Standards and Guidelines for the Psychotherapies

William Glassman is a professor of psychology at Ryerson Polytechnical
University in Toronto.

There is little doubt that psychotherapy, like other forms of medical
treatment, is coming under increasing scrutiny by governments, insurance
companies, and the general public, as well as practitioners themselves.
Standards and Guidelines for the Psychotherapies, based on the work of a
task force set up by the Ontario Psychiatric Association, is intended to
help practitioners by providing standards for appropriate treatment. The
task force originally issued a report in 1995; the book under review
represents an update and extension (to new topics) of the original
report (two of the three editors, Deadman and Cameron, served as
successive chairs on the task force).

Wide-ranging and detailed, the book includes chapters on each
therapeutic orientation, as well as chapters devoted to gender, culture,
and supervision of trainees in psychotherapy. Oddly, there is no
discussion of humanistic/existential psychotherapy (despite Carl
Rogers’s high rating as an influence among most therapists). And while
sex abuse of patients by therapists is noted as a serious concern,
nowhere is there any mention of abuses of power by therapists (though an
OPA report issued in 1999 discusses the issue). Even more significantly,
only psychoanalytic therapy warrants a detailed review of empirical
evidence; for most therapies, efficacy is addressed in two or three
pages.

Despite these gaps (which will possibly be addressed in a future
edition), the book is a serious effort that deserves close attention
from therapists of all orientations.