A clinician’s quick guide to evidence-based approaches: perfectionism

The definition of clinical perfectionism, where self-worth is based on striving to achieve demanding standards despite negative impacts (Shafran et al., 2002), has informed the development of Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy for perfectionism (CBT-P; Egan et al., 2014; Shafran et al., 2018). This leading evidence-based treatment has been examined across 15 randomised controlled trials. Compared to waitlist control, treatment has resulted in large effect size reductions in perfectionism (g = 0.87 to −1.27), medium reductions in symptoms of eating disorders (g = 0.61 to 0.64) and depression (g = −0.45 to 0.60), and small-medium reductions in anxiety (g = −0.14 to 0.42) (Galloway et al., 2022; Robinson & Wade, 2021). Treatment has been evaluated in adolescents and adults, individual and group face-to -face therapy, internet delivered (guided and unguided) and traditional book self-help treatment (see Galloway et al., 2022 for a review). Only one RCT has compared CBT-P to an equivalent length active treatment comparison, showing CBT-P to be superior to a stress management condition (Shu et al., 2019). Further trials are required to compare CBT-P to other active treatments...