empirically supported treatments require that psychopathology must be highly malleable, that treatments must be brief, or that the samples studied are unrepresentative of the kinds of patients typically encountered in clinical practice - comorbidity is common in many clinical trials. Randomized controlled trials remain the most powerful way to test notions of causal agency.