"The most common number of sessions people access is one. If a therapist is spending their first session with somebody exclusively diagnosing them, they've lost the opportunity to take advantage of the first and potentially last encounter to actually do something that helps them,” said Jessica Schleider, associate professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, in a press release.
Although uncommon in the US, single-session interventions are common in other countries and involve a structured program intentionally designed to provide support, guidance, or treatment in just one meeting as many patients may not return for a follow-up.
In the current study, researchers analyzed 24 systematic reviews of single-session mental health and behavioral interventions including 415 unique trials. Twenty of the reviews, or 83.3%, reported significant, positive effects on one or more outcomes including anxiety, depression, externalizing problems, eating problems, substance use, and treatment engagement or uptake.
"We're often taught that therapy is supposed to be a journey, a lifelong process, and that 'change never happens overnight'. While that's often true, people can also have meaningful moments or turning points within one session,” saif Schleider.
Schleider’s Lab for Scalable Mental Health at Northwestern has launched ‘Project Yes!’, a free, self-guided mental health tool for adolescents. The tool provides four 15-minute digital single-session interventions in nine languages to teach one skill or idea per session including self-compassion, the power to change, how to take action, and how to cope with minority stress.
While Schleider doesn’t believe that single-session interventions should replace pre-existing mental health support, she thinks that single-session interventions could fill untouched gaps in the mental health care system that high-intensity treatments such as weekly psychotherapy delivered by trained professionals were not developed to address in the first place.
Sources: Science Daily, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology