Introduction

Empirically supported treatments for mental health disorders are not universally efficacious. Such treatments may prove unsuccessful by not fully helping to resolve target problems, by not preventing relapse over time, or by leaving clients more impaired following intervention. Treatments also may fail as a result of barriers to dissemination to new settings or populations. We introduce a framework for presenting descriptive case studies of clients for whom empirically supported treatments failed and encourage the field to consider the research and clinical advances that may be informed by careful attention to treatment failure.