Ladenburg Roundtable

More than a century ago, the physician and psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was carrying out psychotherapy with his patients on a couch. Much has changed in the meantime, not only in terms of methodology. Psychotherapy research has long been established as a scientific field that has brought about a large number of effective treatment approaches. Nevertheless, a surprising picture has now emerged: Despite steadily increasing research, overall treatment outcomes have barely improved further.

A possible reason for this is that the mental health of patients is influenced by factors that lie outside the setting of therapy. These include personal circumstances, for example the family situation and financial position, working conditions, and additional stress factors such as commuting or shift work. Since psychotherapy mostly takes place in weekly sessions, therapists have only limited insights into the actual lives of their patients.

The digital method known as “ambulatory assessment” opens up new perspectives here. It involves brief, repeated surveys conducted in everyday life, such as via a smartphone. Thoughts, feelings, behavior, and physical reactions can thus be recorded in real time – as they arise. Ambulatory assessment can easily be integrated into a patient’s daily routine and it could also potentially be used in psychotherapeutic practice.

This innovative connection between therapy and everyday life is giving rise to great expectations: Patients could be more actively integrated into the therapy process, while therapists could more precisely track individual changes and make more informed decisions. To date, however, robust scientific evidence is still lacking as to whether and under what conditions these approaches can actually improve the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

This Ladenburg Roundtable brings together experts from the fields of psychotherapy, digital health, and research to clarify some fundamental questions: Does ambulatory assessment have the potential to improve the effectiveness of psychotherapy? How do such approaches work in detail? Can the method be implemented cost-effectively in the long term? The objective is to develop a joint research agenda that will document the current state of the art and pave the way for future studies.