Editorial

The UK has arguably been at the forefront of an evidence-based movement in mental health with the implementation in 2007 of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, which provided a large scale delivery in primary care of psychological therapies free at the point of access within the country’s National Health Service (NHS). Although IAPT has failed to deliver much of what it promised to do in its promise to improve outcomes for people with anxiety and depressive disorders, it has challenged the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy community to demonstrate the efficacy of their treatments with empirically robust evidence, so as to be included in such government funded programmes, to challenge the dominant treatment model of CBT, and to be recommended in UK national guidelines such as the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) for the treatment of specific medical and mental health conditions. Over the past decade, this journal has published many papers describing studies focussed on evidenced-based psychodynamic psychotherapies such as MBT and DIT, that have been developed in the UK and are for the most part delivered within the NHS; however, there have been fewer articles regarding psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapies that are delivered and researched within the public sector in other countries.

This special issue of the journal ‘State of the Psychoanalytic Nation’, which will be published over several volumes, seeks to address this gap by publishing papers from many different countries around the world charting the ways in which psychoanalytic psychotherapy has been developed, implemented, and researched within the public sectors of each respective nation, and how psychoanalytic practitioners locally have responded to the challenges of evidence-based practice (EBP). EBP is defined by the American Psychological Association as ‘the integration of the best available research with clinical expertise in the context