The long-term outcome of cognitive behaviour therapy for adults in routine clinical practice

It is recognised that there is a comparative lack of evidence on the long-term outcome of cognitive behavioural therapy for patients seen in ordinary clinical settings, as opposed to research trials. This paper presents some data on the outcome of 36 adult patients followed up an average of nearly two years after the end of therapy in a National Health Service CBT clinic. Whilst the vagaries of data collection in clinical practice mean that the generalisability of these results is still tentative, they suggest that the outcome at the end of treatment was generally well-maintained over the follow-up period, with most patients maintaining fairly stable scores on the measures used, and the rest roughly equally divided between those who deteriorated and those who improved further. A high proportion of patients at follow-up reported that they were still using various CBT strategies which they had learnt during therapy.