The evidence-based practice of psychotherapy: Facing the challenges that lie ahead

• Psychotherapy continues to move toward prescriptive treatment guidelines.
• Traditional psychotherapy use is on the decline while medication use is rising.
• We must better address the tension between psychotherapy vs medication use.
• We also must address diagnosis, treatment development, and training issues.
• We introduce the special issue on evidence-based therapy research and practice.

What does the future hold for psychotherapy research and practice? We review some key influences, including declining psychotherapy utilization, increasing impact of evidence-based medical practices, over-medicalizing of mental health problems, and changing priorities from grant funding agencies. These factors hold potential opportunities but also major pitfalls that will need to be carefully navigated related to implementation/dissemination issues, interdisciplinary collaborations, and psychosocial versus biomedical perspectives related to the nature and treatment of psychopathology. In addition, we review and comment on the other articles contained in this special issue pertaining to the future of evidence-based psychotherapy.