Contextualized integration as a common playing field for clinicians and researchers: Comment on McWilliams

Abstract

We comment on McWilliams's (2016) article, "Integrative Research for Integrative Practice: A Plea for Respectful Collaboration Across Clinician and Researcher Roles." Above all, we appreciate McWilliams's well-toned plea for considerate collaboration between researchers and clinicians. We also appreciate that obstacles have long made it difficult to meaningfully reduce the scientist-practitioner chasm, and McWilliams shrewdly highlights how some obstacles are becoming even more daunting to traverse. In general, we agreed with most of McWilliams's points. We also provide some respectful challenges or at least extensions or reframes. For example, to us, the researcher-practitioner divide is more than just an urgent conversation problem; rather, it has potential to do harm to patients. Also, although we too appreciate relational factors in the psychotherapy evidence base, it seems important to refrain from contributing to the artificial relational-specific factor dichotomy. We present a resolution of this divide, which we call content-responsive psychotherapy integration (Constantino, Boswell, Bernecker, & Castonguay, 2013). We also offer possible versions of efficient and immediately translational trainings, arguing against continued self- or peernominated experts passing down wisdom in long-form in-services. Similarly, while we champion hearing from "reputable" clinicians about important research topics, we believe that the determination of reputable needs to be based on clinicians' personal outcomes data. We also argue that it is important to move beyond the 4 established integration pathways by pushing for disruptive integrative innovations. Ultimately, our goal is to help locate the common playing field for researchers and clinicians and the most efficient ways to play together on it.