JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Side effects in psychotherapy are sometimes unavoidable. Therapists play a significant role in the side effects of psychotherapy, but there have been few quantitative studies on the mechanisms by which therapists contribute to them.

Objective:

Using machine learning techniques to distinguish therapists with and without the perception of consulting side effects, and identify the predictive factors of therapists who could perceive client side effects in psychotherapy.

Methods:

We designed the Psychotherapy Side Effects Questionnaire-Therapist Version (PSEQ-T) and released it online through an official WeChat account, where 530 therapists participated in the cross-sectional analysis. The therapists were classified into groups with and without perceptions of clients’ side effects. A number of features were selected to distinguish the therapists by category. Six machine learning–based algorithms were selected and trained by our dataset to build classification models. To make the prediction model interpretable, we leveraged the Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method to quantify the importance of each feature to the therapist categories.

Results:

Our study demonstrated the following: 1) Of the therapists, 316 perceived the side effects of the clients in the ongoing psychotherapy sessions, with a 59.6% incidence of side effects. Among all 7 perception types of the side effects, the most common was “make the clients or patients feel bad” (49.8%). 2) A random forest–based machine-learning classifier offered the best predictive performance to distinguish the therapists with and without perceptions of clients’ side effects, with an F1 score of 0.722 and an AUC value of 0.717. 3) When “therapists’ psychological activity” was considered a possible cause of the side effects in psychotherapy by the therapists, it was the most relevant feature for distinguishing the therapist category.

Conclusions:

Our study revealed that the therapist's mastery of the limitations of psychotherapy technology and theory, especially the awareness and construction of their own psychological states, was the most important factor in predicting the therapist's perception of the side effects of psychotherapy.