Psychotherapie auf Distanz in Österreich während COVID‑19. Zusammenfassung der bisher publizierten Ergebnisse von drei Onlinebefragungen

The Danube University Krems, in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Association for Psychotherapy, conducted three online surveys to investigate remote psychotherapy in Austria during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article summarizes the so far published results of these surveys. A total of 1547 psychotherapists took part in the first online survey, which was conducted in the first weeks of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Austria. The results showed that psychotherapists increasingly replaced psychotherapy in personal contact with psychotherapy at a distance (telephone or internet) during the lockdown. Increased stress level and job-related worries were mainly reported by psychotherapists who were financially reliant on the income gained from psychotherapy. The experiences with psychotherapy at a distance were described as more positively than previously expected. Nonetheless, psychotherapy at a distance was viewed as not fully comparable to face-to-face psychotherapy sessions. In a second survey, which was conducted after the first lockdown ended (summer 2020), 222 Austrian psychotherapists participated. The aim of this survey was to examine the change in treatment format (personal to digital or digital to personal) more closely. At the same time as the second survey, a third online survey was carried out in which 139 patients of the 222 Austrian psychotherapists took part in order to examine the patients’ perspective on changing the treatment format. First results show that psychotherapists and patients experienced a difference in terms of the therapeutic interventions used when changing the treatment format. Moreover, the subjective meaning of different areas of life was changed in the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the time before COVID-19. The evaluations to date show that the COVID-19 pandemic has a significant impact on the psychotherapeutic practice in Austria. Further quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the data will provide even more in-depth knowledge.