[Towards a future-proof psychotherapy: some recommendations]

Mental health care has improved considerably over the past decades, maar there are also still too many people who do not get better or too late.

In order to further improve psychological treatments, we can do several things. We can do more research on mechanisms of change, develop interventions that are scalable (for use in low- and middle-income countries), and we can personalize treatments with innovative machine learning techniques and ‘individual patient data’ (network) meta-analyses. We should not develop new general therapies, because they are typically not better than the ones that already existed. We should develop new therapies for more complex problems, like chronic conditions and comorbid disorders. We should also think of sequential treatments because many patients do not respond after the first treatment.

If we could make all these improvements, we could much faster provide treatments to patients to which they respond, we could reduce drop-out and make mental health care much more efficient.