Psychoeducation, Contrasted with Psychotherapy

Depending on one’s definitions, most psychotherapy is psychoeducation; that is, psychotherapy is a subset of psychoeducation. Psychotherapy aims to result in improved patterns of thought, feeling, and/or behavior as a result of experience, i.e., favorable learning. But psychoeducation can be carried out by other means that make it much more scalable. The more scalable forms of psychoeducation differ from psychotherapy in important ways. They are not dependent upon “medical necessity” and diagnosis of a disorder; thus, the stigma and the need for secrecy are reduced. Funding is not dependent upon insurance companies. The teachers don’t need licensure within the health care system. The enterprise does not require the responsibility of measuring and mitigating dangerousness. Clients (or students) have more of an expectation that reading and doing written assignments are normative, and that informing someone about their lives (as in “talk therapy”) is not the major method for improvement. There is much less time spent getting information from those being helped, and much more time delivering information to them. These forms of psychoeducation can sometimes be successfully carried out in groups or through mass-delivered means, more inexpensively than psychotherapy. If psychoeducation can be carried out in schools, time on task can be allocated without competing with everything else in life. If psychoeducation can be carried out early in life, preventively, there is a major advantage over waiting until skill deficiencies have created medical necessity for health care system involvement: the maladaptive patterns are not practiced for years before being addressed.