Recent years have seen a steady increase in the new applications of somatic therapies that target symptom change in interaction with psychotherapeutic interventions. Examples range from use of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation combined with symptom provocation for obsessive compulsive disorder, to intranasal oxytocin combined with social cognition training for young people with early psychosis, to use of MDMA to enhance non-directive psychotherapy grounded in psychodynamic principles to treat adults with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In clinical trials settings such integrated interventions pose a variety of technical and conceptual problems. These issues include:

• defining psychotherapy
• characterization of the psychotherapy component of an integrated intervention
• addressing potentially treatment-intrinsic functional unblinding (e.g., psychedelic psychotherapy)
• accounting for effects of integrated intervention components (e.g., 2×2 trial designs)
• accounting for psychotherapist effects
• evaluating distinctive or novel endpoints (e.g., extinction learning, intra-therapeutic process outcomes such as working alliance)
• distinctive needs in, limits on, and characteristics of regulation of medication-psychotherapy combinations