Integrating psychotherapeutic techniques from different theoretical approaches into a unified framework: The relevance of topic modeling methods

Introduction A wide range of psychotherapies is now available for patients with psychiatric disorders. The proliferation of therapeutic approaches has led to overlap and redundancy among techniques, making it difficult for clinicians to integrate them effectively — particularly when they are rooted in different theoretical frameworks. This study aims to identify shared therapeutic processes, as conceptualized by experts, as well as semantic themes of techniques, using natural language processing. Method We recruited 13 French experts representing different therapeutic orientations. Each participated in a semi-structured interview to describe the techniques used in their practice. Interview data were analyzed using an embedding-based BERTopic approach to extract high-level thematic patterns across psychotherapeutic techniques. Results Analysis yielded 28 distinct topics. These were linked to core therapeutic principles such as behavioral modification, cognitive restructuring, emotion identification and regulation, and interpersonal processes. Notably, most topics encompassed techniques drawn from multiple therapeutic traditions, underscoring the presence of shared therapeutic processes across approaches. Discussion Our findings highlight common therapeutic processes that transcend theoretical orientations. These results support the notion of therapeutic processes shared across diverse psychotherapies. This is particularly promising for implementing a multidimensional psychological care framework that integrates the full spectrum of therapeutic processes while taking individual-specific characteristics into account. Future research should expand this work with larger and more diverse datasets, and further computational developments are needed to refine the automatic extraction and classification of shared therapeutic processes.