[State of empirical research in psychotherapy]

At present nearly 1200 psychotherapeutic treatments are offered on the market with all of them claiming to be helpful and effective. However many of them are not able to even fulfil minimal standards of scientifically substantiated evidence for effectiveness. Modern psychotherapy research has disclosed perspectives to adequately explore the complicated course of therapeutic process. The same way efforts for standardized judgement criteria of empirical studies offer the chance for meaningful evaluating the scientific quality of therapy studies. As shown by several meta-analyses the scientifically substantiated psychotherapy proved to be very effective in the treatment of mental disorders.