Feedback-Informed Treatment (FIT): Improving the Outcome of Sex Therapy One Person at a Time

A great debate rages in the field of psychological treatments (Wampold, 2001). On one side are those who hold that behavioral health interventions are similar to medical treatments (Barlow, 2004). etherapies work, they believe, because like penicillin they contain specific ingredients remedial to the disorder being treated. As such, advocates of this perspective emphasize diagnosis, treatment plans, and adherence to so-called “validated” treatments (Chambless & Ollendick, 2001; Huppert, Fabbro, & Barlow, 2006; Siev, Huppert, & Chambless, 2009). On the other side of the debate are those who argue that psychotherapy, while demonstrably effective, is incompatible with the medical view (Duncan, Miller, Wampold, & Hubble, 2009; Hubble, Duncan, & Miller, 1999; Wampold, 2001). Proponents of what has been termed the “contextual” perspective highlight the lack of evidence for differential effectiveness among the 250 competing psychological treatments, suggesting instead that the efficacy of psychotherapy is more parsimoniously accounted for by a handful of curative factors shared by all (Lambert, 1992; Miller, Duncan, & Hubble, 1997).