Clients’ experiences of dynamic interpersonal therapy (DIT): opportunities and challenges for brief, manualised psychodynamic therapy in the NHS

Abstract

Dynamic interpersonal therapy (DIT) is a brief manualised psychodynamic intervention for depression. This is a first study exploring clients’ experiences of DIT specifically and brief, manualised psychodynamic psychotherapy (PP) in general. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was the methodology employed. Five participants completed a semi-structured interview, three weeks to ten months after completing DIT. The scores of pre- and post-therapy outcome measures of depression and anxiety were also available. Two emerging superordinate themes are presented here: (1) ‘The Distinct Features of DIT’, referring to how its therapeutic style and time limitations were experienced and (2) the ‘Impact of Therapy’, referring to perceived outcomes. While previous findings showed that therapist’s perceived limited activity in long-term PP was experienced as hindering/unhelpful, the perceived sense of direction in DIT appeared adequate to most participants. Secondly, the time limitations provoked complex responses. Reactions to the distinct elements of DIT are to be treated both as therapeutic opportunities and as challenges. Further, in line with psychoanalytic theory, most participants described relational changes that went beyond symptom relief and remained in progress after therapy ended. Intriguingly, there was no consistency between participants’ qualitative accounts of change and the scores of the outcome measures.

Keywords:

• dynamic interpersonal therapy (DIT)
• brief psychodynamic psychotherapy
• interpetative phenomenological analysis (IPA)
• qualitative research
• clients’ experiences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.