The effectiveness of pluralistic counselling in a primary counselling setting

Pluralistic therapy is a relatively new form of psychotherapy where counsellors and clients work together to achieve clients’ goals through collaboration and preference accommodation drawing on a range of therapy methods (Cooper & McLeod, 2011). This pilot study looks at data collected from a counselling research centre to investigate the effectiveness of pluralistic therapy in reducing clinical symptoms for well-being in a primary care setting, with the aim to support the establishment of processes for evaluation of pluralistic therapy.

Pre- and post-counselling CORE-OM, GAD-7, and PHQ-9 outcome measurement scores were compared for 45 clients. In the absence of a control group, results were benchmarked against studies with similar participant groups (Armstrong, 2010; Mullin et al., 2006; Barkham et al., 2013; Cooper et al., 2015).

Of those with a CORE score above clinical level at intake, 62.1% of clients showed either reliable improvement or recovery. 70.8% of clients’ GAD-7 scores and 65.5% of clients’ PHQ-9 scores showed either reliable improvement or recovery. Client CORE, GAD-7, and PHQ-9 scores decreased significantly over time, from pre- to post-intervention.

While CORE recovery rates were lower compared to studies used in the benchmarking process, this may have been due to underlying patterns within the data which were not explored. GAD-7 and PHQ-9 score reductions were similar to those found in a comparable study looking at pluralistic therapy for depression (Cooper et al., 2015). These findings are a helpful starting point from which to develop research on the effectiveness of pluralistic therapy.