TIM: A Tool for Gaining Insights into Psychotherapy

We introduce and demonstrate the usefulness of a tool that automatically annotates therapist utterances in real-time according to the therapeutic role that they perform in an evidence-based psychological dialogue. This is implemented within the context of an on-line service that supports the delivery of one-to-one therapy. When combined with patient outcome measures, this tool allows us to discover the active ingredients in psychotherapy. In particular, we show that particular measures of therapy content are more strongly correlated with patient improvement than others, suggesting that they are a critical part of psychotherapy. As this tool gives us interpretable measures of therapy content, it can enable services to quality control the therapy delivered. Furthermore, we show how specific insights can be presented to the therapist so they can reflect on and improve their practice.