Research digest

Introduction

This is a mixed Research Digest offering, first, a selection of recent articles about goals and outcomes in child mental health generally, and second, a group of articles presenting outcomes in parent–infant psychotherapy, till now an under-researched therapy modality.

Goal setting in therapy is a commonly used outcome measure in most CAMHS and is regarded both as a useful clinical tool in its own right and a personalised outcome measure. The articles below detail attempts to discover potential relationships between personal goals and treatment outcome, or between personalised goals and standardised measures. It is interesting to note that goals characterised as ‘existential’, that is, to do with understanding, thinking about oneself, and the future, did not have any corresponding items in standardised measures, strengthening the argument for the value of personal goal setting in psychotherapy. Jacobs et al. (2017, below) conclude:

There may be areas not captured by standardised outcome measures that may be important for children and young people and which may only be currently captured in goal measurement. There is an indication that we may not be measuring what is important to children and young people.

Jacobs et al., 2017: 170

Other articles explore how to make sense of differences in parents’ and children’s goals, where goal setting is seen as one factor within the framework of shared decision-making (SDM), the use of which is associated with better outcomes (Edbrooke-Childs et al., 2016), and parents’ goals in child and infant psychotherapy (Kenny et al., 2017; Odhammar and Carlberg, 2015), as well as parents’ own outcome in mother–infant psychotherapy (Salomonsson, 2017). The second half of studies in this Research Digest focus on outcomes for infants, mothers, and the effect of intervention on parent–infant interaction, in parent–infant psychotherapy. We list a few RCTs and meta-analyses of parent–infant psychotherapy (for example, Fonagy et al., 2017