Teaching the curriculum
Four artefacts per unit: a deck built for projection, a timed lecture outline that says what to do and what students reliably get wrong, an activity for the room, and an assignment for afterwards.
Units
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Defining psychotherapy, and comparing the psychotherapies
Two sessions. Establishes what psychotherapy is by testing a definition against cases it was not written for, then establishes the transtheoretical framework that makes forty-five systems comparable rather than forty-five things to memorise.
26 slides100 minThe TribunalTwo Systems, One Grid - 2not yet written
The history of psychotherapy, and its omissions
From the moral treatment movement through Freud, behaviourism, the humanistic reaction, the cognitive revolution and the evidence-based practice movement — and the parts of that history the field has been slow to tell.
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The research base I: what counts as evidence
Empirically supported treatments, evidence-based practice, and practice-based evidence — three related ideas that are frequently confused, and the methodological machinery underneath them.
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The research base II: what actually works
The dodo bird verdict, the contextual model, therapist effects, deterioration, and routine outcome monitoring — the findings that unsettle every school equally.
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Psychoanalytic therapies
Unconscious motivation, defense, transference, resistance — and the four psychologies the tradition became.
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Psychodynamic therapies
Adler, Horney and Sullivan replaced drive with relationship; Malan, Luborsky, Davanloo and their successors made the result brief enough to test.
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Existential therapies
Death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness — and the clinical question of when anxiety is the correct response.
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Person-centred therapies
Six conditions, stated as necessary and sufficient, tested for sixty years, and falsified in a way that vindicated most of what they contained.
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Experiential therapies
Gestalt supplied the methods; emotion-focused therapy tested them and found out which parts work.
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Interpersonal therapies
Sullivan’s interpersonal field, the circumplex and complementarity, Benjamin’s reconstructive therapy, and IPT — the most deliverable evidence-based treatment in the world.
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Exposure therapies
Two-factor theory, safety behaviours, and the shift from habituation to inhibitory learning — plus the therapist avoidance that keeps this treatment from patients who need it.
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Behaviour therapies
Functional analysis, contingencies, behavioural activation — and the finding that the simplest component of cognitive therapy carried much of its effect.
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Cognitive therapies
Beck and Ellis, automatic thoughts and core beliefs, collaborative empiricism — and the mediation evidence that has never quite arrived.
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Third-wave therapies
ACT, DBT, MBCT and compassion-focused therapy — behavioural at the root, contextual in method, and the answer to what cognitive therapy could not reach.
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Systemic therapies
Circular causality, structure, attempted solutions, and the feminist critique that reshaped the field.
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Gender-informed and multicultural therapies
Minority stress, cultural humility, the WEIRD problem, and the single most damaging error available to a therapist.
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Positive psychology and solution-focused therapies
The two-continua model, well-being therapy, and a brief therapy that declines to discuss the problem at all.
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Integrative therapies
Four routes to integration, the transtheoretical model, and the discipline that separates integration from drift.
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Altered states: psychedelic, MDMA- and ketamine-assisted therapies
Set and setting, preparation and integration, and a regulatory decision that turned on methodology rather than on enthusiasm.
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Comparative conclusions and the future
Where the systems genuinely disagree, where they merely use different words, what the field looks like in twenty years, and what your own model of change actually is.