Process-based Therapy

This webinar will describe the limits of contemporary models of psychopathology and treatments, and discuss alternatives to the latent disease model. It will also introduce a network perspective to psychopathology, and introduce process-based therapy as an idiographic approach that combines a network perspective and evolutionary theory.

Process-based therapy (PBT) is a radical departure from the latent disease model of the DSM and ICD with its proliferation of the protocols-for-syndrome approach. Instead, PBT focuses on how to best target and change core biopsychosocial processes in a specific situation for given goals with a given client.

This approach recognises that psychotherapy typically involves non-linear (rather than linear), bidirectional (rather than unidirectional), and dynamic changes of many (rather than only a few) interconnected variables. Effective therapy changes the entire system toward a stable and adaptive state by enhancing context-specific variability, selection and retention of biopsychosocial processes. PBT is, therefore, grounded in evolutionary science.

For therapy to be most effective, we therefore need to embrace a systematic, assessment-guided, and theory-based approach to understand the relationships of the various problems of a given client. Functional analysis, the foundation of behaviour therapy, provides the basis to understand these relationships. PBT acknowledges the complexity, inter-relatedness, and multidimensional levels of the problems in a given client.

This webinar will illustrate how PBT is used to target key treatment processes by combining functional analysis with a dynamic and person-specific network approach.

This webinar is most suitable for practitioners experienced in CBT, who have been dealing with its limits and want to expand their knowledge and skills in this area.