Journal of College Student PsychotherapyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:ABSTRACT. Most college counseling centers have adopted session limits for their psychotherapy clients though little evidence exists to support such cutoff points. In the past eight years, a few studies have been published using survival analysis statistics for investigating the speed of recovery in psychotherapy. The outcome of clients at a university counseling center was studied to assess change across time, on a session-by-session basis. The analysis of these data showed that 14 sessions of psychotherapy were required for 51% of clients to meet criteria for clinically significant change. Results were interpreted as suggesting that limiting psychotherapy at college counseling centers may result in improvements that are not clinically meaningful for the majority of clients receiving services.

The authors investigated the number of sessions necessary for college counseling center clients of different levels of severity of distress at intake to achieve clinically significant change (CS) in therapy. The Outcome Questionnaire-45 (M. J. Lambert, N. B. Hansen, et al., 1996) was used to categorize 914 clients by severity of distress. Analyses of outcome indicated that clients with less and more severe distress needed 14 and 20 sessions, respectively, for 50% in each group to achieve CS. Implications are discussed.

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