Update: Current state of the Archive

Submitted by Joke on Nov 12, 2018 in News

The Single Case Archive project is rapidly moving forward! The Archive has achieved some major milestones in the last year.

Currently, the Archive contains 2600 cases online. Another 400 coded cases will be submitted within the next months, hence reaching 3000 cases. The team was enthusiastically searching for new journals that contain case studies from therapy directions other than psychodynamic or CBT. The Archive has as such been enriched with client-centred, systemic and integrative cases. The Archive also contains a growing number of cases written in other languages (e.g., Dutch and German).

In the meantime, the SCA is being tested for research purposes. At the University of Ghent for instance, three Master Theses that were supervised by our team, have included a metasyntheses of case studies within the Archive.  Sanneke Verweij looked at the obstacles during Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. One of the interesting findings was a perceived ‘mismatch’ between the patient and the protocol. Ellen Lateur looked into a psychotherapy processes of depression in adolescents. Throughout different therapy schools, the ‘therapeutic space as a mirror of the outside world’ seemed to be one of the important mechanisms of change. Dewi Hannon investigated the aspects of deficit and conflict in ten cases of psychotherapeutic treatment for medically unexplained symptoms. One of the conclusions was that the therapists use interventions directed on both mentalization deficits and current conflicts, but sometimes postponed the latter in order to establish good therapeutic alliance first. Also, handling resistance at the begin of the treatment appeared to be a major aspect of these cases. Finally, the concept of trauma often played an important role in treatment of medically unexplained symptoms and could be linked both to mentalization deficits and to the conflicts. In the upcoming year, new students will also use the Archive to examine how therapeutic frames can create blind spots within the psychotherapeutic process. They will do this by analysing the language authors of case studies use to describe the psychotherapy process in people with depression, anxiety and relational problems. This analysis is closely related to the aims of the European MentALLY project (www.mentally-project.eu).

The team also tried to increase the number of users of the Archive. Currently, the Archive has almost 1000 users of which 38% are therapists and 23% are researchers. Other users of the Archive are teachers and students. A brief survey in a very small sample of users learned that most of them are satisfied with the search results and the user-friendliness of the search system.

To broaden our public, the Archive has been presented at different international conferences. In 2017, it was presented in Oxford at the Conference of the Society of Psychotherapy research (SPR). In 2018, the team was in Amsterdam and in New York for two conferences of the Society for Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI). In addition, the team presented the Archive on the conference on Qualitative Research in Mental Health (QRMH7) in Berlin. Our Case of the Week, an interesting and unique case study because of its methodology or content, is also posted on several national and international social media. Last week, there was also a webinar about the use of the Archive, targeted towards clinicians as well as researchers, organized by Jochem Willemsen and Greta Kaluževičiūtė.

Researchers and clinicians are still welcome to submit cases for being included in our Archive (https://www.singlecasearchive.com/send-us-a-case-study)!

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