Psychotherapeutic Interventions and Processes

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been one of the most influential developments in psychiatry ever. Since it was developed and introduced, a vast number of treatment protocols focused on specific psychiatric syndromes have been developed. Although this has benefitted many patients and advanced the field, CBT as a treatment with its focus on alleviating psychiatric syndromes seemed to have reached a plateau and a process-focus approach is now emerging within the family of CBT models. This represents a new form of idiographic functional analysis guided by models that integrate a coherent set of change processes. Here, I describe the foundations of this new approach to mental health, called process-based therapy (PBT) and discuss its scientific and clinical implications.