Applying current literature to clinical practice: slides

Choose the article before anything else, and choose it against the **question set** rather than by which title appeals. The required slides ask what population is under consideration, what specific intervention was used, whether it was new or already in use, and what the findings or outcomes were. Those questions assume an empirical study — and several of the five options are conceptual or theoretical papers with no sample, no intervention and no outcomes. Viewing the psychoanalytic process as performance art, or revisiting a theoretical debate, will leave you writing “not applicable” across four of the seven prompts. The clinically framed options, such as the paper on couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a treatment of choice, answer the question set far more readily. If your instructor has attached one specific article rather than leaving the choice open, check that first, because the brief says both things in different places.

Read the brief's opening claim carefully, because it is the most interesting sentence in the assignment and it is not quite true. *Generally, there are no clinical trials in psychotherapy because it is often neither appropriate nor ethical to have controls.* Randomised trials of psychodynamic therapy do exist — including recent controlled trials in obsessive-compulsive disorder and in internet-delivered formats. What is genuinely hard is the **control condition**: there is no inert placebo for a talking therapy and no way to blind either party, so comparisons run against waiting lists, treatment as usual, or another active therapy, each of which answers a different question. Making that distinction is exactly what “evaluate the application of current literature” means here. Handle this in one or two sentences rather than a slide, since the point is to show you read the literature rather than to argue with the assignment.

*What were the author's claims* and *explain the findings/outcomes* are two prompts, not one, and separating them is where a critical presentation shows itself. A claim is what the author asserts; a finding is what the data support; and in this literature the distance between them is often the whole story. Put them on adjacent slides so the comparison is visible, and where the article is conceptual rather than empirical, say plainly that the claims rest on clinical argument and case material rather than on measured outcomes. That is not a criticism of the paper — theoretical work is legitimate — but conflating the two would misrepresent what your client-facing decision is actually resting on. The same slide pairing also gives you somewhere natural to use the table or diagram the brief asks for.

The translation prompt is written to permit a negative answer and almost nobody takes it: *include whether this will translate into practice with your own clients. If so, how? If not, why*. A defended “not with my population” is a stronger slide than an enthusiastic yes, and the article you chose usually supplies the reason — a sample drawn from a different setting, a treatment length your service cannot fund, a therapist training requirement you do not have, or a population unlike the one you see. Name your own client group first, then answer against it. An answer that would be identical whoever gave it has not engaged with the prompt, because the prompt is explicitly about *your* clients. The strongest version names one specific feature of the study that does not hold in your setting, and then says what would have to change for it to transfer.

Two mechanical constraints decide whether the work is even assessable. The deck is **5 to 10 slides excluding title and reference slides**, so seven prompts against roughly seven content slides means one idea per slide and no room for a literature-review slide. Presenter notes are capped at half a page per slide, which is a ceiling rather than a target — the notes carry your argument while the slide carries the structure, and a slide that already contains the paragraph leaves the notes nothing to do. Finally, the sourcing is doubled: specific citations from **the article you selected**, and separately, evidence-based literature supporting your approach. Two different demands, and the second is the one usually missing. Draft the notes first and let them tell you what belongs on the slide, which is the opposite of how most decks get built.