Process-based therapy: A personalized approach to treatment

Abstract

Historically, evidence-based treatment has followed the latent disease model, which emphasizes using specific protocols tied to diagnoses. Today, the field continues to move towards an individual approach with models of treatment based on change processes. Here, we describe Process-Based Therapy (PBT), a new way of thinking that is moving away from nomothetic studies of diagnosis-driven interventions toward an individual approach to treatment that recognizes the complexity of human suffering. In PBT, therapists select from a wide range of evidence-based interventions, tailoring treatment to meet a person’s needs at a given point in time. PBT is used to analyze intra-individual changes at the level of complex networks of biopsychosocial events, then gathering these into subpopulation and overall population parameters using theory and experimental analysis. PBT emphasizes tracking patient progress over time and treating symptoms based on current experiences, as well as understanding a patient’s past and predicting future experiences. Through specific analyses that aid in this process, therapists can use PBT to create a network with clients to visualize symptoms over time and areas of change.