For my master’s thesis, I conducted research on the relationship between treatment tolerability—that is, how intrusive, exhausting, frightening, and acceptable a treatment is perceived to be, and to what extent treatment agreements are adhered to—and treatment outcome. While treatment tolerability is a prominent and frequently discussed topic in the medical literature, it remains underexplored in the field of psychotherapy. For example, it is well known that Exposure with Response Prevention (ERP) can be a highly distressing treatment for patients with OCD, and that this fear and discomfort can lead to dropout and treatment refusal. Nevertheless, research examining the impact of treatment tolerability on treatment outcome is still limited.

To investigate whether and to what extent treatment tolerability influences treatment outcome, I analyze data from the arrIBA study by Wolf et al. (2024). Additionally, I explore whether certain patient characteristics can predict how tolerable the treatments—CBT and Inference-based CBT for OCD—will be perceived by the client or patient.