Empirically Supported Treatments and Comorbid Psychopathology: Spelunking Plato's Cave

Presents two case examples of diagnostic ambiguity and examines the empirical literature to identify appropriate empirically supported treatments (ESTs). The author contends that the examples outlined show the discontinuity between clients with comorbid psychopathology and ESTs. He suggests two agendas for future research and practice: (1) the inevitable limitations of efficacy studies do not excuse clinicians from ignoring scientific evidence. The expensive tradeoff of client heterogeneity for experimental control and statistical power is the cost of keeping the discipline grounded in science and (2) to practice maximally affect practice, researchers need to incorporate more comorbid psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)