Handwriting was a therapeutic intervention with an adolescent victim of a serious electrical accident that occurred in 1972. It was initiated two months after the accident as one aspect of educational therapy. The handwriting tasks involved copying numbers, printing letters, copying shapes, practicing cursive letters, writing sentences, and…

The authors are grateful for this opportunity to respond to Robbins's and Turner's review of "Functional Family Therapy (FFT) for Behavior Disordered Youth Aged 10-18: An Overview of Reviews" (Weisman & Montgomery, 2018). It may be helpful to ensure that a few key points have been clarified to enable this process. In their paper,…

Weisman and Montgomery completed an overview of reviews to evaluate the status of research concerning functional family therapy (FFT). Despite reporting modest effects on delinquency, substance use, and secondary outcomes, the authors conclude that the research base supporting FFT is tenuous and that it "may not be advisable to continue…

The article entitled "Changes Across Three Editions of The Suicidal Patient: Clinical and Legal Standards of Care: Relevance to Counseling Centers" by Paul Polychronis (EJ1123965) provides an informative summary of the evolution of Bongar & Sullivan's (2013) book The Suicidal Patient: Clinical and Legal Standards of Care across…

In this retrospective commentary on "Acceptability of Behavioral Interventions Used in Classrooms: The Influence of Amount of Teacher Time, Severity of Behavior Problem, and Type of Intervention," I first examine the concept of social validity and related measurement challenges per Wolf's concerns about consumers' subjective reactions to…

The present article provides commentary on this pioneering special issue covering the usefulness of so-called mind-body practices with youth and in schools. I begin by addressing the way we talk about this approach to practice, describing a few undesirable consequences that can follow from using the mind-body moniker adopted from the world of…

Fricke et al. and Hagen et al. (2017) each report on large-scale pragmatic randomised controlled trials delivered in schools or nurseries, investigating language interventions for vulnerable children and showing moderate positive effect sizes. Such research is part of a recent development of 'what works' research in England, and the number of…

The articles presented in this special issue both advance what is currently known about treatment implementation in research and practice and illuminate what remains unknown. This article provides a commentary selectively linking current findings to prior research to make arguments regarding those facts that are well established and the gaps in…

In his testimony, Jon Baron, president of Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, recommends reauthorization of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV) Program. He outlines three reasons that support his recommendation: (1) MIECHV represents an important, bipartisan departure from the usual approach to social…

The prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in adults is estimated to be at least 1% (Brugha et al., 2011), yet almost all ASD research focuses on children. Adult intervention studies, in particular, are few in number and poor in quality (Bishop-Fitzpatrick, Minshew, & Eack, 2013), and support networks for adults with ASD are much more…

Parents seek sustained intense "hands-on" therapy for their children based on a belief that "more is better." Since the core objective of evidence-based practice (EBP) is to do the right things, for the right child, at the right time, and to optimize intervention outcomes, it is vital to know what the literature says about how much therapy to…

Objective: Crits-Christoph, Connolly Gibbons, Hamilton, Ring-Kurtz, and Gallop (2011) used generalizability theory to critique the measurement of the therapeutic alliance in psychotherapy research, showing that the dependability of alliance scores may be quite low, which in turn can lead to attenuated alliance-outcome correlation estimates. Method…

Current approaches to mental health in school tend to overemphasize individually prescribed treatment to the detriment of prevention programs. Moreover, they are implemented as another fragmented set of interventions, and this contributes to the continuing marginalization of student and learning supports. Finally, when the focus is on individuals'…

Meta-analytic methods are often used to determine the effectiveness of certain treatments across studies. However, we are often unaware of how a meta-analysis can provide value to researchers and practitioners. This paper offers a brief commentary on a meta-analysis conducted by Lin, Huang and Liou (2013) in LLT, providing further statistical…

Comments on the original article, "The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy," by J. Shedler. Shedler summarized a large body of research that shows psychodynamic therapy to have a substantial effect size, comparable to that for many empirically supported treatments. This is an important finding, in part refuting the concerns raised by Bornstein…