Influence of life events on outcome in psychotherapy

The life events occurring to 64 outpatients participating in a psychotherapy outcome study were assessed for the 6 months before intake, during therapy itself, and during a follow-up period that averaged 7.2 months. Events were identified using a combined checklist and interview methodology. The impact of events was assessed by examining their predictive validity above and beyond that attributable to a set of demographic and clinical variables (sex, age, socioeconomic status, chronicity, and history of prior treatment). The major findings were that: a) life events did have a significant influence, but only at intake and termination and not at follow-up; b) "negative" events were more useful than the total number of events in predicting status; and c) when life events did have predictive power, the average increase in explained variance attributable to events was 13.4 per cent.