Trajectories of change among highly challenging patients in intensive long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy

This study aimed to identify and describe trajectories of change in distress among highly challenging patients who had received long and intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

The longitudinal version of the K-means algorithm was applied to the outcome measures data of 74 patients treated in four public mental health centers. The patients were measured five times at 6-month intervals for three outcome measures.

For the OQ45 and Symptom Checklist-90, one trajectory was marked by a lower initial distress level. In this trajectory, the improvement occurred in the first half of the measurements, with a plateau thereafter. A second trajectory was characterized by higher initial severity and an improvement, mainly in the second part of the measurements. For the Beck Depression Inventory, one trajectory was marked by lower initial distress. In this group, the improvement occurred throughout the entire period. The remaining patients were characterized by higher initial distress and a decreased level of distress in the last part of treatment. They began to improve only during the third year of therapy.

The response to treatment is not uniform in long-term treatment for highly challenging patients. A significant number of patients require a longer period of therapy to ignite improvement.