Will We Ever Again Conduct in-Person Psychotherapy Sessions? Factors Associated with the Decision to Provide in-Person Therapy in the Age of COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a new reality on the delivery of psychotherapeutic services. Therapists have had to rapidly adapt to telehealth therapy using various video conferencing technologies while working from spaces that were not necessarily designed for delivering therapy sessions. While COVID-19 continues to be present in therapists’ lives and shapes how they provide services, answering the question of whether to meet with clients in person again is a decision laden with complexity and ambivalence. In this mixed-method study, surveys with 169 therapists and interviews with 17 therapists were used to determine the factors that currently influence their attitudes toward resuming traditional in-person psychotherapy in light of COVID-19. We focused on the therapists’ personal and professional characteristics to assess their plans to continue with telepsychotherapy or return to a traditional psychotherapy setting. Our findings suggest that positive attitudes toward telepsychotherapy, the lack of an effective vaccine, clients’ satisfaction with telepsychotherapy, insurance reimbursement for telepsychotherapy, and negative attitudes toward wearing masks during sessions influenced therapists’ decisions on whether or not to return to traditional in-person psychotherapy in the age of COVID-19.

Virtual (Zoom) Interactions Alter Behavioral Cooperation, Neural Activation, and Dyadic Neural Coherence

“…Although conversational turn-taking was associated with positive measures of social interaction, it is important to note that we did not identify differences in observed performance and subjective experience measures between the conditions for any of the three tasks. These results are similar to those of prior studies that found no differences in perceived effectiveness and performance in association with virtual interaction [4][5][6][7][8][9] . Thus, our findings that video conferencing affects social interaction at the behavioral level, but not subjective or performance level, may help to clarify some of the inconsistent findings in the literature.…”

“…Research in this area, however, has produced mixed findings as to whether video conferencing has negative, positive, or no impact on the quality of social interaction. Some studies have found that virtual interactions are no different from in-person interactions in terms of perceived effectiveness and performance in administering neuropsychological assessments 5 , psychotherapy 6 , educational activities 7,8 , facilitating social connectedness 9 , and participating in leisure activities such as yoga 4 . In contrast, other studies found that virtual interaction led to or was associated with a reduction in perceived therapeutic skills 10 and reduced memory function in health care workers 11 , a decline in exam performance 12 , and increased communication and management problems in the workplace 13 .…”

Counselling students' responses to conducting role‐play activities online: An evaluation of MSc university students

“…Shklarski et al's. (2021b) mixed‐methods study also identified a shift in psychotherapists' perceptions of online working through continued exposure. The amount of recommended online content varied significantly between the participants, from ‘at least have one lecture on it, about online counselling and how to do it' (D, lines 281‐282), through to ‘I think like 50 50 really, so you can get even practice of doing both' (F, line 115).

a lot of people might be counselling online in the future and a lot of people might need help with this, so let's integrate it into the course and bring out this new perspective.

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“…It is important to also reflect on the influence of the evaluation being conducted with counselling students working with children and young people. Shklarski et al (2021aShklarski et al ( , 2021b found that participants working with children were less likely to agree that remote and face-to-face therapy can be equally effective due to the additional planning and creativity required to engage children online. Given these noted differences, different results may have been obtained from interviewing adult counselling trainees.…”

“Ariadne’s thread”. Psycho-educational empowerment intervention for patients with metastatic breast cancer. A Case Study

“…The possibility to connect from any device permitted an high and constant participation, despite the numerous treatments these patients have to undergo and the agreement with other activities (work and family management). At the moment we haven't got information that say to us if the web is a proposal equivalent to that in presence, but literature about this theme seems to go this way (31)(32) (33).…”