Does CBT for psychosis help everybody?

Dr Emmanuelle Peters: Therapy is not going to help everybody. At the moment we don’t really know what the best indicators [are] of who’s going to be helped and who’s not going to be helped. The obvious one is that you’ve got to want to come to therapy ... therapy is not something that you can impose on people and if somebody doesn’t want to come to therapy, even if everybody else thinks that they would benefit, then you can’t make them come to therapy and so that won’t help them. 

There are some problems that get in the way of therapy, with again another one being memory problems. So if someone is unable to remember from session to session what is discussed, then it’s very difficult to make any long-lasting change and those two things really – motivation and ability to come to sessions and ability to remember what’s been discussed in sessions – are two obstacles to people not being helped. 

But apart from that, we don’t really know why some people do better than others.

And it’s difficult to know exactly what the proportion of people [is], but we believe that it’s about 50 per cent of people will get some benefit in some aspects of their life, and it may not be with the experience of psychosis but it may be with depression or with other problems, so it’s a very difficult thing to measure because different people will be helped in different ways because there is such a wide range of experiences that people are coming with. So, not everybody will benefit.