To celebrate the Child and Adolescent Mental Health journal’s 25th anniversary, we have released the 25 top cited articles of all time*! All papers are freely available online for you to read.
Number 24 of 25 is…
A Follow‐up Study of Characteristics of Young People that Dropout and Continue Psychotherapy: Service Implications for a Clinic in the Community
Geoffrey Baruch, Ioanna Vrouva, Pasco Fearon
Published: 22 April 2009
Key Practitioner Message
- Using audit data, the study shows that dropping out of psychotherapy among young people is a significant problem for a psychotherapy service
- Internalising problems, relationship problems and being older increase the likelihood of continuation
- Externalising problems, homelessness and being younger increase the likelihood of dropping out
- Significant changes in service provision have been made including the introduction of a structured parenting programme for parents of young people with ‘challenging’ behaviour
- Defining the threshold of the number of sessions for dropping out is critical, as an examination of outcome data suggests that young people may have dropped out before the threshold of 20 sessions used in this study because they experienced a significant improvement
* as of December 2019