Psychotherapy

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to investigate the effects of equine-assisted psychotherapy (EAP) on mindfulness, self-reflection, insight, and psychological well-being in an adult veteran population with mental health concerns. Specific aims were (1) to determine the effect of EAP on mindfulness, self-reflection, insight, and psychological well-being in veterans with psychiatric diagnoses or mental health concerns; and (2) to describe the relationship of the sociodemographic characteristics (age, ethnicity, gender, education level, income, and deployment history) to mindfulness, self-reflection, insight, and psychological well-being of adult veterans with mental health concerns engaged in EAP. Smith’s (1999) theory of unitary caring provided the guiding theoretical and conceptual framework for the study.
A convenience sampling design was used to recruit 18 participants from a South Florida therapeutic riding center and an online veterans’ forum. The sample consisted of adult veterans ages 18 years and older who had mental health concerns and/or diagnoses. Assignment to the EAP group (n=9) was determined by the therapy center director based on session days and times and participant availability. The comparison group (n=9) received their treatment as usual.

This is a novel attempt to produce a rigorous mathematical model of a complex system. The complex system under study is the relationship between therapists and their clients. The success of psychotherapy depends on the nature of the relationship between a therapist and a client. We use dynamical systems theory to model the dynamics of the emotional interaction between a therapist and client. We determine how the therapeutic endpoint and the dynamics of getting there depend on the parameters of the model. ... We describe the emotional state of both the therapist and client with coupled, first order, nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODE's). The rate of change of the emotional state of the therapist and client is proportional to their previous state, their uninfluenced state when alone, and an influence function which depends on the state of the other person. We formulated influence functions based on the research literature on psychotherapy and the therapeutic alliance. We then determined the critical points from the intersection of the nullclines and used a numerical ODE solver (Matlab ODE113) to compute the trajectories from different initial conditions. ... The results validate this prototypical approach to psychotherapy ; we have shown that human interaction (in the context of psychotherapy) can be quantified and modeled using differential equations.