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The two books under review are recent doctoral theses made in the connection of the Helsinki Psychotherapy Study (HPS). They both belong to the quantitative tradition of effectiveness studies of psychotherapy and can be said to follow the logic of randomized clinical trials. The HPS is based on a total of 367 psychiatric outpatients, aged 20–46 years, who were recruited for the study from the Helsinki region, and assigned to treatments in 1994–2000. A 10-year follow-up evaluation since the start of treatments continued up to 2013. The project aims at the evaluation of the effectiveness of psychotherapies used in the treatment of mood and anxiety disorder patients, the examination of sufficiency of treatments and evaluation of factors related to suitability to short- vs. long-term therapies. The study is based on a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative database of patient-, therapist- and therapy-related variables on several outcome dimensions, with 15 repeated measurements during a 10-year follow-up. Numerous articles and reports have been published. The HPS aims at giving a comprehensive picture of how two short-term therapies (solution-focused therapy, short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy) and two long-term therapies (long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis) are suited for the treatment of outpatients with mood or anxiety disorders.
Erkki Heinonen (2014) introduces his research question as follows: more effective therapists have been shown to be more effective than others in producing positive treatment outcomes, yet little is known about the characteristics of the more effective therapists; what are the effective characteristics? The question is highly important, because therapist variables explicate usually more of the total variance than the therapy form used. Heinonen uses as his main method the self-reports of psychotherapists. He has also had the opportunity to use a large international database as a reference point. He also wanted to